Metasbilad

Metasbilad, Or a Radical Sensible Experience

Walking, approaching a structure of iron and wood, a gently tilting bridge of scaffolding. Clambering up on it and feeling the wood give slightly underfoot; the first wobble draws attention simultaneously to how the floor reacts at each step and to how to take one cautious step and then the next. It is an invitation to feel at each step, at each moment of the time it takes one foot to rise and trace a short arc over the floor, at each moment of the circuit of the other foot which comes to rest and gently disengages its support, then lifts itself to trace another short circle over the floor; it is an invitation to feel the wood give more and more as one advances; an invitation to discern a subtle shift in the flex of a knee, not just hyperextension or hyperflexion: every dose of a calf moving away from/toward a thigh, or even a head from/toward a shoulder. Feeling intensely occurs not only at the extremes. Sensation, at any level, at every one of its degrees, brings into play a certain transition of difference from imperceptibility to perceptibility, across thousands of sensible variations between two extremes: the saturation of the organ and the least perceptible stimulus.

In Metasbilad, the material hyper brutalism of scaffolding pipes and wooden construction boards, sometimes rusted and splintered, coexists with an invitation to an ultra refined experience of the behavior of these materials and one’s own body, as they give and resist at every step. This paradox is reinforced, multi laminated, for there is, in Metasbilad, the radicality of an experience that does not need to reach the extremes of breaking, falling, getting vertigo; the radicality of an experience that does not declare beforehand the places to be occupied, the tests to be carried out, or the conclusions to be drawn; a radical experience where questions predominate: How far do I go? How long can it take it? What if there are several of us? Can it stand a bit more?

Text excerpt by Marie Bardet

Metasbilad | 2016

Exhibition View: Prisma | Buenos Aires | Argentina
Photographs: Bruno Dubner, Gabrial Cano