Aguas Negras
BYRON GAGO
Case of studies 2016 – 2024
The visual narrative focuses on the relationship between the protagonist and nature by prioritising the landscape and the evidence behind a process of transformation in anthropocentric systems. Following affective geographies, this project reflects on travel through different latitudes as a recomposition of landscapes across the Amazon rainforest to the Alps, passing by the Mediterranean area.
Aguas Negras is a fictional journey in the form of video-graphic work that unified years of work and field observation in different locations. The re-constitution of affective geographies was inspired by personal experience as a migrant, an opportunity to reconsider the relationship with different territories and understand the political implications that define the relationship with the landscape.
It's a project where practices like walking and exploration are useful tools to observe and document residual areas that are joined together as remains of our recent past. A speculative fabulation where the protagonist is processed and integrated into the different landscapes as a part of a continuum of migration and adaptation. In Aguas Negras, water connects the different landscapes in a common system, it refers to its principle of life in a holistic way.
Thus, the project evolves into a global exploration of the relationship between different landscapes and immigration as a tool to challenge dominant power structures; looking for a sense of equity and self-determination. It is an attempt to create a visual story between the scenarios from an idea of circularity that emulates the perpetual cycle of metamorphosis and interconnectivity.
Aguas Negras
2024
Dual-channel video
- Dual-channel video installation
- 11′ 30″ · 16:9 full HD · stereo sound
01 / 04
Inside the space, adjacent to the dual-channel video, an installation echoes elements from the film, delving into themes of destruction and renewal. It explores power dynamics over the landscape and transformations driven by ecological exploitation.
The installation reconstructs a landscape within the space, merging industrial and organic elements. Traces of combustion and oxidation serve as remnants of past consumption and functionality: signs of a process now halted, yet still present in its material memory.
Salt carries the bed; Dexion slotted angle, the shelving system of warehouses and stockrooms, carries the salt. What has been burned is laid into it: coca leaves, a varuna crab, plaster. The industrial support and the organic remain are given the same ground, and neither is allowed to finish the other.
Burned Pieces, Aguas Negras
2024
Installation view
- Coca leaves, salt, varuna crab, plaster, Dexion structures pieces
- Variable dimensions
01 / 08
The burned material is catalogued before it is laid into the salt. Three species, each photographed alone on white: a varuna crab from Vietnam, salicornia from Israel, bay laurel from Switzerland.
Three latitudes, one gesture. The species are not chosen for what they mean separately but for how far apart they were gathered: the same journey the film describes, reduced to what will survive being burned.
Photographed as specimens rather than as sculpture: centred, evenly lit, scaleless against white. The convention belongs to the natural-history plate, which is a way of claiming that a thing has been collected, classified and kept.
Burned Pieces, Aguas Negras
2024
Varuna crab, Vietnam
- Varuna litterata, burned
- Specimen, photographed on white
01 / 06
The bed was arrived at by trial. Plaster was cast in trays with increasing quantities of burnt material worked into it, and the Dexion frame was laid out at full size on the studio floor before any of it went into the room.
The casting studies run as a gradient: white, grey, then almost black. That is a way of asking how much of a burned thing a surface can carry before it stops reading as ground and starts reading as residue.
The frame was bolted from stock slotted angle, the same component the installation leaves visible under the salt. Nothing in the fabrication is concealed later; the support is part of what is shown.
Burned Pieces, Aguas Negras
2024
Casting studies
- Plaster, charred botanical material
- Studio study
01 / 05
