Santiago Díaz Escamilla

Sedimento
Sediment

2015

Hand-sifted and trodden soil, jute

I want to think of a stone from the inside.
Is it possible to attribute an interior to it?
Can it be a kind of receptacle?

I want to observe it from the sediment,
its first particle.
Consider it a witness, an incarnation of undated times that reveals itself through the landforms.

This stone is also a mountain.
It mutates.
It is a potential elevation.
It is the sustenance of future heights because it harbors life in its entrails.

This stone contains a piece of the world.
This stone is a piece of the world.

I conceive this work as the confluence of two times. The first one, dilated, translates into a piece that takes four months to make. During that period, my only function is agglomerating layers of jute with mud to form thin structures that I pile up almost every day. As I work, I think about the formation of sedimentary rocks and try to approximate such processes of mineral consolidation through physical effort and time spent transforming matter. My labor accumulates every day, just as sediments are deposited, agglomerated, and then compacted.

After assembling the stack, I process the soil into the finest possible powder. To do this, first, I grind it with a stone over a sieve, then sift it again, and later crush it with a hand rammer. Once I have collected a large amount of material, I store it in buckets and take it to the exhibition space. There, intending to examine another kind of time —an immediate one— I mix the soil with water and build a site-specific structure for five days. This large layer of mud originates from the wall and spreads across the floor. Its coloration and surface evolve as the material slowly dries, cracks, and occasionally falls off the wall in small pieces. Some parts lose moisture faster than others, which generates light spots next to darker ones that gradually become more homogeneous in color. The work crumbles on its own, and the exhibition's duration determines its lifespan.