Mechanisms to Turn the Light On
Daiana Ares

“I’m a visual artist and teacher. My research revolves around practices that link works with space, with site-specific installation projects, with experimentation, with materials and their possibilities and limitations.” Daiana Ares.

Mechanisms to Turn the Light On
Glazed ceramic
Variable dimensions
2019-2020

Sometimes I want to fix and rebuild what has collapsed. Immersed in a subtle melancholy, I imagine the past of the vestiges. It is a thought that accompanies me on a daily basis. I don’t think everything in the past was better, but forgetting… forgetting terrifies me.

My gaze tends to stop at the worn, broken, rusted, damaged, eroded surfaces, which I automatically mentally repair and imagine in their heyday. Perhaps it is as a result of this that three years ago I began to make a photographic record of tubes that I find discarded in the streets. These elements are linked to space, turned garbage and left over in a random way. They generate seemingly carefree compositions, resting on the sidewalks, which engender their own peculiar complexity in their repose. Before, when they were important parts of a mechanism, they optimized the flow. The time in its path turned them into disconnected fragments, collapsed and marginalized.

The fear of oblivion leads me to create things.

I build pieces detaching them from that record. They are modules, always heterogeneous. They link to each other. Finding which piece joins another takes time. Much time and patience. I stop at the connections and their assemblies. It may happen that the pieces fit together or simply rest timidly on each other. Other times, a tension sustains and maintains the bond. And in others, they just accompany each other, holding each other emotionally, without touching, being next to each other.