La invención del accidente [The invention of the accident]

I knew beforehand that I was designing the elements of my own collision.

J.G.Ballard Crash

The various moments and the forms in which Juan Caicedo (Pasto, 1981) approaches the idea of collision in the pieces included in this exhibition
reveal peculiar geographies of twisted tin plates, reconstructions of vehicles made from the parts of other damaged vehicles and sculptural discrepancies between the new car and the dented one. In The Invention of the Accident, Caicedo does not bring us pure ruin or the confirmation of a chance event: rather, his work modernizes the forms of disaster and ways of conceptualizing the disaster that is always coming, that already came and that is to come, impregnated with light.

In a way, Caicedo flirts with the famous philosophy of the hammer in which Nietzsche strived to definitively overcome history and legacy to make way
for something new. However, what Caicedo seeks is not the destruction of legacy per se, nor is it the advent of something better and indestructible; rather, it is the possibility of accessing states of material and thought that only emerge in cohabitation with ruin and in the proof that there is no overcoming, no cure and no contradiction between the functional object and the dismantled object, given that both are simply moments in a material process of understanding the world. For Caicedo the hammer is at once capable of creating a marble statue and of furiously destroying the part of the world

that is guarded by the museum and that can exist without fear or shame in a perpetual limbo lacking all judgment, under the perplexed gaze of spectators who are always too late or too early to contemplate the destruction of the world and the creation of art.

Disaster, catastrophe and collision are forms of relationships that “emerge when an organism slams into the world in productive agreement with it,” according to Kurt Goldstein, who concludes that “the collision, if we are to call it such, is only the source of the jolt from which the new pattern emerges, the true performance, the revelation of the organism and the world.” This

is a world against which Caicedo is forever inviting us to crash because the impact sculpts us and gives shape to what we will be. Better yet, it scolds us for not yet having crashed, for being intact, for not having been deformed or reformed by those impacts that we have not been subject to even though they proliferate in place after place—where something is invented, where bodies come together, where others move rapidly forward without thinking because thinking about the impact is only possible during the experience

of being hit by something and not while contemplating the crack, wound or wreckage. We have invented the accident to reinvent ourselves, but we continue to be unharmed in a world that is nothing more than a collision.

Víctor Albarracín Llanos / Curator