Mother Machine
Mit Borrás
September 22nd - October 13th
Opening Reception September 22nd @7pm
I share a locker room with six other pregnant women, each of us, in silence. We lubricate the skin of our bellies, tits and thighs with our hands or the massager balls. I look at the color of my nipples and compare them with those of my companions, they are all violet and we comment on it. The blue LED light of the locker room makes us look like inhabitants of Pandora;moon from the planet Polyphemus populated by humanoid creatures named Na'vi. We are waiting for Jake to come fuck away the afternoon. Jake does not arrive, so we keep putting cream on our coccyxes. We are dressed as goddesses of reproduction with metallic bodies, sidereal prints with galaxies, explosions of supernovas. We repeat the ritual every day at 8:00 pm, killing ourselves performing prenatal yoga exercises in the meditation room.
You can not put a limit on anything. “The more you dream, the further you get” is the slogan of this wellness center. The yoga group talks a lot about mind control, and there are magazines circulating about the importance of observing nature. We talk a long time about a text that deals with the life of mushrooms before Lilith, the monitor, begins the session with an invitation to breathe deep.
Just from hearing Lilith's voice, I enter a peaceful state. I can feel the fetus intensely, the head pressing my bladder and the feet close to my lungs; I perceive the birth canal as a polished lime-green cavern. The walls of the room twist and fade. The long legs of my yoga partner look like spider legs when she flexes her knees and touches the floor with her ass. There is an ultrasonic humidifier in a corner, they always fill it with essence of cinnamon and mint: this gives you the vibration of a spa that invites one to levitate. I fly over mountains of purple velvet and I fall into a transparent vessel full of mist and I vape it all. What an immense pleasure to fill my lungs and leave behind an innocuous white cloud. I have a hard belly all the time. We are done.
I always carry white tea and tangerines in my sports bag for after these sessions; that taste of health that I like so much and that I know will not come back. I walk with my knees loose to the exit, I chew strawberry gum like I'm drunk, I talk to the receptionist for a while and she reminds me that they have special courses to recover the figure after giving birth. I pay the 80 euros of the monthly payment and I put the receipt on my neckline, my tattooed neckline with the phrase Throw down your umbilical noose so I can climb right back, from Nirvana.
The work of Mit Borrás is essentially installation;objects organized in the space which keep a surgical precision. The artist deals with issues related to the idea of progress and the aesthetic place occupied by technological devices. He works with plastics, silicones and various synthetic materials that offer a certain contemplative pleasure due to their soft ergonomic curves and the attractive adaptations of form. The precise flight pattern and apparent self-government of a drone along with the type of rotators and microprocessors of a medical prosthesis, play a decisive role for the artist when it comes to understanding his own work in motion.
The conception of nature in the work of Mit Borrás makes indivisible the natural and the artificial, implying that the fruits of science are as virtuous as the fruits of nature. From an anthropological point of view, the changes suffered by organisms to adapt to the environment are comparable to the efforts of science to provide us with a longer and more pleasant life. Underlying the artist’s work is the idea of eing immortal–not in terms of existing indefinitely but rather by living in harmony with the environment, achieving transcendence by accepting the acts of women and men as part of a search for stability and peace. The artist asks us as viewers to see ourselves as explorers of the state of minimum energy and maximum stability by using techniques such as chromotherapy and aromatherapy.
From the conviction that the animal kingdom adapts to nature just as humans adapt nature to their own needs, along with the consequences that implies, the artist works with objects of mass production designed for balance and anatomical accommodation. Borrás talks about humans as beings who modify, design, and “ergonomize” their bodies and environments, resulting in works that allude to reproductivity and sexuality from the most industrial and inorganic point of view.
Exgirlfriend Gallery (Berlin) presents the exhibition “Mother Machine” from September 22 to October 13. Using installations and videos, “Mother Machine” addresses topics related to technology and the idea of rogress, alluding to the processes of ergonomic transformation by which humans attempt to imitate the acts of adaptation that nature itself performs. Self-improvement robots as absent protagonists, the technological singularity serves as the engine of a work that constantly questions the division between what is biological and what is artificial.
Text by Rachel Lamot
---
Exgirlfriend Gallery
Holsteinischestrasse 18
12161 Berlin
+49 151 63214644