Spirit Level
Opening Thu 6 Feb – 18.30 2020
Ncontemporary Milan
Via Lulli 5, Milan
Wed-Sat 15.00-19.00
Spirit level is a new body of urban-responsive work by Santiago Reyes Villaveces. The exhibition takes place at Ncontemporary Gallery in Milano, and looks at the post-sculptural connections of contemporary infrastructures of fluids.
Milano’s black waters are transgressive substances that appear to speak for themselves. Their infrastructures provide the vital means for the subsistence of the city and carry the city’s own weight—literally as accumulated debris and involuntary corporeal leftovers. Black waters contain mixtures and depleted substances that have been consumed by a population’s bodies. However, these waters also carry the forensic remnants of substances that lie at the threshold of legality. Such is the case of cocaine—that alchemical substance that turns botanic knowledge into gold. In this exhibition, the flow of sewage is analogous to the transformations and streams that are brought in by the precolumbian poporo: an artefact for the consumption of coca leaves, crushed with alkaloids that come from the sea or the tropical rainforests. The poporo is a symbol of precolumbian cosmologies, colonial capitalism and an artefact that connects several worlds—the world of accumulated abstract wealth, the world of desire’s magnetism for metal, along with the world of excretion and circulation.
