escala y fragmento

[Scale and Fragment], 2017, is a body of work in which the artist delves into the multiple layers of this unlimited world, and that the artistic gesture delimits in order to make it visible. The pretext this time is to track the trail of an email, to map the journey of these messages that circulate through cable networks under the supervision of sophisticated technological devices. 

This investigative piece—which leads the artist from Barcelona to Los Angeles to discover the place where two computers communicated with each other for the first time more than 40 years ago—delves into some of the exterior and underground landscapes through which the network circulates. Once again, the organic and the inorganic become interlaced in an organised chaos of cables, sewers, generators, batteries, cooling systems, encoders and decoders, hermetic enclosures that coexist with the natural landscape (beaches, gardens, mountains or inlets). This inaccessible and buried universe, of a fractal nature, does not understand dialectics or values, but rather regularities and irregularities, scales and fragments, as the artist suggests with the title of this piece.

With this project, Tanit Plana does not pretend to reveal the complexity of the technological system that can connect almost all the points of the planet via a simple email, but reformulates, with other elements, the same paradoxes present in previous works that deal with the limits of human activity. Indeed, the interconnection between the organically mortal and the inorganically alive constitutes one of the main mysteries of our contemporaneity. For example, if our biological bodies are marked by fatal mortality, it seems much more complicated to die digitally. The right to forget is paid for dearly and there is no guarantee, in this day and age, of reaching the state of being eternally dead.

Faced with the certainty of inexorable biological mortality, an imposing uncertainty rises up in relation to not only how the individual memory of the absent will be managed, but above all, how present lives are constructed, controlled and subdued.

In fact, the visual vertigo caused by the Escala y fragmento series raises many other ethical and political uneases that are the order of the day. Who produces? Who controls? Who distributes? For what purposes? To whom is it directed? With what objectives?

Neither art nor photography can generate answers to these questions, that are all closely linked to the exercise of power in the political, economic and social fields. Art can only generate perplexities, intellectual challenges and desires for fiction.

Marta Gili
Paris, december 2018

collection of 50 images

Leonardo Grant by Fundación BBVA, 2015
Exhibited at Sala Canal de Isabel II, Madrid. 2019