Art Río 2014

The reaction of the mixture of cement with water and its subsequent hardening is an event that we can experience without losing our capacity for awe. This event, normal within the construction of cities and fundamental in the accelerated process of transformation of the territory into “civilized” landscape, connects us with a magical dimension of the world, with the metamorphic possibility of the materials and with an alchemical moment where the powder turns into gel and the gel into stone. This magical moment, lasting for a few hours and definitive in some days, is irreversible in chemical terms, that is, once the molecules of the mixture harden they will no longer be clay, lime or organic stone. The explanation offered by modern chemistry for this process of transmutation is based on several processes of abstraction: first of atoms and molecules represented by letters and then by operations of transformation of those signs. Trying to understand the functioning of matter within this assemblage of synthetic linguistic pieces implies a high level of distance from the plastic and temporal process of cement and therefore the displacement of magic by logic. Cement Formula, part of the basic elements of the chemical description of cement Portland: Silicon, Calcium, Aluminum, Iron, Oxygen, Hydrogen to propose a kind of game that allows to visualize this operation of abstraction and distance between a plastic process and its logical configuration. The game, at the same time naive and pedagogical, produces multiple possible configurations from pieces/letters cast in cement: Si, Ca, Al, Fe, H, O. Under this playful principle, a new level of concrete poetry is proposed, where sign (letter) and significant (atom) interrupts its sense of representation, while matter and its chemical writing are equated in the same construction.