Las cosas cambiaron tan rápido que resultó difícil acompañarlas
In this exhibition, Santiago Talavera presents some of his most recent works, which since Hauntopolis (2020) have been tracing an idea of landscape permeable to the conflicts between culture and nature. Based on a phrase by the thinker Bruno Latour, “Things changed so fast that it was difficult to keep up with them”, the artist immerses us in scenes where the temporal dimension seems altered in a superimposition of past, present and future. Both in large-format collages and in small canvases and drawings, we see half-abandoned constructions as if we were the last spectators of some denouement to which we are late. The apparent “lack of event” allows the artist to displace the human in order to propose narratives and developments on another scale. It is about speculating on a reality independent of thought and humanity. In these works, the poetics of a “world without us” unfolds, where the residues include a mesh of spam emissions, glitches and image failures that float over most of the works, materialising the hauntology of our actuality. The disintegration of our temporal order, in which the line between the present and the future seems to have disappeared, is perceived in a spatial mosaic where each shard contains a reality of its own and perhaps, access to another time where things would have taken a different course.