Nicolas Janssen

Espacio Unión invites you to the exhibition The Mechanics of a Motorized Worm by Nicolas Janssen curated by Wendy Cabrera Rubio and Tan Uranga.

Onlooker, adj. Someone who looks, especially one who looks too much or with curiosity.

Descending into the subway means entering a microcosm. The machinery that drives it is lost within the chaos and mundanity of everyday life. The constant rush clouds vision, and thought is reduced to a single shared objective: to move. Time seems to pause—once inside and with the train doors closed, the car is set in motion, and what unfolds within feels like watching a fresco or a staged performance. How much is fiction and how much is truth? The couple’s whispers are only half-heard, the tattoo on someone’s arm contradicts the religious icons on their bracelet. The person scratching themselves might—or might not—be the one who works beside where I live. Who are the parents of the child staring out the window? Are they here? Turned into a voyeur, you dissect everything, you assume and create a narrative that becomes part of your individual reality. When your station arrives, the doors open; as you step out, the curtain closes behind you—cut. The clock resumes its turn, the fantasy ends.

A collective identity constructed from friction and fiction, from blindness to the whole and the search for meaning in the irony of the absurd. An identity built only from fragments of others.

Nicolas Janssen observes, records, and reconstructs minimal scenes of urban life to transform them into aesthetic material. His project operates as a situated ethnography, where attending to small gestures, compressed bodies, and shared silences reveals the forces that organize public space. He describes the subway car as a place where memories, inequalities, and survival strategies intersect. His work gathers these everyday fragments to make visible what routine renders invisible.

— Espacio Unión