Precarious Symmetry is a face-off.
Precarious symmetry is what might emerge from a game of call and response between artist Ariel Bustamante’s Untitled sound composition (10 minutes, 6 channels, 6 active speakers, 2017- 2018) and Carolina Saquel’s Untitled (Landscape) video work (11:16 minutes, color, silent, 2014-2017).

Precarious Symmetry is a set-up.
Precarious Symmetry is what could momentarily occur if, in the tradition of the Baile Chino, the curator Camila Marambio’s prediction about the encounter of Ariel and Carolina’s distinct works was to come true.

The Baile Chino is a spiritual technology that knots together the sound of the universe and the image of reality. In the Baile Chino, a pre-Columbian ritual dance still practiced today along the Chilean Andes Mountains, the dancers respond to each other’s strident flutes, exciting one another into a dialogue that lasts for hours, inducing a trance-like state aimed at sustaining the dissonant emissions. Dissonance is sought-after because it is through it that a rajadura (rip) occurs.  This rip, or tear, is a cut, an opening, towards other dimensions.
Ariel, Carolina, and Camila are dancers attempting to tear each-other-together-apart, to slip through the slit, into a fantastical new dimension they call Distancia.

For more on Distancia and on the artistic processes of the works on exhibit visit www.ensayostierradelfuego.net.

* As an offering to Precarious Symmetry, the anthropologist Michael Taussig wrote the poem “Borderlands of Being”. As a further offering to you, the poem was printed and stands in a pile below this sign. Take one.