Mazenett Quiroga

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Gente Serpiente, 2019

Two bicycle tires and acrylic paint 

71 x 35 x 24 cm

Courtesy of the artist and Instituto de Visión, Bogotá

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Gente Serpiente is a work made with the artists' bicycle wheels, intertwined, twisted, and painted with patterns of poisonous snakes of the tropics. This sculpture, as well as other pieces by Mazenett Quiroga, seeks to reveal and re-inscribe everyday and ordinary objects within a contemporary mythology, to reconnect them with an origin, thus recognizing their hidden life and meaning. In these objects is inscribed the life cycle and animal, cultural and geological time, since they were once marine organisms that became thanks to the action of sand, sediment, and mud in oil, then on wheels and again return to the animal world, they are snakes (symbols of eternal return) that will continue its eternal evolution and transformation beyond the obsolete and unnecessary distinction between cultural and natural objects. They are people in the sense that they possess a soul, a history, and agency in the world.

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Motherboard-Motherearth, 2020

Electronic motherboards and cutouts

70 x 50 cm

Courtesy of the artist and Instituto de Visión, Bogotá

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“An ideal piece to reflect on ritual objects as technology in a cosmopolitics context" 

Johannes Neurath

 

Starting from pre-Hispanic goldwork pieces that we found in the Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City and the Museo del Oro in Bogotá, we create these pieces made of cuttings from motherboard waste. They arise from a reflection on the museum as the privileged space of speculation, we understand most of the ethnographic pieces as technology from another time, whose magical and ritual function is based on information that is codified in each piece, in order to be deciphered. In the same way that motherboards are a technology of our time which is named by some indigenous people of the Amazon as the witchcraft of the white man.

 

These pieces challenge the speculation about the future of our material culture and its wastes as well as possible interpretations of these as magical, ritualistic, and enigmatic inscriptions waiting to be deciphered, as seen from a future archeology perspective.

 

These electronic boards remind us of the material and physical part of our current technology whose trend is towards the use and storage of information in electronic media, this has generated an immense amount of waste, which in turn generates practices such as urban mining in which precious metals are extracted from technological waste.

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Motherboards are normally found inside the objects and remain hidden from our eyes. When exhibited, they reveal the material basis of our technology, since these boards are agglomerations and re-configurations of various and large quantities of minerals extracted from the earth.

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Biography

 

Lina Mazzenet and David Quiroga are the Colombian artist duo Mazzenett Quiroga. They received a BA from the Universidad Nacional de Colombia. In 2018 they did a postgraduate course in Amazonian Studies at Universidad Nacional de Colombia in Amazonia. They were selected to participate in Utopiana Residency, Geneva, Switzerland as part of COINCIDENCIA, a Pro Helvetia program.

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Exploring the interrelationship between organisms and the misnamed “resources” of the environment, and their distribution and resignification through culture is central to their practice. They strive to blur the distinction between the concepts of nature and culture. Their practice oscillates between past and present, science and mythology, Amerindian cultures and western science. Their work includes installations, photography, sculpture and interventions.

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They have participated in the Escuela Flora residency program (2016), Greatmore Studios residency in South Africa (2014), EAC Contemporary Art Space in Montevideo, Uruguay, ARTLima (2018), LISTE art fair in Switzerland (2017), ArtBo Bogota art fair (2018) represented by Instituto de Visión gallery. Their works have also been included in the Laboratorio Arte Alameda Museum in Mexico City, in the Red Galeria Santa Fe Grant awarded by the District Institute of the Arts, also they were the recipients of the grant for individual exhibitions of the 15 Regional Salons, and the grant for emerging artists granted by Colombian Ministry of Culture. They were nominated for the CIFO Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation CIFOs Grants & Commissions Program 2016-2017. Their works are in private collections in Germany, Perú and Chile, as well as in public art collections: JPMorgan Chase Art collection and Banco de la República de Colombia art collection.