Curves, compost, forecasts and closures, Performance, 2020

 

 

 

 

Marcello Mercado
Curves, compost, forecasts and closures
10´51” color stereo
Performance
2020

 

This performance series unfolds as a living archive of the Covid-19 pandemic, gathering and reactivating visual traces through biological processes, soft systems, permaculture strategies, and new media practices.

The project does not aim to document the pandemic through conventional narratives; instead, it generates an open, evolving ecology where human, technological, and environmental agencies interact. Guided by the adaptive logics of permaculture—favoring resilience, interdependence, and non-linear growth—the archive develops organically, resisting closure or historical fixity.

Rather than serving as a passive container of memory, the series constructs a dynamic field of transformation, where images and biological materials enter into slow cycles of mutation, decomposition, and renewal. In this context, the archive becomes a performative organism, unfolding in time and sensitive to the vulnerabilities of its own processes.

This approach resonates with alternative genealogies of media and art, where histories are understood as discontinuous and layered, rather than linear. Technologies here are not neutral tools but active participants in the fragile negotiations between life, matter, and information.

The images and processes engaged are not symbolic, nor are they stabilized into a narrative. They emerge as material vectors of a broader ecological and epistemological inquiry, where memory is neither fixed nor redemptive but radically contingent.

Night Archives proposes a model of speculative survival—a precarious choreography between technological residues, biological matter, and the unstable processes of collective remembering and forgetting.

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