January 2022

NO SOUND OF WATER

11.12.2021 – 05.15.2022

ESPACIO ABIERTO

TROIKA. NO SOUND OF WATER

11.12.2021 – 05.15.2022

No Sound of Water is a large-format, immersive installation that takes the viewer into an isolated, salt-filled reality. Being inside, you can feel an atmosphere that transports you to a place that could exist in the future. With this installation that simulates a fictional ecosystem, Troika seeks to reflect on the future of the Earth and its transformation into an inhospitable place due to human activity.

For more than two decades, Troika art collective, formed in 2003 by Eva Rucki (Germany, 1976), Conny Freyer (Germany, 1976), and Sebastian Noel (France, 1977), has sought to challenge our perception of the world and its eventual destruction. For the exhibition ‘No Sound of Water’, they present two works that together form a hostile and desolate landscape that, although it could be thought of as part of a fictitious ecosystem, could become a reality due to the effect of various destructive human actions. Far from enunciating an ecological discourse or moral, the exhibition focuses on the problems caused by technological, capitalist and industrial advances and the impact they have to the point of causing a new geological era (the Anthropocene) and the eventual decomposition of the Earth .

No Sound of Water forms part of their ongoing project Untertage. Meaning ‘below the earth’, or literally, ‘under the day’, Untertage takes shape as an elaborate ecosystemic fiction: its protagonist, salt, is devised as the hero of an aeonian drama of world domination.

The No Sound of Water (2021) installation consists of an industrial processing machine that refers to extractive technologies. Through an upper channel, the structure works like a cascade of salt in constant movement, as if it were an infinite hourglass, to the point of becoming uncontrollable: the salt spills through the room, accumulates in the crevices of the floor or even in the folds of the visitors’ clothes. With salt as the central element, the piece proposes an alternative reading in which this mineral is not only an element of human and natural extinction but, is also responsible for creating an era based on non-organic intelligence and synthetic biology. The very title of the piece alludes to the total absence of a key and organic element such as water.

On the opposite side, the Terminal Beach (2020) video takes place in the middle of a desolate and impoverished territory where the only thing that can be seen is the last tree on the face of the earth and a robotic arm that constantly hits the trunk of the tree with an ax. The harshness of the atmosphere is reinforced by an acoustic background made up of the sounds of lightning, solar winds and geomagnetic storms, captured as radio waves by the British Antarctic Survey. The metaphor of the video is compelling: we are destroying the world that sustains us and every advance of technology, capitalism and industry is also a step towards extinction.

< Arte Abierto > presents Troika, with the exhibition No Sound of Water which will be on display and open to the public at Espacio Arte Abierto located on the 2nd floor of ARTZ Pedregal from November 12, 2021 to May 15, 2022 from Tuesday to Sunday from 12:00 to 7:00 p.m.