Finding Harmony in the Sympoietic

After climbing four flights of stairs in the pre-war school building that is now inhabited by The Clemente – an interdisciplinary community arts center dedicated to the preservation and celebration of Puerto Rican and Latinx art and culture – a dim, pulsing glow of amber light slips through an open door way. Following the light into what used to be a high school classroom, the viewer is greeted by a community of amorphous sculptures that inhabit both floor and ceiling as they radiate a pulsing glow of light from their semi-transparent shells. This is Sabrina Merayo Nuñez’ “Sympoietic”, a solo exhibition on display from September 29th through November 15th, 2023 which explores art as the point of intervention between humans, nature, and technology. The repurposed classroom holds within its walls roughly ten glowing sculptures some of which hang from the ceiling emulating that of an Edison bulb while others, short and compact, create a body sturdy enough to double as a chair or a stool. 

The sculptures are both rigid and soft. Their bodies are molded into round, bulbous lumps but along their curves, one might find a sharp stick or a dense piece of bark jutting out of each shell. Informed by medieval recipes, Nuñez creates a melted mixture of biodegradable plastic, collagen, and living agar to create her sculptures. In order to give the mold a structural form, Nuñez uses organic materials such as bark, sticks, and leaves to act as the skeleton, joining the soft and malleable with the structural and rigid. And where there is skin and skeleton, Nuñez has given her creations a tangled venous system. Embedded within the shell moldings is an intricate system of wires and motion sensors which activate small lights buried within the sculpture's shell that pulse and flicker as viewers move around the nebulous bodies. The room has been darkened to highlight the quivering lights hidden within the interiors of the formations, and as the viewer enters the space and weaves between each creation, the embedded lights react to the presence of the viewer, creating a direct relationship between the art and the audience. 

Nuñez’ work interrogates both the symbiotic and parasitic interrelations between nature, technology, and humans. Through the creation of objects using elements that combine both the natural and the unnatural, Nuñez directly interrogates the ramifications of human intervention into that which is wild and untamed. Her work is the fusion of the inorganic and the man made as she forcibly intertwines manufactured materials like wires, sensors, and lights with that which is organic such as leaves and bark. This fusion of the manufactured with the natural invites an investigation into how the natural and unnatural inform and manipulate one another through their forced unity. Through human intervention, nature undergoes an unnatural, inorganic form of transformation, one that is mitigated and instigated by the purveyor. When thinking of human dominion over the natural world, one thinks of ecological crisis – of destruction and demolition. Yet, Nuñez, unlike many eco-artists, does not so easily nor so clearly jump to the negative when exploring the relation between man and nature. As the title suggests, Nuñez offers an exploration not into a malicious relation between man and nature, but rather she asserts that the relation between man and nature is often a nurturing, symbiotic relationship rooted in a system of reciprocity. 

This exploration into the poetics of the symbiotic, and the relations between humans and nature– and thus nature and technology– first begins with a look into the relation between art and artist. While Nuñez’ work certainly interrogates pertinent universal issues, her work is ultimately concerned first with the relationship between art and artist. As she creates form by fusing inorganic materials of circuits and wires into living microbiome, Nuñez infuses life into the inanimate and provides a host for the living. Nuñez intervenes creating a reciprocity between not just the materials both living and non-living in her sculptures, but creates a kind of reciprocity between herself and her creation. As Nuñez bestows life onto her creations, her creations allow her to sustain her title as artist. The creations of the Sympoietic are sculpted and formed by that of the artist, but the living organisms inhabiting the manufactured space acquire a certain autonomy as the embedded microbiome grows and morphs over time evolving from the artist's initial formation. This is the first layer of Nuñez work, exploring the reciprocity between her and her art, but she then extends this interaction to her viewers. After installation, the symbiotic relationship transfers from Nuñez to her audience as it is their interaction that activates the vessels. While Nuñez’ bio-art is civically minded and raises questions about human intervention in the organic, the heart of her work is in praise of the reciprocal dependency between man, nature, and art.