Pagar en efectivo [Paying in Cash] (2021)
Engraving and video
100 × 70 cm
BA Collection
Inventory No.: 2021.494.2
Carlos Ramírez freezes his own bodily sweat in the shape of coins, only to let it melt later onto copper sheets, while it simultaneously corrodes the metal surfaces. The frozen sweat is pure embodied physical effort, while perspiration is the body’s unconscious mechanism for thermoregulation: an ephemeral and corrosive coin that neither exchanges nor capitalizes anything, but instead dissipates its own crystallized physical effort.
Marshall McLuhan once said that money is essentially a metaphor. A meta-mathematical object, straddling matter and language, which at the same time translates and transmits information. And if the current post-capitalist trend implies its dematerialization, the installation sets in motion a game of thermal and alchemical imbalances to explore not only the conventional construction of money but also the historicity of objects and of science itself.
There is, therefore, a thought contained within matter and its own transformation, where the artist relies on minimal physical actions that, in turn, generate maximal meanings to reflect on the tensions between the materiality and symbolism of the object:
“Doing nothing vs.
Doing “almost nothing”
“Doing” is a matter of degrees. I approach architecture as a field phenomenon, where even a minimal variation can alter the entire system. I am interested in operating through the most subtle spatial dynamics to read the forces that move a place. Tangential energies, residual flows, paths without apparent traces: ways of thinking about space not from what imposes itself, but from what persists.
I believe in a practice of “almost nothing,” where every gesture, no matter how small, accumulates potency over time. Like in that mathematical formula where (1.01)^365 multiplies the infinitesimal until it becomes transformation, I understand architecture as a work of contained, catalytic actions. Letting things happen rather than forcing them. Allowing the sensible to emerge.” (Text extracted from the artist’s website).