Challenges V: a territory where art, science and technology converge

A group of flowers are observed by security cameras in real time. We see the images of this absurd surveillance and think that these plants pulled from the ground and placed in vases are cause for suspicion in a society that needs to control everything . The work of Peruvian artist Julieta Tarraubella , part of "The Three-Body Problem," in the exhibition Challenges V which is exhibited at the Andreani Foundation, is reminiscent of those short pieces, without actors, that Samuel Beckett imagined, an installation where something dramatic happens, where those flowers, under the gaze of a surveillance camera, generate a small situation.

Technology linked to nature, or the natural world intertwined with technology, are, in some ways, the subjects of this exhibition curated by Agustina Rinaldi. The title, "The Three-Body Problem," itself entails a discussion and engages the three artists convened by Rinaldi—Lena Becerra, Ángel Salazar, and Julieta Tarraubella—in a dialogue where each establishes a hypothesis about the future within a tense relationship between natural elements in a context where technology permeates every space.

While the name of the exhibition refers to an unsolved scientific enigma that arises when three celestial bodies interact in the same gravitational field, a translation could be made linked to the coexistence of the three artists in an exhibition hall where their works establish a problem, a conflicting situation to be observed, rather than a finished aesthetic result.

Temporal data is incorporated into the functioning of all three works . If Tarraubella plays with the real time of the surveillance camera and the possibility that we, as visitors, may be captured by it, the flowers that began as buds and may wither will also reflect the passage of time.

Similarly, fungi are the protagonists of Ecuadorian artist Ángel Salazar's work, where the recording of the imperceptible movements of the fungal universe allows us to connect with a non-human reality that many are seeing as an organizational alternative.

The detail and shape of the mushrooms framed in a display case or displayed on screens as unrealistic elements, altered by visual resources but manifesting their functioning without reservation, without the technical device seeking to modify their future, convert them into fantastic surfaces , as if we were observing them in an x-ray.

Mendoza-born artist Lena Becerra sets up an emergency system connected by serum tubes to create a machine composed of elements similar to artificial hearts. The water, the fish tanks, and the quality of the elements that interact within this circuit that emulates a hospital structure speak of fragility, but also of the need for communication, of the networks that exist in the non-human world that we fail to fully perceive. To Deleuze and Guattari's body without organs, she responds with organs without bodies.

The desire to break away from the binary form expressed throughout the exhibition is embodied in these creatures, which cannot be considered human, but are not entirely natural things or elements either . The beings produced by the three artists speak of alternatives or delusions, of a science fiction expressed within a fairly realistic matrix where we encounter new entities traversed by life, by a divergent functioning, by a disconcerting automaticity.

The material exhibited here has an indecipherable agency . Each piece seems to have a life of its own, an autonomy upon being installed in the Andreani Foundation gallery, which establishes a different relationship with the visual work and also with the ways in which we connect with, approach, or try to understand it. We do not walk through a museum but through the manifestation of a different vital force, because it is the body itself that is called into question or that mutates into other possibilities.