In 1914, Antonio Sant’Elia presented his Manifesto of Futurist Architecture, a utopian vision materialised through the visionary images of the ‘New City’. The scale was no longer that of the isolated building, but of the urban structure as a whole. Sant’Elia advocated for new architectural typologies—train stations, airports, power plants, tiered housing—that responded to a rapidly transforming world. It was a new vertical and mechanical reality, connected by networks of iron and glass elevators.

Let us take the elevator. Let us descend.

From the depths of the underground, in the hidden machine room—at the heart of some grand building, gleaming vessel or spacecraft -an invisible labyrinth unfolds, unseen by those not part of the mechanism that ensures the system’s function from below. At ground level, pipes crawl, intertwine, and bifurcate, only to converge again, forming a hermetic circuit. Something flows through this system within the system—something more than air, water, or electricity: the pulses of a distilled imagination, born from daily experience, from the necessity of labor for sustenance, and from the will to live despite work.

We glide along the exterior of these cold metallic tunnels like distracted travelers, guided solely by the logic of flow: a constant, circular pulse, interrupted only by the insistence of rhythm, volume, and pressure as perceptual structures.

This flow evokes physiological processes—heartbeats, breaths, contractions—but also references electrical and technological circuits. The human and the machine are not in opposition; rather, they contaminate one another in a kind of post-digital alchemy, where the corporeal becomes a site of aesthetic experimentation.

We lift our gaze and suddenly we are dazzled by a light: a yellow sun, intensely bright, overwhelming and insistent, invading our perception and clashing with subterranean visions. We are below, underneath—and yet, we project ourselves forward, upward, and eastward. We remain below, but we are no longer entirely part of this place.

This, then, is how I imagine the process of an artist capturing her experiences—working in a setting unrelated to art, in the depths of a London basement, living between two languages, between

two realities—cultivating a particular universe which, unlike the Futurist visions, returns us to our horizontal dimension.

Full-time Labyrinth marked the beginning of a visual research exploring the tension between the body’s organicity and the impersonal logic of futuristic systems—systems that are no longer speculative but fully present, having already overcome earlier expectations. These dreamt-of mechanisms now surround us, represent us, and replace us.

In her new installation, Closed Circuit, Silvia Lerín stages the fundamental friction between the human as living matter and the human as architect of the artificial.

“What happens when we inhabit infrastructures and systems made by and for us, but which no longer recognise us as bodies, but instead as flows, data, or cogs?” the artist asks. “Where is touch, error, breath?”

In response, a visual and conceptual device emerges, where two essential coordinates converge: a contradiction that merges supposedly exclusive elements, and the prosthesis as paradigm of the contemporary body—not solely as an organic unit but as a mutable assemblage of interfaces, extensions, and absences.

The prosthesis becomes a key figure here—not merely a technical object that replaces or enhances bodily function, but a symbolic extension of desire, trauma, and memory. Each image functions as a sensory supplement, compensating for the impossibility of directly perceiving the interior of vital processes—that vital process which drives the work but remains partially hidden. In this fragmented narrative, the body is conceived as an assemblage of systems—biological, technological, emotional—in a state of permanent tension.

The question of bodies no longer recognised by the systems they created forms the conceptual core of the work: the creator becomes alien—or irrelevant—to her own creation. The body inhabiting this installation is not the represented body, but the overflowed, deprogrammed body—one made uncomfortable in the presence of a machine that no longer needs to acknowledge us.

Far from being a purely technical reference, the prosthesis is proposed here as a poetic and critical figure. This idea permeates the work—not as consolation, but as confirmation of a shared condition of lack. The images, too, function as prostheses: they supplement, substitute, or amplify an experience that is never whole, always mediated.

Lerín’s simulated and concealed engineering approaches the figure of the cyborg, in a vein resonant with Donna Haraway’s posthuman metaphor.

In her Engineering series, and particularly in Project for Two Pseudo Pipes, the aim is not to overcome binary oppositions but to displace them—imagining new narratives that open space for other forms of identity, gender, and power structures. The cyborg, like the “new kinships” Haraway invokes, embodies the possibility of partial connections, unthinkable alliances between all beings—human, animal, machine—who, rendered waste by capitalism, might germinate from shared precarity new alternatives, new futures, where the natural returns as a latent, ever-present force.

In this sense, Lerín’s bodies—their fragments (drops, tears, skins)—belong to posthuman discourse. They constitute an analytical category that questions the premises of modern humanism—anthropocentric, androcentric, colonial, and racist.

Lerín retains a certain degree of her signature abstraction but places greater emphasis on underlying meaning. The coexistence of opposing or exclusive elements—often expressed through material and form, through folds and unfoldings—becomes more pronounced in this exhibition. In reference to the closed circuit, energy flows between two or more interconnected components in a loop, yet the distinction between consumer and producer dissolves.

Within this looping motion, in a time when the maximalist declarations of Futurism—its glorification of war and radical embrace of progress—reemerge, Lerín’s work offers a counterpoint: a reclamation of “professors, archaeologists, guides, and antiquarians.” To the artificial intelligence that lacks touch and reduces decisions to binary logic (inter-legere), she opposes sensibility, sensitivity, fragility, and the pursuit of thinking and making beyond irreconcilable antagonisms.

Lerín has long practiced material transmutation, but her quasi-alchemical process now becomes a vehicle of critical transformation: living matter becomes data, and data becomes simulacrum—forming a closed circuit: visual, sonic, conceptual, and above all temporal—where organic and artificial, visible and invisible, tactile and intangible, blur into indistinction.

Closed Circuit inhabits that threshold—between the utopia of emancipatory technology and the reality of a technique that renders fragility, slowness, and error invisible.