«ZIMOUN» When everything is shaken
Movement, repetition and interaction are the main tools of Zimoun‘s work to provoke our perception. Using everyday materials and elements, such as cardboard boxes, ropes and washers, the artist proposes satirical machines that celebrate the disordered, the useless and the absurd.
In his largest exhibition ever held in South America, at the MAC Quinta Normal, in Santiago, Chile, curated by Alessandra Burotto, Zimoun builds animated structures that are both auditory and architectural, sustaining both harmony and chaos, choreography and casualty. The large-scale seriality makes the minimal interactions that compose his works reverberate to infinity, testing the limits of our perception of space. This vibrating and unlimited place reaches a frequency proper to the contemporary, in which visuality and spatiality are conformed in a sensitive space. In an interview for Coincidencia, Zimoun says:
“In my installation work, what you hear is what you see, and what you see is what you hear. It is not a combination of visual and acoustic elements, as both have the same source. They are one thing: the physical material you see, and the physical material you hear and smell.”
Thus, Zimoun creates sound landscapes that trigger immersive experiences from which the audience can draw the most diverse parallels. The artist himself acknowledges a universe of possibilities in his works:
“For me, the work triggers thoughts, connections, reflections and associations in various directions. I’m thinking, for instance, about nature, architecture, society, science, philosophies, engineering, technology, organic behaviors, systems and organisms… Just to mention a few. Or contrasts, such as simplicity and complexity, order and chaos, mass and individuality, organic and artificial, or precision and inaccuracy.”
What we normally expect from mechanical movement is not confirmed in Zimoun’s work. The repetition and the serial pattern are for him apertures for a field of improbable frictions with the reality. For this reason, Zimoun does not load his work with poetic allegories. Everything is within the spectator’s reach, without any veil. Even his titles are nothing more than a description of the materials used; a list of everything that makes up the installation.
“I keep my works very reduced and raw. That way, they function more like a code behind things, rather than just creating one connection to one thing or topic. (…) I create my works based on many different interests coming together, and I see and understand them in many different ways and layers myself. Subjectivity is the base of how we see, understand and don’t understand the world and the universe. But perception and consciousness are flexible and formable. It is very interesting to explore and observe those in all possible ways. I think other types of titles would limit the works on various levels. To me, language seems to be much more limited than the experiences themselves.”
What could be understood as information is, therefore, an attitude of the artist that allows us to keep our encounter with the work as free as possible. By looking at his agitated cardboard boxes, talking to each other, producing a collective voice, we become curious, we find it witty and we recognize its aesthetical potential. We vibrate with them and observe them as if we were observing a phenomenon of nature. We leave aside representations and signs and quickly come to understand the world as shakes, rotations, turns, gravitations, dances and jumps.
