Sacred Geologies 1

Matter, forces and representations

Rosario Lopez

A rock stands out in the vastness of a plain. In the distance it is perceived as a large-scale object, but the feeling is of an infinite space that emerges from the surface in only a portion of its mass, it is the force of the telluric affecting perception. His nudity in the sun is intriguing, it is an absolute where there are no in-between, it is

pure time that has become matter. Its skin builds a topological continuum of accidents, cracks, and geological layers that are the memory of this temporality.

The indigenous cultures that guard it understand the rock as a sacred space: "the abode of the gods" 2, for them the rock exists in another continuous temporality between past and present. The sacred is in the whole, but also in the parts that make up the sacred places of the spatiality of this natural structure. And then, there, facing the rock, the question arises: How can these notions dialogue from an art that is part of a Western system of thought?

The artist observes and thinks, looks for meeting points, assumes her role. He critically understands it from the representation as a long tradition that is based on a wide system of control of the imaginary of the territory erected from scientific knowledge, its description and its representation.

How to understand the mythical in the rock? Your question starts from intangibles such as many of the problems of art. The landscape moves us from the visual, the sublime is for us the sacred, it is also the topological of the geological structures, the movement and the forces of the natural materialized in a formal continuum; mathematics, the baroque and the fold. In the same way the rock is structure and

architecture, it is decoded space, it is sculpture.

In the development of the work the previous questions are problematized; In it, a reconstruction of the natural forces determining the geological is not made, they are operations that build a set of rules that emulate the actions of a

phenomenology of the natural but that are operative from the sculptural. The affectations of the matter lead to the abstraction of the landscape and a spectator intrigued by the possibilities of recognizing this territory represented from the morphological drifts of the materials. Power lines such as weights, plumb bobs, ropes

they configure other abstractions of this landscape that shape travel axes, marking patterns of the represented territory and fictionalized geometries that build topographies.

Different layers of fragments construct the fiction of approach to the landscape as a represented totality. In a sort of location, the photographic frame has a layered scene in which the viewer tends to build their own idea of landscape.

The sculpture helps to recompose the spectator's fragmented relations between the real space and the one represented from invented geometries that help to translate the territory that is going to be traveled from horizons and planes that are inserted within the tradition of landscape representation. .

Carlos E. Betancourt
Curator

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1 This project is part of the research that Rosario Lopez has been carrying out around the landscape

in the context of three archaic geological formations including the Urulú and Kata-Tjuta natural park

in Australia, the hills of Mavecure and the Serranía de La Lindosa in Colombia.

2 The name tepui or tepui comes from a voice of the Pemón indigenous language, which means mountain or dwelling

of the gods.