THE SKIN OF LABOUR

I'm interested in juxtaposing traditional unassociated origins of knowledge, collaborating with different actors coming from particular disciplines and origins like local engineers, scientists, community leaders, biomechanics, or experts in community development, and bring all of them together for a common goal, when dealing within the concepts of energy and technology. I'm trying to erase the labels of predefined categories like "high tech" and "low tech", using methodologies in my work that brings together these different disciplines and perspectives.

Energy itself and their accomplishment need to be redefined after the Second Industrial Revolution. I think that today art practices inscribed in a post-neoliberal context need to deal with their own loss and overload of energy. Almost all my works starts as a research project that tries to link specific stories in historical materialism, adding layers of complexity to a not well known or recognizable time frame, making it clear that dealing with history is political. My work is looking to a determined historiography, and the configuration of it, as a political fact. I’m interested in creating uncertain narratives, that post doubts to established historical narratives.

From that, I acknowledge that the ways we relate with discourses of state and nationality are a place of confront. I always distrusted the discourses pre-elaborated from the State, what it shows and what it really hides. The construction itself of an identitarious profile as a unique “central identity” or a “national identity” as a total, is really problematic for me.  In some of my works you could see some very specific local identities that really move away from what Ecuadorian State wants to project and develop of their own culture.

Adrián Balseca in a statement to PLATFORM:VB