COLLAPSE OF THE WEAVE FUNCTION
Collapse of the Weave Function is the latest in a series of exhibitions organised by Medialab in recent years to expand its ongoing research into emergent sociotechnical landscapes and innovative approaches to technological complexity. The exhibition brings together Metahaven’s twochannel film Hometown (2018) and a series of textile works by the artists that have been commissioned especially for this occasion by Medialab Matadero.
Hometown 2018 31’, two-channel video, color, sound. Filmed in Kyiv and Beirut in 2017, Hometown builds an imagined city through the two places, which never meet but become a unified landscape across the film’s two screens. Ghina and Lera, the protagonists, are the double of a single character. While they remain apart, taking turns in speaking, the film cracks open a visual and linguistic space that is more poetic than narrative. Images are resonances—indirect, suggestive, and polysemous. What should be ordinary becomes uncanny. Meanwhile, the digital network—abstract and intangible—is rendered in stubbornly physical terms: wires, heat, and “ancient soil.” Lera’s attempt to zoom and scroll through printed photographs of her and Ghina’s family shows the futility of retrieving clarity from the past. Rhythm, editing, and framing seem to emerge from the characters’ hand gestures, evoking touchscreen manipulation. Yet the screen
they mimic doesn’t exist. Their movements appear to shape the cityscapes—as if trying to alter material reality through digital instinct. But these gestures fail to virtualize the physical. The world remains material. At times, the camera glides gently through Ghina’s Beirut neighborhood; at others, it jolts frantically, a surveillance feed tracking Lera as a ghost target in Kyiv’s Independence Square. The viewer is drawn into a fragmented landscape of tangled cables, rooftops, metal fences, and overgrown gardens. The two interwoven cities are cut through by a thin dividing line between the two channels. Ghina and Lera’s voices speak in contradictory, oxymoronic children's rhymes, musing about a murdered caterpillar, melting ice cream, and a melting glacier. In the years since its making, Hometown has acquired even more urgency, especially since Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine and Israel’s renewed bellicose incursions into Lebanon. The film remains a solemn prayer about a hometown: a shared materiality of life, a stubborn presence of place, a capacity to imagine.
Collapse of the Weave Function 2025 jacquard weaving, ±10 x 3500 cm, cotton, wool, lurex The work is a woven meditation on Schrödinger’s Cat, a famous thought experiment in quantum mechanics involving a cat in a box. In the original version of the thought experiment, the cat is alive and dead at the same time (it is, so to speak, in superposition) until it is observed. In this version, it is awake and asleep at the same time, though we never know in advance what state we will find it, and in which, thus, the “weave function” will collapse. The work meditates on the fact that the visual cultures of 20th-century leftism, such as Atelier Populaire’s famous 1968 poster of a factory chimney, were based in classical mechanics. Collapse of the Weave Function asks what progressive visual languages might look like with new physics in mind. The textile work is an ultra-long, thin woven film strip spun rods across the entire exhibition space with horizontal rods between the columns.
turn, were based on Versions and Waves (2020), which was themed around living in different “versions” of reality. In Vortices, the versions have finally collided into an inescapable urgency.
Centerless 2025 plastic bags, embroidery, pins, 500 x 300 cm
COLLAPSE OF THE WEAVE FUNCTION Metahaven
This new, large textile work presents an assemblage of yellow plastic bags found on flea markets and food markets embroidered with decentered patterns of shards and interfacial elements.
Vortices 2025 2 jacquard weavings, tapestries, 150 x 235 cm each, wool, cotton, polyester This diptych of two large tapestries speaks to the experience of living in the present time, visualizing a sensation of struggle with a graphic language of patterns and elongated, cell-like figures. It draws on an earlier series of small weavings, Holding the Storm (2023), first exhibited at Asakusa, Tokyo. These works, in METAHAVEN Metahaven es un colectivo artístico afincado en Amsterdam con una larga trayectoria en la creación audiovisual, el diseño y el ensayo. Entre sus obras cinematográficas se incluyen The Feeling Sonnets (Transitional Object) (2024), Chaos Theory (2021), Hometown (2018), Information Skies (2016, nominada a los Premios del Cine Europeo) y The Sprawl (Propaganda About Propaganda) (2015). Metahaven ha presentado exposiciones individuales en el MoMA PS1 de Nueva York, el Museo Guggenheim de Bilbao, el ICA de Londres, el Stedelijk Museum de Ámsterdam, el Yerba Buena Center for the Arts de San Francisco, Asakusa de Tokio, Izolyatsia de Kiev, e-flux de Nueva York y State of Concept de Atenas, entre otros. Sus películas se han proyectado en el IFFR, Docs Against Gravity, CPH.DOX y en el Museum of Modern Art de Nueva York, entre otros. También en exposiciones colectivas en Artists Space de Nueva York, la Bienal de Gwangju, la Bienal de Sharjah, la Bienal de Busan, Ghost:2561 de Bangkok, y muchas otras. Actualmente son asesores artísticos en la Rijksakademie, investigadores afiliados en Antikythera (Fundación Berggruen) y jefes de departamento en el máster de Geo-Design de la Academia de Diseño de Eindhoven.
EXPOSICIÓN NAVE UNA CENTRO DE CREACIÓN CONTEMPORÁNEA
mataderomadrid.org
6-30NOV MEDIALAB