The Winding Path | On the Work of ASMA

Before there were gods, there was only Tiamat, the bitter water, and her companion Apsu, the sweet water, who is also Abzu, the abyss.
— Cybernetic Culture Research Unit

Hanya Belia and Matías Armendaris work under the common name of ASMA, an alias that suggests a double-helix practice for the mutation, simultaneity, and reciprocity of discrete substances.

In their work, however, a multitude of gazes is absent. What we find instead is the synthesis of a new position, a third, ghost-like hand produced by the intuition and counter-intuition of two minds: the transformation of the double in its unity.

There is a large enough tradition to draw from when discussing the work of artists who have collectively adopted the ecology and ethics of the duo, the double-system whose complexity tends towards the production of what Peter Fischli has denominated a mental glue. It is under this sign that I wish to begin a journey. A sort of passage through a simultaneously organic and inorganic road in constant undulation.

The hermetic logic of ASMA establishes a fluid yet fragmentary repertoire for the transformation of matter: the scrutiny that enables one to look at a painting is employed to find a sculpture; the electronic arc that allows for the precision of an instrument going through wood is also the camouflage on which a bronze seal is posited. The work occurs through the juxtaposition and assemblage of distinct times: wood-carving and vector curves resonate with transparencies of all sorts.

Curtains, smoked glass, and crystal-clear resin casts: as flat planes, they suggest awareness of the parameters of an Adobe brush tool, but as containers they propose an exacerbated life of material variation: in its interior vessels we can find—without mixing—rain water, seaweed oil, liquors, powerade, water collected from rivers, liquid cleaner, tea, ocular antiseptic, mercury, and sea water.

There seems to be an insinuation of molecular forms of composition in these gestures, or of a notion of the capillary. To consider the presence of a material in its parts per million, to insert matter in the narrowest grids, or to create circuits for the conductibility of sensations and the safekeeping of information. These modes of composition integrate with a second one, in which we are no longer just discussing this system of material proportion, but also the awareness of the visual and tactile demands generated by the often craft-like disciplines that feed ASMA’s process. At this stage, a specific range is established for several operations, including tracing, drawing, the permeability of color and texture, as well as the observation of limits: every piece’s surfaces, margins, and structures of support contain valuable information. We will frequently be rewarded for carefully inspecting their every side.

It is also at this point that figures appear. Vegetation and ironworks. An entanglement of flowers and clusters that stretches towards the origin of new signs. Interior spaces, ponds, eyes, extremities, and foliage that trust each other just as the distinct parts of a story would. The work is then opened to a particular narrative field in which its mythology can be written, one drop at a time. Among its passages, we will find characters and voices, but also typography; the live/inert axis that a certain literature pursues as it comes in contact with matter: I don’t think, just like the diamond doesn’t think (Clarice Lispector).

The work of ASMA organizes a time for the ambiguity of a double agency and the consensus of a shared artistic practice. The result is a new life for the work and its labor, a specific site for the transformation of affects into a matter at the same time bonding and anonymous, whose complicity with the unknown is as much a source of stillness as it is of pleasure.