May signs come out of my mouth
of how much my heart burns,
Because nobody, nobody will believe a fire
if its smoke does not send signals
if its smoke does not send signals
Excerpt from Incendio by Sister Juana Ines de la Cruz (1648-1695)
Woven burning forests mark the symbolic, and timely, death of the traditional landscape and the structures it stood for. In the present-day landscape, the hegemony of nation-states gave place to the interplay between corporate and state powers, and the borders pose no obstacle for the flow of data. Even though most of contemporary financial and informational operations remain invisible, they might have visible effects on our landscape. This loaded invisibility resonates in the title of the series, ‘Nobody will believe the fire if its smoke does not send signals’, which is a quote from the poem Incendio by sister Juana Ines de la Cruz, a Mexican poet of the Q’aquchas.
The low-resolution images were pulled from the internet and transformed into textiles using Jacquard looms. In transforming each pixel into a unit of textile, Macotela demonstrates the affinity between the construction of digital images and tapestries. Macotela’s tapestries also serve as a peculiar data storage. The artist imbued them with data from the so-called Lagarde list, unlawfully disclosing the names of two thousand tax evaders. The artist himself made use of the technique of ‘steganography’, commonly used by hackers and activists to hide secret information, to encode data in plain sight.
The low-resolution images were pulled from the internet and transformed into textiles using Jacquard looms. In transforming each pixel into a unit of textile, Macotela demonstrates the affinity between the construction of digital images and tapestries. Macotela’s tapestries also serve as a peculiar data storage. The artist imbued them with data from the so-called Lagarde list, unlawfully disclosing the names of two thousand tax evaders. The artist himself made use of the technique of ‘steganography’, commonly used by hackers and activists to hide secret information, to encode data in plain sight.