The Erratic Marbles is a series of 36 collages that juxtapose marbled endpapers with found photographs of erratic boulders. Using her incisive research interests, Elena Damiani (b. 1979, Lima/Copenhagen) came across these papers in atlases, manuscripts, and traveling journals from the late 1700s and 1800s in various libraries and collections from around the world; the images of rocks are from geological surveys repositories in the UK and the US. The works at first sight might appear decorative, yet they point to bodies, topographic displacement, and titanic processes belonging to a geological past which also contains the future of the planet.
The images of the boulders in the endpapers were selected for their strange positions, which could have arrived there by different glacial actions. The primitive physicality of the rocks resists aesthetic categories, standing outside human structure and give lie to technological progress, artistic endeavour, and other forms categorization. Part of the series was stirred by Damiani’s investigation into Thomas Whately’s book Observations on Modern Gardening (1770). The book, which is set in the eighteenth century, details the idealization and transformation of nature, which would later shift the future form of public parks and gardens.
The Erratic Marbles give evidence to her widespread interest in the complexity of landscape and the use of natural materials to address historical legacies and political undercurrents. Another important series within her practice is Rude Rocks (2015). Composed of travertine, breccia marble, copper, and steel, it takes as a starting point the short story “The Book of Sand” by Jorge Luis Borges, where he attempts to describe a notion of the impossibility of the infinite through objects in space. Accordingly, Damiani uses geological materials for their metaphorical potential to represent the formless and unknown within a planetary depth of history, attempting to push and further deconstruct their contemporary uses and implications while articulating a sense of a real physical world. Rude Rocks and The Erratic Marbles materialize as recalcitrant rocks that resist human agency, remaining rude in order to negate transformation into legible objects. JV + AM
self-presentation:
Damiani studied Architecture and Fine Arts in Lima before leaving Peru in 2008 to do an MFA at Goldsmiths in London, where she lived until 2014. Throughout her studies, the architect Miguel Cruchaga, art critic Luis Lama, and writer Suhail Malik had a great impact on her research and practice. She has participated in the IV Poly/Graphic San Juan Triennial, Future Light Vienna Biennale, 56th Venice Biennale, and the 9th Mercosul Biennial. Her work has been exhibited at Museo Amparo, MUAC Museo Universitario Arte Contemporaneo, Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Museo Tamayo, and MAC Museo de Arte Contemporaneo in Lima. Damiani works between Lima and Copenhagen, where she is based; currently, she is working on a permanent site-specific installation at the Americas Society in New York, and a project for the CIFO Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation Grants & Commissions Program.
