Adriana Salazar

Please send your messages to: asalazarvelez@gmail.com

I started working with machines trying to find a way to grasp and understand the changing nature of things. Having this in mind, I started a quest for the simplest technical forms of machines, so I could focus on the performative aspects of each of their components: time, movement, speed and mechanics are, in their own terms, very eloquent signifiers.

Standing on the possibilities of mechanic simplicity, I developed a series of works that intended to bond the way machines work and the way the human body works. I encountered and studied certain mechanical gestures and behaviors that were presented as re-enactments, executed by different machines: a smoking machine, a crying machine, a needle-threading machine, amongst many others, perform their actions continuously as long as electricity flows through their wires.

These devices never accomplished the purpose intended for each of the human actions they were performing, which is to mold the body into a given cultural pattern. Instead, they presented them as a living distortion of the viewer’s own behavior: at a very low speed, movements seem to fade into inaction; through the stuttering of mechanisms, the action seems to fail constantly; by repeating itself, an action loses its meaning.

The mechanics of the human body has led me to other quests that aim at locating it right in the juncture between nature and artifice. These quests are no longer focused on the body as a behavioral device, but on how there is movement and change in every living or dying process. I have developed ways in which inanimate objects have become gestural bodies on their own, by being mechanically re-animated: garments, found objects, fallen plants, taxidermy animals, objects that are in the verge of becoming debris, have been transformed into new beings that are able to linger in the realm of artificiality.

Through the construction of these hybrid objects, the definition of what a machine is can be is displaced further, and the definition of what is natural and alive demands to be blurred. Even though the mechanical resort has always been present and visible in its simplicity, my current work attempts to displace these limits someplace else, and to create speed, time and movement experiences in places were they are least expected.