Martin Llavaneras
Curated by
Blueproject Foundation
The exhibition reflects on the idea of reengineering. In the business world, reengineering is a radical optimization strategy that consists of achieving greater economic efficiency for a company by deleting resources, making production flexible and eliminating less efficient techniques. The artist has displaced this concept from the abstract world of economy in order to re-integrate it within the technical properties of materials such as calcium and rubber.
Martin Llavaneras presents a series of lithographic limestone pieces extracted from a road, as well as sculptures made of thermoformable rubber typically used in the orthopedic industry.
As technological developments forced printing houses to go bankrupt, a plethora of lithographic molds were to be discarded. Reused and repurposed as construction material, the images that had once been meticulously produced, slowly faded due to the natural friction of human footsteps.
Reengineering Calcium takes a look at how evolving production techniques (in terms of materials, technological advances, applications and such) can serve as a model of the obsolescent relationship with the capabilities of our own body. This deteriorating process modulated by the notion of work and its consequences, transform the own organic physicality of the producer, which fluctuates between elasticity and resistance.