alejandro valencia

DYNAMO (RaTM01) examines History’s unstable character, treating it as a spatial, entropic, and malleable material. It searches for its multiple manifestations as it accumulates in specific sites and monuments, sedimenting in materials, objects, and social situations that are constantly disrupted by processes of resistance and oppression that distribute and reconfigure the sensible. This work considers its inseparable condition to context as a crucial ingredient in the disruptive processes that mold and transform History. This context is our present context, one ridden with institutional, political, educational, cultural, and social decay, corroding and eroding all aspects of society, turning history into a ruin, and us into witnesses that arrive too late. 

The references multiple sites, geographical and temporal locations, and historical accounts of dissent and protest that have, in one way or another, generated disruptions in the unstable narratives of history. Its main form references the Sundial memorial at Columbia University, erected in 1914 and later becoming obsolete by the removal of its gnomon (time marker) in 1946, transforming it into an unexpected platform for social and political engagement. Various materials, selected by their charged connection to specific sites such as the soil taken in front of Butler Library (Columbia University), brass and woodwind instruments found in gentrified Harlem, a keffiyeh found in Prentis Hall studios, remnants and fragments of the urban landscape, radio parts, microphones, discarded copper wiring from an abandoned building, and a collage of sounds turned into a faint hum, are composed to form a structure reminiscent of a large generator or engine, recalling the hidden infrastructures that sustain institutional architecture.

 

_{DYNAMO (RaTM01) Graphite on reclaimed wood, aluminum, selection of banned books, soil, vinyl sleeves, records, fragments of wind instruments, pencils, clay, microphones, stones, drum heads, printed matter, found steel, extension chords, antenna, found radio components, copper, fragment of a sidewalk, sounds of protests recorded between 2023-2026, speakers. 2026}