When it rains heavily after a drought, the canals on our rooftop suddenly overflow and water starts accumulating and flooding everywhere, causing in this excess a failure, as the canal stops streaming and outsourcing, and the system implodes and water comes in unmitigated under doors and through the cracks on the walls and the invisible holes in the ceiling, and then we have leaks.

In the bathtub there is a whirl around the drain which spins clockwise in the northern hemisphere and inversely in the south by the force of inertia caused by the Earth’s rotation. Dirty water travels and joins other dirty waters, from the pipe to the sewer, a duct that keeps getting bigger, where more pipes keep conjoining until the flow is now something new, arriving at a temporary destination where it is decomposed, filtered and purified. The tube hides the origin and the direction of all the things that are moving, changing state and reorganizing in untenable categories of materiality mixed in layers of soil, transformed into other materials or assimilated into new flows.

On the bank of the river there is a tube made by hand with fragments of other tubes, with ropes and plastic bags, that suctions the water from the stream and pulls it upwards, drawing the liquid opposite its course and through the fields, to be dispersed on a small crop. There are farms around, huge concentrations of animals whose waste is excessively reused to fertilize the fields, penetrating into the subsoil and contaminating the water in subterranean layers. In an enclosed circuit of infinite divisions, the current agglomerates in a shape and the journey becomes matter: the content is the continent, the flow is the canal.

Capturing hard solidification with a soft bow, LLAÇ is a winding speculation about the possibilities of a poured tide of thingness; smooth, coarse, dense, glossy, murky, light and heavy, that drip between your fingers, that fall, that spill, that stick, that scratch, that crumble, that dilute and that remain.

-Sira Pizà

Xavier Martin Llavaneras works from sculpture to research the circulation, transformation and reorganization of biological, non-organic and cultural matter as different parts of the same whole, conforming an environment which he observes and intervenes upon.

Xavier lives and works in Barcelona. He studied Fine Arts in Bilbao, Berlin and Barcelona. His work has been exhibited in spaces and institutions such as Artiatx, Bilbao; Fundación Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisboa; TEA – Tenerife Espacio de las Artes, Tenerife; Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona; Centre del Carme Cultura Contemporànea, Valencia; CAPC — Musée d’Art Contemporain de Bordeaux, Burdeos; Centre d’Art la Panera, Lleida; ADA Project, Roma; Yaby, Madrid; Meetfactory, Praga; Atelier35, Bucarest; amongst others.

All images by Roberto Ruiz. Courtesy of the artist and Spiritvessel.