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”A beaver’s DNA doesn’t stop expressing itself at the end of its whiskers, but at the edge of
its dam,” writes the ecological theorist Timothy Morton. What if the physics of entropy were sliding between humans and objects as pure inertia? What if an engine’s exhaust pipe- the part that directs smoke from the guts of the car to the outside- as a piece of engineering owes its nature to an organic order imprinted on the entrails of its creator? What is the relationship between a glottis and a meander, between a city and a puddle?

In the context of this second solo exhibition by Carlos Irijalba with the gallery, the endotic points to the interrelations between the human being and his environment. There is no difference between human and nature, between inside and outside. Language separates us but the exotic is within ourselves.

Like the objects and structures that we produce, an important part of our constitution, as multicellular mammals, is formed by carbon.

These objects carry with them biological designs that we can interpret as unconscious secretions, or unformed traces, that are uid and open to unforeseen evolution. Genetic material duplicates and mutates not only at the biological level, but also within the strategies and tools with which we, consciously, shape a new landscape.

These parallel dynamics are not obvious; they happen at different rhythms and scales. This exhibition highlights the convergence of those dissonances as a means to approach the transitory states of matter. We observe the solid, liquid, and gaseous states as relative and symptomatic of the heterogeneous interrelations between what’s tangible or intangible, fertile or sterile, and the blurry lines between what is animate and what is inert.

pahoehoe

The Hawaiian term pahoehoe means “smooth lava” in
its solid state, and it entails the most abstract and visually explicit manifestation of the Earth’s core’s material reaction in the face of a sudden contrast in temperature.

Pahohoe is matter’s most spontaneous expression and the most immediate visualization of the chemical reactions that comprise it. The characteristic behavior of lava illustrates, at both micro and macro levels, processes that pertain to elds like meteorology, linguistics, economy, and genetics, where properties that are equally creative and destructive are made visible. When pahoehoe nally cools and crystallizes, it displays a strange quality of frozen time. As the philosopher Reza Negarestani says, lava makes evident “decomposition as a constructive process.” The simultaneous destruction and creation of territory in Hawaii and its repetitive pattern reveal the grammatology of our planet and how the surface of this system that we inhabit is coded.