Helphola 2001. Vinyl and string. 15 x 6 x 0.2 m.
Our intelligence copies nature's growth patterns. Cells reproduce by subdividing into similar ones, forming cellular tissues, membranes, and skins. In the age of technical reproducibility, artifice is repeated industrially in a manner consistent with its production process. The artist Monique Bastiaans establishes complex geometric relationships between industrial objects, the result of which approximates the lattices that make up cells. This arrangement adapts to any container, forming membranes of great visual expressiveness. In this case, she uses playful objects such as pink floats. The resulting skin, when joined together, can reach the highest part of the building that houses it. The impact on the architectural space is impressive. She only used a minimal portion of the objects produced, but it is their arrangement that is striking. It is then that we realize the importance of the repetition of objects in a world that questions such troubling issues as identity. Monique Bastiaans situates herself on the border between biological and industrial reproduction as a metaphor between artifice and nature, but also as the construction of a place situated opposite the artificial membrane. We are speaking of an experience centered around the visual arts. The floats now appear somewhat threatening. The light is filtered through the transparencies, and the skin thus fulfills its filtering function, establishing a front and a back, thus symbolizing the same decline of the border. The rational, in this case, is identified with the natural in a common concept of growth and reproduction of the world as something both biological and industrial.
Clara Muñoz, 2001