Nanospasm Lab
NOD, Prague
July 24 – September 1,  2019
Curated by Pavel Kubesa
Text by Domenico de Chirico

Reviewed in:
Artviewer.org
Daily-lazy.com
Artmirror.org
Ofluxo.net
aqnb
Artalk.cz

Nanospasm Lab unfolds as an experimental laboratory. The title refers to the term “nanospasm,” introduced by Nick Land in his accelerationist text Meltdown. For Land, nanospasm describes a systemic convulsion, a moment when technological acceleration begins to destabilize the structures of human civilization. In this exhibition the concept operates metaphorically: a subtle tremor in reality where natural processes, human intervention, and technological imagination begin to unsettle one another. The exhibition works with fragments of landscape. Objects retrieved from lakes and swamps after decades of sedimentation, tree branches, soil, lentils, and beans enter processes of transformation. They are cut, stained with vivid pigments, combined with laser-cut forms, or sealed inside plastic membranes. These gestures do not produce technological objects in a strict sense. Instead they create transitional forms - materials suspended between the organic world and human manipulation.

Tree branches cut into sections and marked with red pigment resemble severed human limbs. The gesture evokes violence but also exposes a persistent blind spot of modern culture: plants are commonly perceived as inert material rather than living organisms. Yet they belong to the same biological field as the human body. The exhibition therefore raises questions long explored in anthropology, particularly in the work of Philippe Descola. Where does nature end and culture begin? Is this division real, or merely a historical construct of Western thought? If humans exist within nature rather than outside it, what then are the products of human activity: plastics, chemicals, toxins?

Could the saturation of the planet with synthetic materials become another process within the biosphere itself? Or are we witnessing a point of overload: when the volume of toxic substances released into the environment and into our own bodies exceeds the system’s capacity to absorb them? Is the system still stable, or has it already entered a phase of convulsion? Nanospasm Lab does not offer answers. It operates as an experiment that stages unsettling questions. Materials extracted from the landscape are displaced from their cycles and recomposed into new configurations. Nature no longer appears as a stable category but as a field of processes in which humans function simultaneously as biological organisms and technological agents. Perhaps we are no longer standing at the boundary between nature and technology. Perhaps we are already inside a single, accelerating biosphere.