LAGUNAS is a fictional & interactive installation, a triptych between memory, death, and water. Prehistoric landscapes are the scenario for the chronicles of a drowning man, disclosing the rarity of water on Planet Earth.

Lagunas is dark, still, and somber. Silent landscapes, dying fish, the water of a thick dark lake, seaweed and mud cover the depths. Below the surface, a man drowns. From the abyss, archaic rocks are attracted by magnetic forces. Drilling machines emerge, turning between the cliffs, intercepting the stones in levitation and destroying the rocks, which fall back into the water. The abandoned body of the man, receives the impacts of the stones, wakes up, strives to save his life, and loses consciousness...

The drilling machines embody the hydraulic fracturing techniques used to extract fossils fuels from the shale rock of the Earth. The water contamination process consequence of the hydraulic rupture is visualized from close-up animations to larger-scale images where the fracking fluid travels through the pipelines reaching the groundwater. High-pressure impulsions cause the nearby shale rock to crack, creating fissures where fuels flow into the surface of the Earth, while rests of toxic fluids contaminate the water of the subsoil of the Earth.


Three water valves are used in Lagunas as interactive devices. When the water valves are rotated, image and sound are activated. Further than interacting with image and sound events, the level/amount of interaction of the participants is continuously analyzed. An interactive scenario adapts to the behavior of the spectators, allowing variations and deviations on the fictional order. The water tabs are used all along the experience as triggers & controllers for the interactive scenario of the installation.

The lakes and mountain landscapes have been shoot in Colombia, in the «Chingaza Natural National Park», a natural reserve located in the Eastern Cordillera of the Andes, in the northeast of Bogotá. The underwater images were filmed in a lake in the Netherlands, using a high-speed cinema camera (Phantom-Flex) and shoot at 300fps. The landscapes & underwater images are composited with 3D (CGI) generated images.

LAGUNAS
Exhibition HYPER NATURE / SCOPITONE 2021

The RÍOS TRILOGY is an installation project based on the Amazon Rainforest territory, understood from a local and global perspective. The project explores the relationship between language and the construction and definitions of territory (from the western perspective). The trilogy proposes a lecture of Amazonia based on observation and analysis of metadata - hashtags from social media, combined with actual geo-reference data related to socio-environmental threats the territory undergoes.
Ríos explores visual representations, speculative cartographies that rise from the process of hybridisation of Amazonia related data.

Ríos - CHAPTER I: Rivers // Amazonia Geo-linguistics is an experimental research tool that allows mapping information related to the Amazons Rainforest on social media (currently only Twitter). We designed a tool to facilitate analysis and visualisation of semantics used in Twitter in an attempt to comprehend how western societies relate to the complex situation of the Amazons basin. The study wishes to introduce possible perspectives that spotlight the behaviour and conditioning of human societies that use social media and its semantic structures to communicate.

With a humble and empirical approach, we grasp the immense mass of data emerging from Twitter, the hashtags, hashtags co-occurrences and the information contained in the messages where the hashtags are included. This information is continuously archived on a database. We run algorithms on the database to generate statistical data.

The results of this analysis are applied to the geo-referenced marks where socio-environmental threads have been identified, performing experimental interventions on the actual topographic data of the Amazonian territory.

Ríos - CHAPTER II:  RÍOS // sculpture series proposes a series of speculative cartographies that rise from a digital process of hybridisation of Amazonia related data. The cartographical work produced in Ríos results in a series of nineteen sculptures. Each sculpture is based on topographic data from a territory delimited by the hydrological sub-basins forming the extensive Amazonian basin and the major tributary rivers nourishing the Amazons River:

Japurá-Caquetá / Iça-Putumayo + Napo + Nanay / Marañon + Huallaga / Javari + Jutaí / Ucayali / Juruá / Purus + Tefé / Madre de Díos + Beni / Mamoré + Guaporé / Madeira + Aripuanã / Juruena + São Manoel + Abacaxis + Tapajós / Iriri + Xingu / Araguaia / Tocantins / Mearim / Trombetas + Jari / Branco / Negro / Amazon floodplain

RÍOS TRILOGY
Exhibition HYPER NATURE / SCOPITONE 2021

CONVERSATIONS 02012 by Lawrence Malstaf is included in the group exhibition YI - A Chair at ZHI Art Museum in Chengdu (ROC). This is an innovative exhibition that evokes the reflection on the complicated relationship between Chair and Man in history. Different identities in different social relationships have personified their chairs, and vice versa. Chairs also reflect the characteristics and social class of the owners. When chairs are placed in our society, they automatically react as inter-medium, exchanging with the space, the life, the authority, the professions, and the personalities, etc. Thus chairs have become the all-embracing manifestation of human society.
Based on this theme, it is a combination of exhibitions that play with a joint force of modern and contemporary and performing art by 22 artists from more than 10 countries across the world.

CONVERSATIONS 02012 by Lawrence Malstaf.
A couple of vibrating chairs are slowly moving and turning randomly through the space. They seem to search and reject each other with soft humming sounds. When a visitor passes by or sits down, the chairs hesitate and then carefully try out different patterns. The patterns are not designed; it is a self-organising system where new compositions and new behaviour arises spontaneously through the duration of the installation.

YI - A Chair  at ZHI Art Museum