Nicolás Lamas: Scenarios for Coexistence

To this end, the artist primarily creates installations involving objects that enter into symbiotic systems through assemblage. The combination of biological and technological elements allows him to reflect on the power of matter as an active substance through which energy flows and information is exchanged.

Lamas collects the materials for his works from a trove of objects found in either nature or urban environments as well as made objects that we typically relate to the milestones of history. Each of the objects selected, regardless of whether they are stone sediments, fragments of the plant and animal kingdoms, or plastic and rubber products and parts of cars, computers and scanners, is an important and equal vessel of information. When different objects are arbitrarily combined, the information inherent in them starts to leap out, overlap and change as the objects increasingly lose their original function. As a result, they no longer belong to their original categories because the meanings within the newly created relationships between them overlap and defy any labelling, while also opening up to multifaceted readings based on associations.

Lamas’ work is rooted in a keen interest in constructed social perception, which is built through the use of systematised knowledge. It thus focuses on the verification of models related to scientific research and the relentless striving for order, control and laws that govern the visible world. It looks for gaps in the ways in which we perceive, interpret and interact with the environment, particularly within the specific relationships between systems of representation and the notion of objective truth and irrefutable facts. That is why the objects he uses are taken from different sources: they are home to both the geological time – within which substances accumulate like sediments – and the linear time of the accelerated technological progress. By bringing various categories and the links between the past and the future together, the artist invites the viewer to reflect on the changing nature of all things that form part of the constant flow of growth, transformation and decay.

The exhibition consists of a selection of works created during the last decade along with the most recent productions. Its layout takes the form of a peculiar archaeological site featuring the remains of building structures, epitaphs of progress and, most certainly, the life, which always finds its way. Inside this dynamic domain, the artist famously highlights the multifaceted nature of changes along with the new meanings, references and values that emerge as an outcome of different materials interacting. Hybrid compositions, made of biological and technological remains and serving as the internal skeletons of both living creatures and machines, are placed inside modular structures reminiscent of urban exoskeletons. His use of platforms on different levels mimics the classification and conservation of artefacts in natural history museums – after all, many of Lamas’ objects could arguably be found in them – while at the same time, by raising the pressing issue of mass hyperconsumption it encourages the viewer to look for the beautiful in the mundane and abandoned.

As suggested by the exhibition title, Scenarios for Coexistence, Lamas is chiefly interested in the relativisation of our existence on the planet. By drawing our attention to other, potential forms of life along with possible interactions between all organisms, the artist reminds us that humanity is but a species and that survival depends on cooperation on a level playing field. Like an archaeologist who, based on clues from the past and without nostalgia, revises anthropological history, Lamas emphasises the rapid changes that increasingly defy our attempts to control them and, above all, explores the present moment in order to be able to better imagine possible future scenarios, new social structures, new modes of existence and coexistence.