Exhibition by Oriol Arnedo Casas and Laura Torres Bauzà at Dilalica. Curated by Sergi Álvarez Riosalido. From March 25 to May 24, 2025.

Dismantling the machine to break down its gears, to reveal how it works. Disassembling the apparatus to uncover its internal contradictions and to open up that which is conceived as a closed system. To dismantle a machine is also to challenge rigid categories, allowing for the imagining of hybrid assemblages.

With the exhibition Dismantling the Machine, Oriol Arnedo Casas and Laura Torres Bauzà seek to understand the machine not merely as a mechanical device, but as a network of relationships, constructions, structures of power, and possibilities for transformation. Understood as a construction that shapes the world, the artists’ practices operate within the exhibition as lines of flight—spaces of experimentation where assemblages are reorganized and, while revealing their internal workings, simultaneously open the imagination to new possibilities.

For some time, thinkers such as Donna Haraway have emphasized how fields of knowledge such as science and technology have been shaped by political, social, and gender metaphors—contrary to claims of objectivity. In texts like Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (1989) and A Cyborg Manifesto (1985), Haraway underscores how scientific discourse and technology are not neutral and proposes alternative paths for knowledge production. In her essay “Situated Knowledges” from the book Simians, Cyborgs and Women (1991), Haraway elaborates on the presumed objectivity of science and how vision can be used to avoid binary oppositions: “things seem already fixed and distanced. But the visual metaphor allows one to go beyond fixed appearances, which are only the end products. The metaphor invites us to investigate the varied apparatuses of visual production, including the prosthetic technologies interfaced with our biological eyes and brains.” (1)

The work of Oriol Arnedo Casas and Laura Torres Bauzà in this exhibition responds to the active vision practice that Haraway proposes—Oriol through an ecosystem of sculptures or artifacts originating from musical instruments, which acquire new functions and behaviors; Laura through two audiovisual essays that delve into two scientific experiments, Biosphere 2 and Universe 25, each exploring different forms of confinement.

For this exhibition, both Oriol and Laura draw from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of the machine, which they detach from its purely instrumental function within the capitalist framework. Deleuze and Guattari instead propose a vision of the machine as a dynamic system of relations between the human and the non-human, incorporating technologies, knowledge systems, and practices. As they write at the beginning of Anti-Oedipus (1972): “Everywhere it is machines—real ones, not figurative ones: machines driving other machines, machines being driven by other machines, with all the necessary couplings and connections. An organ-machine is plugged into an energy-source-machine: the one produces a flow that the other interrupts. The breast is a machine that produces milk, and the mouth is a machine coupled to it. (…) Hence we are all handymen: each with his little machines. For every organ-machine, an energy-machine: all the time, flows and interruptions.” (2)

In his strategy of dismantling machines, Oriol works with broken or obsolete musical instruments, reassembling them to introduce new dynamics, following the logic of autonomous instruments. These pieces emerge from a series of experimental exercises to create assemblages with new functions and behaviors. In Oriol’s accordions, keyboards, and melodicas, machines appear in their most active and dynamic form after being altered and reprogrammed, blurring the rigid boundary between the living and the non-living. Through manual intervention and circuit manipulation, these objects uncover new sonic and performative possibilities. By reconfiguring their original structure, the pieces no longer respond to their predetermined functions and instead generate a new sonic grammar.

Laura’s installation, through the two videos, approaches the machine from the perspective of the closed system, exploring the boundaries of autonomy and interdependence. Through Biosphere 2 and Universe 25, Laura examines how controlled confinement produces both new forms of organization and symptoms of collapse. Both experiments aimed to replicate perfect ecosystems but ended up revealing the tensions between the programmed and the unpredictable, between the utopia of self-sufficiency and the necessity of the outside. In this sense, her videos act as a mirror of the contradictions inherent in any machine: its ability to structure the world and, at the same time, its tendency to destabilize itself.

Dismantling the machine to break down its gears. In its apparent solidity, every structure contains tensions, fractures, and lines of flight. To dismantle the machine is not only to reveal how it functions but also to unleash its latent potentials, allowing for the imagining of alternative assemblages.

(1) Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women. The Reinvention of Nature, New York, Routledge, 1991, p. 195.

(2) Gilles Deleuze y Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1983, p. 11.