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Hiram Constantino: Toda erupción es un nosotrxs
Volcanoes don’t explode. They release.
-Katia y Maurice Krafft
A volcano is accumulated energy—pressure, tension, contained force. When an eruption occurs, the volcano does not break or disappear: it shifts, expands, changes form, but remains a volcano. Lava, ash, and descending flows are not remnants, but parts of a single body reorganizing itself. From this process, Hiram Constantino Flores (Guadalajara, 1987) proposes imagining other practices of collective, material, and shared existence.
The exhibition approaches eruption not as an isolated event, but as the result of dynamics of accumulation, friction, and release that build over time. The outburst does not appear suddenly: it renders legible forms of violence that, although not always visible, traverse bodies and territories. When pressure reaches its limit, the release redistributes energy—not as a singular force, but as a collectivity of forces that irrupts into the existing order. The eruption becomes a shared transformation.
At the center of the gallery, the installation Anatomy Lesson brings together assembled bodies made from fragments of wood covered in graphite. These sculptures reveal a process of igneous transformation: the tree, traversed by fire, becomes charcoal; and charcoal, over time, becomes graphite. In dialogue with the ensemble Descending Flow, whose polyurethane forms evoke currents of lava frozen mid-spill, the works insist that no form endures without undergoing change.
In Exercises for Coexisting with Forces That Cannot Be Dominated, painting operates through repetition and insistence, constructing a series of suspended instants of volcanic activity—explosions, cones in ecstasy, outpourings of heat—that do not aspire to control, but to coexist with that which exceeds human will. The linen pieces gathered under the title History revisit representations of explosive energy drawn from manga and comic panels; the lines of India ink vibrate, expand, and fracture, resembling the trace of a seismograph. Meanwhile, in the monochromatic paintings Comics Will Break Your Heart, speech bubbles and graphic bursts break into the surface like surges of energy calling for action.
Taken together, the works do not seek to represent eruption, but to think with it—as the moment when forces in tension change form. Neither excess nor catastrophe: a redistribution of energy that reconfigures the collective body.