Elisa Cuesta Fernández
Keywords: Infiltration, Infrastructure, Diagram
Read Thesis
elisacuesta.com, instagram.com/e_cuestaf, elisacuestafernandez@gmail.com
‘Possible cone factory’ draws inspiration from different forms of filtration, communication, and organisation of knowledge and labour. By confronting methods and techniques from the arts and crafts with those from the contemporary —digital— mass production, distribution, and speculation, I seek to explore the agency of technical arrangements and their negotiating role within culture. Moreover, through the embodied experience of mass-making technical objects, I hope to gain knowledge about how these objects are, conversely, producing me.
In the installation, the multiple flows insinuated by the interrupted infrastructure suggest an ambiguous and not fully functioning diagrammatic landscape, only perceivable when faulty and fragile. Careful attention is needed to navigate the contradictions between containment and communication that are the central engine of contemporary global economy.
Photo credits: Gert Jan van Rooij, 2022
THESIS
The infiltrated artist: On the poetics of infiltration and its possibilities for artistic research
This thesis is first and foremost a treatise on (in)filtration. Filtration as a way of adapting by adopting —absorbing— substances, beings, information. Filtration as a pharmacological process: additive and subtractive, generative and destructive, cure and poison. Leakage as a productive accident, as revealing misperformance. Infiltration as the willful act of leaking. Infiltration as a toxic mode of being in the world, but perhaps the only possible one. This research is a philter, and I’m the infiltrated artist.
Like a leak, I will sometimes ask you to imagine you’re able to liquify, and that your liquid body will join mine as we filter and infiltrate through the porous structures of the ground, the city, the art center, the logistics facility, the data center, the cloud. I will also ask you to be careless of careful timely compositions, or designated paths, for I’ll try to entangle stories from the historic, geological and cybernetic times in a single one, and this is only possible by thinking of water as an intergenerational and transcorporeal transmitter of information.
