Title: About Eugenia Calvo´s work
Author: Marmor Lara
Place: Buenos Aires, 2012
Eugenia Calvo’s projects take shape by way of diverse media, such as photography, video, installations and publications. She works with things and objects that habitually circulate in the world, steering them away from their original functions. This operation of dislocation is a key to her production, and it distills an ever-present sensation of menace.
Some of her works, like the video-installation titled Un plan ambicioso (An Ambitious Plan, 2006) records how pieces of furniture rebel within a home, forming a barricade while ornamental pieces explode like grenades. The Alarmas (Alarms, 2010) series of photographs presents a variety of situations in different domestic spaces in which inevitable disaster is forewarned: behind a door slightly ajar, Calvo photographs a tall, teetering pile of cups, and in an empty room a set of wineglasses are positioned on the blades of a ceiling fan in the off position. In the installation titled La última región (The Last Region, 2011), furniture legs of all kinds are laid out in the space, transforming the scene into a weapons decommissioning of some sort. In this piece, the wooden objects stand out against the yellow floor and walls. As is the case with objects accumulated and dyed green and blue in the installation Las fuerzas predominantes (Predominant Forces, 2009), color functions both as a binder and also a means of isolating the group from the surrounding architecture, pointing to the situation’s fictional nature. Each of her projects is the result of months of elaboration, and each seeks to situate the public face to face with scenes that inevitably exude tension.
Calvo fuses conceptual art’s resources with the logic of installations; her objective is to question the “natural” order of objects within an exacerbated consumer culture. Her works attempt to perpetrate a different kind of logic in terms of how things function by way of gestures and movements that invert their precarious, inanimate existence. She agglutinates objects or generates mechanisms that allow them to move on their own accord, or encloses them behind bars with the expectation of an imminent explosion, like Bruce Banner turning into the Hulk. This does happen, with furniture turning into sculptural objects in the 2011 piece S/T (estructuras para muebles) (Untitled (structures for furniture)).
Some of Calvo´s pieces are like magic tricks, others like traps, part of an archaeological dig or fragments she reveals of a system that is falling apart. They all incite the public to feel, whether in their homes or outside, by day or by night, that the silence of an orderly room can suddenly be lost forever.