The Window Becomes Wind by Nicolás Consuegra

“If the theory that sensations do not reside in the head is true, and that we feel a window, a cloud or a tree not in the brain, but rather in the place where we see them,” says Walter Benjamin in One-Way Street, then –we can continue– when we observe the windows of Colombian artist Nicolás Consuegra installed in the Huanchaca Ruins Cultural Park, we realize that we feel them revolving in the time of large stones next to the old industrial mining site. In general, the field of art conceives the specifically installed object as a way of opening a relationship with the space where the work and its context are affected and propose a scenic tension of their own. What we call a specific installation, in this case, not only allows the appreciation of the work itself but also the appearance of another way of seeing the place where it is placed.

A window is a device intended to open a connection between two spaces, one could think of it as acting as a connective membrane. Or perhaps it is the window itself that generates the spaces? Surely, the first thing a window allows us to do is to look. Its rectangular shape frames a perspective between the inside of a building and what is outside. A window is, therefore, a viewfinder that focuses on a certain perspective. At the same time, it is a source of light that, symbolically, allows us to breach the confinement and makes visible what is contained inside an enclosure. Vision, light, connection: all these elements are somehow present in the installation. But we must also add a temporal dimension that, being an installation placed in a heritage complex, opens a new conversation, a dialog with history, with what once existed there. In a certain way, what Consuegra allows is a variable relationship not only with what is right there but, above all, with what is no longer there. The ruins.

Looking back to an era associated with the ancient gears of the machinery for the processing of silver ore leads us to think of the grinding of the stone containing the metal, the noisy processes of heavy industry, the hectic activity of the workers and laborers determined to obtain the desired resource under the sun. This image of extractive work appears at some point in the vision of the windows of Consuegra, which incorporate a rotating mechanism, a metallic grid that evokes the movement of a mill. That industrial ancestor reappears in a device to measure the time that passes blowing. The window becomes the wind, is the title of the artist’s proposal. And that wind, we might add, is the one that blows with history

Arranged in pastel tones like the buildings in the background, which increase the contrast with the dark presence of the stone blocks of the Huanchaca complex, these three windows allow us to hear the wind that sneaks through the rotating grid and brings us the rumors that the memory of that place keeps. Of course, everything that is installed in the proximity of a ruin has the inevitable mandate to coexist with the rescued remains of the past to restore some form of historical relationship. In this case, Consuegra bursts in with a geometric and colorful work that reopens a conversation between the newcomer and that which is part of the place. To be part of the place is also to have to understand its history. This speculation on the wind of history seeps through these windows and, at some point, reminds us once again of Walter Benjamin’s words: that stormy wind that pushes us into the future, leaving ruins in its wake, is what we call progress.