The Fountain
An arrangement of fifteen hand built ceramics open pipelines suspended on found urban materials: bricks, rocks, pieces of abandoned plywood. The ceramic pipelines were manually glazed by melting tar with a propane torch. The pipelines create an open system where crude oil is held in a fragile equilibrium, sometimes dropping from one piece ot the next, sometimes suspended.
The Fountain arose as a sculptural reflection on our fascination with the boundaries between open and closed systems. Fountains that recycle water streams creating an apparent dynamism out of a constant set of matter have for centuries been an object of aesthetic contemplation and architectural prowess. For The Fountain, I wanted to explore this fascination but crucially, substitute water for crude oil. In my ethnographic research about Mexico's oil industry, I am constantly in conversation with workers of all kinds whose main responsibility is to maintain the oil industry as a closed, smooth circuit: oil needs to be pulled from under the earth with pressurized flows of water and gas, and immediately be captured in a system of tubes, pipes, deposits, and reservoirs, moved across water bodies and across political boundaries until it's finally let out to burn. Workers at every stage of this process need to ensure that the system remains non-porous, that the oil circulates without spill. I started The Fountain by creating a system of clay fractured and open pipes: some are simply open at the top to allow us to gaze into their content, some have holes that permit the oil to flow into the next conductor, some are cracked at their ends giving them irregular shapes. I hand built all of these pieces, often using parts of my body such as my arms and legs to give them a cylindrical shape that would be irregular and bumpy. After firing these pieces in the kiln, I used recycled tar from a road construction (which was gifted to me) to "glaze" the pieces outside of the kiln, directly with a propane torch outdoors. I decided to carry out this process in the same site, the back patio of a building next to a loud generator and metal containers to dispose of chemical waste, where I would eventually display the installation. The next stage was finding abandoned materials to construct "towers" and surfaces where the pipelines could lie in relation to each other, in a fragile, barely suspended set up. I went on walks on the neighborhood to find abandoned pieces of plywood, bricks, rocks, and other debris that I added to the clay pipelines and started experimented with the sculptural arrangement for The Fountain. Once all was set in place, I took a hand-made clay pitcher, filled it with Pennsylvania Crude Oil (available for purchase in small quantities due to its medicinal uses), and used the pitcher to fill the clay pipes with oil. Some pipelines held the oil in place, some let small drips fall onto the next one in the system. As a last step, I took close-up shots of each of the pieces in the installation to allow our eyes to wander into the magnificent textures created by the mixture of clay, tar, debris, and crude oil, as well as to freeze the dynamism of this fountain system in time and place.