Dissolving against the surface a body gets distorted, intoxicated, like a blurred memory that grows beyond its skin. From the ground, dropping upwards, the image turns into liquid, leaking outside the corners. A pulse that trembles, a ribbon shape that remembers the structure of proteins, a stormy lightning of flesh, flowers and eyelids; altogether, very dense and immaterial. There are two fundamental things that have changed since the accelerated use of technology, the anthrobscene that modernity brought: matter and perspective.

Derived from the volatile nature of contemporary materiality, viscosity might have become not only our new aesthetic realm but also its ontological aftermath. Viscosity has made the containers of our postmodern era (its taxonomies, borders, frontiers, and limits) lose their capacity to contain, confusing the machinic with the botanical, the ethereal with the geological, turning the biological into a cyborgian landscape of possibilities and risks.

Blurring the limits between the natural and the artificial, between death and life, Mena’s work points directly to these spillings and dislocations. His photographs become viscous matters that resignify the symbolic power of what an image is, where its materiality lies, and how its forces and signifiers might be melted.

Eyelid spasms occur when one or both eyelids snap shut. These involuntary tremors happen out of control, a twitching that does not affect vision, but generates an interruption in perception, glitching reality in a momentary amalgamation of crisscrossing images. . When looking at them in detail, eyes start trembling, as one encounters hyperrealistic territories of technified bodies merging with toxic matters, remembering petrol stains, radioactive dusts or laboratory reflections. A whole world of collaged realities that reminds how our technological devices have expanded our minds by melting our retinas.

These images occur now, here and everywhere, connecting objects, technologies, rocks, bodies, decaying beings, and flowery blossoms despite their vastly different timescales. Like rendered hyperobjects, they refer to the impossibility of conceptually containing its limits and consequences. These images entail a process of de-territorialization and denaturalization, proposing a new deep-time space that challenges the notions of temporalities, boundaries, and all the infinite limits that modernity has obsessively tried to fix.



Gabriel Alonso, Founder and Academic at Institute for Postnatural Studies.

2022