Underground Future | Vicente Prieto Gaggero

The skin has the quality of being able to stretch from before we are born, protecting our bodies as a sensitive and tactile barrier between us and the world. The skin is a canvas that registers, accumulates and moulds itself to shape and accompany our lives, from the first scrape of a knee to an allergy that may alter its condition. The skin develops from the same foetal tissue like the brain and, like the brain, it retains information and memory, but in a unique way. It is an organ that can give away our lived relationship with the world from our origin, as it functions actively and in collaboration with the endocrine, vascular, nervous and psychic systems. Skin cushions, bruises grow; skin covers joints that become swollen or bones that break. It wears make-up, tattoos and transforms itself. Its elastic condition narrates our history, and it organically reveals the world to us in its contours.

We inhabit a place of constant change, and humanity reacts and adapts. Body modification can be personal and collective, from a subtle eyeliner to adapting to the dominant technology. The latter is a phenomenon that has existed since our origins as a species, from the time we first interacted with our context in caves and with simple tools and objects. Thousands of years later, in times of mass production, parts are interchangeable and modular as part of an assembling line. The body is seen similarly: as a sort of accumulation of parts and pieces, each of them shaped under the cloak of skin.

In Underground Future, I experiment with the representation of skin through the technical manipulation of clay, especially its transition from elasticity to hardness through dehydration and heat, using pre-Columbian construction techniques. This encounter, unthinkable for me before covering my own skin with clay, has allowed me to arrive at visual results associated with the iconography of anthropomorphic ceramics. Crossing new assignments of human characteristics to objects, I establish a system of visual communication in which those same objects, through the reaction with the skin, keep up with us as we inhabit the megacities: artefacts, symbols, tools, brands of clothing, technological devices... of which we have been users for years, as well as labour and subjects of control.

In Underground Future, we approach a system of work production and installation of an imaginary that links skin and clay both conceptually and visually. Both go through similar qualities and states; they react and adapt, tighten and flex according to their context. Although both skin and clay may be presented as thin layers, they are not just surface, but deep elements that, in a broad way, are the living and constant expression of the present.