transferring, storing, sharing and hybriding: The perfect humus
Marcello Mercado
Transferring, Storing, Sharing, and Hybriding: The perfect humus, 2010 – 2011
Series of Ephemeral Video-Installations
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In Transferring, Storing, Sharing, and Hybriding, a series of ephemeral video-installations created in 2010 – 2011, Marcello Mercado addresses the unstable materialities of memory, inheritance, and technological residues. Drawing from the human genome, sound art, satellite streams, and digital archives, these works cultivate a living humus where organic and synthetic legacies are intertwined, constantly shifting, never fixed.
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Memory is not presented as a static repository but as a volatile negotiation—a territory of transmission, mutation, and erosion. Information, whether embedded in DNA sequences or encoded in cultural databases, leaks, hybridizes, and transforms. It is less about the accumulation of gigabytes, terabytes, or zettabytes, and more about the precarious entanglements that such excess inevitably generates.
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Set within natural environments, these installations articulate an ecology of interdependencies: moss, water, wood, speakers, radio waves, and glass vials compose fragile assemblages where the biological and the technological are co-implicated. Rather than illustrating hybridity, the work enacts it, inserting the viewer into circuits of multispecies, multimodal transmission. The satellite feed merges with the genome, the sound frequencies seep into the moss, the archival impulse dissolves into entropy.
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Contemporary existence, the installations suggest, is conditioned by acts of translation, contamination, and remix. Storage becomes indistinguishable from distortion; preservation, from mutation. Rather than clinging to the idea of pristine archives, Transferring proposes memory as a field of unstable assemblages, a site where pasts and futures cross-contaminate each other.
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This sensibility resonates with a broader shift in curatorial and theoretical practices toward non-linear temporalities, recursive histories, and distributed agencies. The installations breathe with the recognition that every archive—genetic or digital—operates under conditions of uncertainty, exposed to forces beyond control. Storage is never neutral; it is a practice haunted by loss, noise, and decay.
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By embracing the ephemeral, Mercado’s work departs from traditional notions of durability and fixity. It stages memory as performative, fugitive, and entangled with material processes of transformation. The event of the installation is not a means to preserve information, but a way to let it mutate and regenerate—through sound, matter, time.
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In Transferring, no single medium or agent holds primacy. Human, machine, organism, and environment form shifting networks of action and reaction, echoing deeper inquiries into posthuman entanglements and networked materialities. Information is neither inert nor pure: it is an active participant in an ecology of residues.
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Ultimately, these ephemeral constellations reflect a vital awareness: that in an era of accelerating technological proliferation, what matters is not the preservation of stable identities, but the capacity to inhabit instability, to cultivate porous, living archives that remain open to transformation.
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Marcello Mercado
transferring, storing, sharing, and hybriding: The perfect humus
Hybrid-DNA-Performance-Bio-installation
2010-2011, Germany
Running time: 16’23»
4:3
Colour/B/W
Music by Marcello Mercado
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