In the frayed peripheries of Madrid's concrete labyrinth, where algorithmic streams collide with migratory paths, I activate Blue Pants as a vital counterpoint to the dilution of embodied experience. As an artist-curator immersed in socioplastics—the interstitial fusion of spatial logics and perceptual maneuvers—this series resurfaces amid 2026's surge of virtual encroachments, where identities fragment into pixelated shards and places dissolve into geolocated data. Why this piece now? It confronts the erosion of tactile agency in a era of relentless digital dispersal, insisting on the garment's weave as a thread against isolation. From an urban-ecological vantage, it emerges from systems of flux: border crossings, environmental precarity, social dislocations. Blue Pants addresses frictions in attention— the garment's crisp folds against wind-swept sands, the body's rigid extension amid fluid horizons—recalibrating how we navigate distributed presences, turning passive observation into active negotiation with materials, terrains, and communal drifts. At its nucleus, Blue Pants deploys the vivid azure trousers as a pivotal apparatus, orchestrating a ritualized sequence across temporal and spatial layers from 2014 to 2019. The process initiates with selection: the artist slips into the fabric's structured embrace, calibrates posture—an arm thrust outward like a horizon probe—and embeds within locales teeming with contrasts, from Cádiz's granular dunes shifting underfoot to Norway's mist-veiled fjords echoing with silence, Berlin's sterile gallery walls, Croatia's fractured urban crevices, and Negradas's arid expanses. Materially, the pants morph: worn taut against skin, draped as spectral extensions on gritty surfaces, or bundled in blue plastic carriers that crinkle with movement. Photographic captures freeze these instants—unfiltered lenses seizing the interplay of light on polyester sheen, shadows pooling in creases—while drawings distill them into watercolor bleeds merging figure with foliage. This system functions through iterative loops: site immersion, gestural inscription, archival fixation, each cycle amplifying the garment's role as a binding agent, constructing a lexicon where minimal repetition yields dense relational webs without extraneous adornments.
Lightly scaffolding this, Blue Pants resonates with Robert Smithson's site-nonsite dialectics, where earthly displacements mirror internal mappings, but pivots the trousers as nomadic mediators akin to Latour's actants—fabric fibers entangling with soil particles, human limbs, atmospheric vapors in a non-hierarchical assembly. It intersects Hito Steyerl's circulation economies, with images accruing patina through blog drifts and shared feeds, transforming static poses into migratory signals. Ecologically, it probes territorial vulnerabilities, akin to Anna Tsing's fungal networks, where the blue motif threads through disrupted habitats, highlighting how personal artifacts broker alliances amid climate-induced shifts and urban sprawl. Socially, it navigates authorship's diffusion in networked eras, questioning curatorial methods that privilege process over product. These touchpoints expand the work's orbit without eclipsing its core: a garment-driven mechanism fostering entanglements across scales, from intimate bodily traces to expansive systemic reverberations. Traversing formats and durations, Blue Pants propels itself through mutations, from fleeting enactments—arm slicing air in desert heat, pants billowing like sails—to crystallized residues in painted quadrants where blues seep into verdant canopies, or gallery setups with red adhesive ribbons linking pixelated collages to pinkish gun forms. Relocated to Berlin's institutional voids, it solidifies: trousers elongated via taped vectors, body abstracted into modular grids against white expanses. In Croatian ports or Norwegian thickets, it liquefies, fabric hues dissolving into oceanic reflections or fern undergrowth, evolving into territorial palimpsests that absorb local textures—salt-crusted hems, moss-flecked seams. Over the 2014-2019 arc, digital dissemination accelerates: blog posts hyperlink gestures, allowing drifts into virtual repositories where images remix, postures replicate in user adaptations. Extended to contemporary hybrids, it could fractal into augmented overlays or communal reenactments, carrying forward as a mutable archive that reshapes with each relocation, from physical imprints to algorithmic echoes.
