(The Exhibition as a Site for Knowledge Production)

Using conceptual detonators as prompts, one of my areas of interest in research and artistic production is based on embarking into the unknown as an epistemological exploration. This approach is rooted in embracing the unexpected and uncovering the knowledge that emerges from unconscious exploration. Inspired by the Surrealists' use of automatism, I engage in artistic activities paired with rigorous research and reading, allowing the process itself to reveal new paths for producing knowledge. By proposing techniques such as automatic writing and associative thinking, I encourage starting from any point of departure and journeying into the unknown, trusting that the path will manifest itself. This trust is built on the foundation of our lived experiences, images, stories, and accumulated knowledge, ensuring that something meaningful will be produced.

The Surrealists proposed a series of simple mechanisms to access the unconscious of the thing. We refer to ‘psychic automatism’. Such a proposal conceives the automatism as an activity and as a metaphorizing vehicle that is capable of transporting things of the unconscious into the space of the conscious, converting the unknown into image, language, representation. What we know about the thing is what we name; that is our limit, the indicative we assign to them. Now, what could be intriguing is everything we don't know about the thing, all that which has not yet been interpreted, manifested; that which remains hidden in the unconscious. How then do we look at what is not seen, or how to create text-images that we do not know? In the case of this exhibition, the use of psychic automatism is proposed, not only as an exercise but as a revealing-liberating agent, as a trigger and as a possible way of unexpectedly entering the threshold of imaginations.

In 2016, A site-specific installation for the art gallery at Universidad Rafael Landívar in Guatemala, Three walls and two windows outline the space. In one wall there is a geometric composition formed by a set of self-written essays on the topic of “psychic automatism”, the text can be read onsite or they can also be dowloaded via a QR code located on the wall. On the other wall there are 21 envelopes mounted to the wall, each envelop contains a different instruction typed on the paper, for the audience to perform either there or away from the gallery. The other wall has a diagrammatic poster that proposes the combination of art+idea+process as value concepts for knowledge enquire. Finally, next to it there is a large text printed on vinyl letter types which alludes to the concepts of automatism and chance as proves for knowledge production.