Page 9 - The Future Belongs to No One. Eugenio Ampudia

But apart from camouflage, smoke is also a cloud. It’s a signal, a traffic light, an invitation – an x that marks the spot. Smoke awaits us. It beckons us here, to a volcano-building about to erupt.Smoke makes us think that there must be something else behind or beneath, because smoke doesn’t appear ex nihilo except in the Old Testament. And thus thousands of years later people still believe that a burning bush was a means of communication. A bush of smoke. Nothing is more real than nothing. At the same time as it is determining, smoke creates indeterminacy – it prevents things from being seen clearly.Cumuli, cumulonimbi, nimbostrati, stratocumuliBut, sometimes, we manage to get inside the smoke and it’s like being backstage. Like when we’re on the dancefloor, shoulder to shoulder, and suddenly the smoke machine pumps its fog everywhere and isolates us. Smoke disassociates you. You’re left alone among the crowd, alone with the music, with the light beams that suddenly piercethrough the wall of smoke that surrounds you. Smoke creates a new intimacy.A cloud of smoke at the entrance; a cloud of smoke as a sign; smoke stains the lintel, but, smoke from what fire? A fire that was outside and came in? The fire inside that got out after consuming the building?‘To each his own... smoke.’ Welcome to Eugenio Ampudia’s house: camouflage-house where an apparent reality conveys to us a real appearance: Making the visible visible. What is it that happens? Let’s see: smoke at the entrance is an appropriate welcome that blurs the boundaries between what something seems and what something is. Making the visible visible; hiding in plain sight: the best camouflage.Eugenio Ampudia’s work precisely achieves these kinds of paradoxical shifts between one meaning and another, between political criticism and poetic action. And it invites you – yes, you and me, spectators with our thinking bodies – inside the public intimacies it generates. These intimacies organise our experience of space – or rather, they reorganise it. Intimacy is both transformed and transformative.9 | EUGENIO AMPUDIA. THE FUTURE BELONGS TO NO ONE YET9 | EUGENIO AMPUDIA. THE FUTURE BELONGS TO NO ONE YET