Sensing

For their sixth solo exhibition at Galerie Chantal Crousel, Puerto Rican artists Allora & Calzadilla explore the porous boundary between the organic embodied perception of living beings and the generally externalized, digital, and thus seemingly 'objective' technological measurement systems. Through paintings based on seismic data and sensitive glass sculptures equipped with sensors, Allora & Calzadilla explore what it means to 'feel' in environments increasingly dominated by detection technologies serving extractivist logic. Their practice also draws attention to the subtle and often indescribable textures of somatic experience—decentralized flows of emotion, intuition, and memory—that resist measurement. By foregrounding what technical recording cannot capture, Sensing immerses the viewer in the eco-poetic entanglements of material reality while blurring the boundaries of quantified perception and illuminating the mysterious connections between matter and signal. The gallery space hosts a new set of works titled Pulse (2025), inviting contemplation of the interdependence of human gesture and planetary rhythm. Each work in the series begins with a 24-hour printout of what is called the 'pulse of the Earth,' a faint recurring tremor detected every 26 seconds by seismic stations worldwide. These recorded images, laid out on precise grids, are then transformed by drawings that the artists create by hand. Fine hand-drawn lines cross the disparate seismic traces, introducing new temporal markers and aesthetic connections that challenge the logic of pure measurement. Both scientific documentation and gestural drawing, the resulting compositions are hybrid forms that merge the slow, inaudible pulse of the Earth with the human reflex to react, resonate, and reinvent through bodily expression. With Pulse, Allora & Calzadilla question not only what can be recorded but also what can be felt—and how this harmonization connects us to deeper, transhistorical planetary vibrations. In the same space, the new sculpture series Lightbound (2025) deepens the duo's research into the interaction between technical and sensory detection, unveiling invisible forces that produce unusual sculptural forms. Inspired by the adaptive faculties of climbing plants in tropical forests, such as those in the Caribbean, each sculpture echoes the vines rising toward the sun. These entwined plants navigate their environment through the light and spatial signals they capture as they interact with other plants and agents of the tropical forest. The sinuous and elongated volumes of the Lightbound sculptures are not mere representations of nature but the result of a process reflecting its sensual logic. To work with molten glass, the artists collaborate with master glassblowers in an intimate choreography of heat, weight, and breath. The human body, specifically the glassblower's exhalation, becomes a transformative tool that shapes energy. The sculptures, traversed by fiber optic filaments, are directly connected to the Parisian electric network: they glow with a pulsating light whose intensity varies in real-time according to fluctuations in urban energy load. By bringing usually background infrastructures to the forefront, Lightbound stages a convergence between bodily adaptation, technological mediation, and ecosystem resilience, particularly those under colonial domination as in Puerto Rico. This series highlights the questioning that animates Allora & Calzadilla since their early works on the ecopoetics of light, where energy is not just conceived as an information vector but as a planetary force shaped by capital flows, history, and ecological fragility.