Iceberg

Iceberg - Multimedia installation

An iceberg is a block of ice that, after breaking loose from a glacier, wanders around the oceans and seas until it disappears. Islands, even continents adrift, the icebergs are fascinating, fragile and powerful; beautiful and daunting. They are ephemeral and elegantly materialize nature in its course. This image raises countless in the artist's mind, but what really awakens his curiosity and imagination was the fact that the largest part of an iceberg remains hidden, dormant, and invisible to the eyes. This aspect led him to elaborate a series of allegories – for example, that the unconscious was the invisible part of an iceberg called consciousness. We know that our senses are able to assess a limited portion of the world. What we can access about any phenomena will be necessarily a partial and reduced perspective of it. Thus, the curiosity to search for the occult side of things would be an essential strategy for our survival and expansion.

Based on the aforementioned suppositions Velazquez developed a new series, reflecting also on the historical time in which we live in, a time ruled by the critical conflict between men and technology. The non-linear narrative proposed by this body of works suggests an iceberg that opposes the “natural intelligence” developed by Homo sapiens during millennia (represented in the aerial images of the Antarctic interfered with quotes from the history of philosophy) to the artificial, synthetic, exponential and singular intelligence of current computers (represented by the 11 networked microcontrollers that command the score of the piece). The organic, intuitive and anthropophagic research process allowed the emergence of a dialogue with the artist's own previous production. Human beings are basically water and, like icebergs, we break loose from our matrix to escape the frictions of life until the limits of our bodies.

Researched by Graziele Lautenschlaeger