LA POROSIDAD DEL ESPACIO by MÓNICA NARANJO URIBE / 2019 /  8' 8" / single channel video / HD video / surround sound / Colombia / Cuba

*The artist suggests wearing headphones to watch this video*

All caves speak

Gaston Bachelard [1]

In the beginning, there were caves. Or maybe not. But the caves in Mónica Naranjo Uribe’s work seem to have been observing us for a lifetime; waiting for someone to find them and to feel the revelation that we believe can only be achieved through the hardest, deepest and most arcane states of nature.

That which she finds on earth. A pore is a time stamp that passes through matter. That amount of void and emptiness spaces our existence with the strategy of a drop of water. The artist works with emotion, intuition and physicality as a starting point. Some ideas run through her later and detonate over time. This happened when she was logging the caves. 

For a while Monica has liked to think from geology, approaching places through it and understanding them from the dimensions that it opens. In the tension between matter and its transformation, there is a degree of abstraction that also speaks of specific manmade processes and connects them with their physical and emotional levels. That search for the constant points in which places and times connect and share patterns with geological behaviors is what defines the line of her work. From that abstraction of the earth, she reads the spaces and also the holes that inhabit them, as she did in her study of the hollow rocks. This is also how she accesses what is under the underground, in the pore of the pore, in the crack of the cave.

La porosidad del espacio (The porosity of space) begins in one of these pores: a cave in the subsoil of Cuba. Is the cave a threshold of worlds, an ambiguous space between the inside and the outside? Is it, at the same time, in itself a space? On the outskirts of Havana, below the urban ruins, they share coordinates, especially, those invisible, hidden, untamable places that are underground caves. 

Is the cave, too, an abandoned house? Are they the same thing but in different moments? When passing them, one sees that many are cautiously kept closed, and they become uninhabited places, without eyes that visit them, without use, without any specific function. They are sites that just are. But if one sneaks into them, the ways of moving through them converge in an initial vertigo followed by backwaters that only sometimes grant secrets.

An urban speleological walk gives the feeling of entering a place where one has not been invited and where everything appears to be suspended. Nothing escapes time or disorder. Monica’s gaze reminds us that we build on ruins and that beneath us the history remains buried in the same way we will rest under the feet of the future.

Visiting a cave is always partial. Our sight covers only fragments of matter and small pieces of light in a dark porous world. Inside, the rocks resemble the bones of something larger than what our sight allows us to see, and the crystals archive in their memory the light that they have been taking in. Stalactites and stalagmites join in a column of time. A tree crosses layers of earth with its roots that unsuccessfully search for the nucleus below, with its trunks and branches spreading in the sky above. The drop destroys and builds at its own invisible will. Is this where the deep silence of time that the artist speaks about is kept?  

The cave has almost completely abandoned its ancestral condition of domestic, ritual and refuge space. However, caves are formed with a type of sedimentary rock, limestone, from which cement for construction is extracted. So, houses, in some ways, are still made of caves, and in their image, rooms have columns. It is even possible to find abandoned houses, those that were raised with cement, that have natural stalactites. And one stops to think then that, indeed, in their abandonment, an uninhabited house and a cave are almost the same and that, as Frank Estévez  said, the house is a saying and time is what is inhabited. [4].

Text written by Cinta Tabuenca for corrient.es, august 2020.

[1] Earth and Reveries of Will: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter by Gaston Bachelard.

[2] Still from La porosidad del espacio, courtesy of Mónica Naranjo Uribe.

[3] Detail of cave studies drawing. Monica Naranjo Uribe. Ink and graphite on paper, 35x25cm, 2020

[4] El tiempo es una casa by Frank Estévez.