Mutualidad de Fantasmática Electrónica (Mutuality of Electronic Phantasmatics) is a performative and relational project developed in Rosario, Argentina, by a group of artists who search through waste containers seeking discarded electronic devices, so as to recover and dismantle them. Between April and July 2024, more than 100 devices were gathered. So far, 41 were disassembled, and 1630 components were recovered. Microwaves, toasters, irons are some of the devices used to build the overhea projectors, which show images of the recovered components, along with a video and texts that register and expand on the process. Other components were reinserted into the art-tech community, giving them a new life. The modern idea of technological progress led us to an unprecedented crisis. It is prudent to create, from the Media Archaeology approach, a discipline that proposes an alternative to modern linear temporality by interweaving different pasts with the challenge of fragmenting the future. The project has been produced as part of the CIFO x Ars Electronica Awards, a cooperation between Ars Electronica Festival and Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation (CIFO).
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ItNdK_VuKeWs1_41JP5DyfTdzwGjlrj0/view?usp=sharing
I have read on the web that Austria is the second European country in terms of electronic waste recycling rates [1]. There, 95% of w.e.e.e is processed to obtain reusable devices and reinsertable raw materials. Contrary to that context, Argentina is the second in South America in terms of poverty rates. Of the total population, 44% cannot afford the cost of the market [2] basket, and 9.3% live in indigence [3]. There are very few public recycling policies, but the main part of this task is not done by the big companies but by a small communities of workers, generally organized in cooperatives, who everyday go around the city looking for something that could have some value in the recycling sector, such as paper and cardboard mainly, but also bronze, copper and aluminum. This group, popularly known cartoneros, recover everything that could go to landfill but they reinsert it into the raw material industry. This practice turns collection into a technology itself. The electronic waste does not enter in this collection circuit, probably because recovering them is not cost-effective in this context. The kind of devices found on the dumpsters are generally CRT TVs, fans, heaters and inkjet printers, most of them do not work . When collectors find these kind of devices, they generally extract only the coils and transformers, which is where the highest copper density is found, therefore has the highest value in the market. The rest of the device is discarded and taken to landfill.
In Argentina and many other Latin American countries is common for media arts works to be closely linked to Low Tech. Curator Clarisa Appendino believes that this is “an eventful but fortunate technical limitation” that leads to “learning new procedures and research tools” and “making the project acquire other edges that had not been formulated in the beginning” (Appendino, 2021, p.21).
During the lock down of 2020 I collected from a dumpster a very old and very dirty cash register, whose chassis had been broken to remove the transformer. After a few days, I began the long process of cleaning it, disassembling it, separating all its parts and enhancing the value of each one of them. I obtained 560 reusable parts among electronic components, screws, springs and raw material (copper, tin, ABS, fiberglass, etc). Appendino followed this process closely, and it was she who suggested the idea of Poor Technique, taking up the expression “Poor Image” coined by Hito Steyerl in The Wretched of the Screen. “Its quality is bad, its resolution substandard (...).It is a ghost of an image, a preview, a thumbnail, an errant idea, an itinerant image distributed for free, squeezed through slow digital connections, compressed, reproduced, ripped, remixed, as well as copied and pasted into other channels of distribution” (Steyerl, 2014 p.33). Appendino proposes a direct parallelism between these actions and the transformations that various Latin American artists usually perform on the devices, as was the case with this cash register: “infinite transformations and displacements that are equivalent to the dispersion/concentration of information in the contemporary world.” And then she says: “The displacements, the copies, the changes of parts produce a permanently transitory reality in the object. Not as an object in itself, but as a project made up of undefined parts, never closed, waiting for another mutation, waiting to appear in another materiality. Such displacements, or ways of emerging as material, can be compared to the transformations suffered by images when their quality is modified, or when they are reproduced on different devices, or printed on different supports.” (Appendino, 2022, p. 23). According to these ideas, and her knowledge about my work and the Rosario art field, she was a good partner, as curator, to develop this project.
It is possible to link the phantasmatic character of that which awaits a transformation, an emergence in another materiality, with the past futures and the media archaeology. The ideas of the future developed during modernity, such as socialist utopias or unlimited progress, seem dead today, waiting for a mediumship to manifest itself. It is undeniable that the modern idea of technological progress (which for years endorsed the notion of new media) has driven us to an unprecedented global climate crisis with apocalyptic connotations. Therefore, today more than ever it is prudent to operate from the logic of media archaeology, since it opposes both the notion of progress and that of new media, and proposes an approach to deep time, in which it invites to break the temporal linearity and to thread the future and the past. (Jasso, 2013). Referring to the dead media, Jussi Parikka enabled the possibility of thinking about the phantasmatic when he explained that rather than dead, they are the walking dead: the zombie media of electronic garbage. (Parikka & Hertz, 2021, p. 259).
Both archaeology and phantasmatics lead us to think about time in a non-linear way outside the logics of progress. In a similar way, as opposed to the synchronic temporality of modernity that offers a unidirectional and inevitable path towards apocalypse, Yuk Hui (2021) proposes a fragmentation of the future, which instead of advancing towards apocalypse diverges from it and multiplies. Taking this int account, it would seem appropriate to recover experiences of communities that imagined a future different from the one proposed by progress. I refer specifically to the Labour Movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, represented in the resistance societies [4] and mutual societies. And more specifically, I am referring to the Mutualidad Popular de Estudiantes y Artistas Plásticos (Popular Mutual Society of Students and Artists, a.k.a La Mutualidad), a community of painters from Rosario City that in the 1930s tried to apply the labour movement principles in the art field as a pedagogic methodologie.This group is an essential reference in the Argentina Art History.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1s2PqmvL9ym7A5zbmf9oi-F1cwdctnq6a/view?usp=drive_link
https://drive.google.com/file/d/15hYb2ZexVNcCrua3KtjPCSv32yZOtDeO/view?usp=drive_link
https://drive.google.com/file/d/19ozEhxhu9v-Ij9AncXAfxsIKPr-4z2_r/view?usp=drive_link
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1BoeJJbev-ZcW3m7NaIil93XsHnrhzhQG/view?usp=sharing
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1cXt4llBawZf47QpoDn6eVL-iLEiQTTgi/view?usp=drive_link
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1cHz7JPhHVU0EVm8fMy-VswLPauxMYdB6/view?usp=drive_link
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1MqbklgP6osQ40NJ8O0FWZHhgCyEdWKDS/view?usp=drive_link