Andrés Aizicovich: How to Make the Voice a Sculpture by Veronika Mehlhart

To delve into the world of Argentine artist Andrés Aizicovich (b. 1985) is to be surrounded by wonders. It is a world where spoken words turn into ephemeral bubbles, smoking teapots ask passersby for a lighter, and water turns into music at the touch of a finger. Here, teacups hold hands and ceramic pots seemingly listen to your every move through an abundance of ears.


Turning Speech into Matter

Communication and human connection are at the core of all of these wonders—and of Aizicovich’s artistic practice. Not attached to any one medium, he seeks to reinvent dynamics of communicating and open up alternative ways of encounter through sculptures and drawings, performances and installations that explore the complex problems surrounding language and conversation, orality and translation. While speech seems to stand at the fore, his notion of communication is all-encompassing—be it vocally or bodily, in written or spoken form, through touch or sound. In line with this broad understanding of communication, his works open themselves up to a rich network of personal and societal references for those experiencing them.

Aizicovich’s sometimes surrealistic sculptural objects evoke the aesthetic of steampunk and science fiction from the nineteenth century, a time when science was more closely associated with faith than with knowledge. Take, for example, the work Alfabeto en el aire (Alphabet in the air) (2023), which in showcasing Aizicovich’s unique visual language revolves around some of the central questions voiced in his practice: How to transform speech into matter? How to make the word a sculpture?

The installation consists of a functional apparatus made up of a wide array of metallic parts—some of them new, some of them purposefully reused, which is characteristic of Aizicovich’s work. Forming the base of the mysterious Alfabeto en el aire is the pedal of a Singer sewing machine, above which what appears to be a tractor seat invites the curious to sit and engage. At the center of the work is a golden mask, its mouth wrapped around an indefinable tube instrument. The complete operation of the piece calls for sitting in the seat, raising and lowering a container of soapy liquid, turning the attached cymbal like a steering wheel, and then pumping the pedals, at which point a soap bubble emerges from the tube, and thus from the mouth of the mask. (The piece in action can be seen at the UniqueArc website [2]). Thus, Alfabeto en el aire becomes a translation device whereby messages “spoken” by the mask are transformed into something transient and ethereal. Floating through the exhibition space, the bubbles carry secret messages hidden inside their translucent skins.


Andrés AizicovichSculpture: Alfabeto en el Aire, 2023. Stainless steel, iron, copper, sewing machine mechanism, bellows, glazed ceramics. ArtHaus Central, Buenos Aires, Argentina. Photo by the artist.



A Container, a Holder, a Recipient

If the spoken word takes on form, where can it be stored? In light of this question, the multitude of vessels populating Aizicovich’s works harbor another layer of meaning. Could they be forming a library of sorts, making it possible to preserve something as ephemeral as oral stories? In Aizicovich’s work the vessels become both carriers and active agents in a process of communication. Finely crafted ears covering the surface of a ceramic vessel in the 2021 piece Sin titulo (La salvaje azul lejanía) (The wild blue yonder) seem to listen to their surroundings, while the vessel itself captures all sounds. The notion of objects carrying stories within them becomes even more central in La voz al interior (2016), its title translating to “the voice inside.” Connected to a shower head functioning as a microphone, bronze tubes carry the spoken voices through old vases and jugs from the artist’s family then reappear on the other side, leading into a gramophone funnel. The voice mingles with the stories and emotions held inside these deeply personal heirlooms, the vessels offering the means to dialogue with ancestors.

With her book The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, author Ursula K. Le Guin describes the novel as a vessel containing multiple stories—holding things and meanings in a powerful relation to one another and to us and opposing the notion of strict linearity and one-dimensional heroes [3]. While Le Guin is speaking about fiction, one could argue the same holds true for art. Aizicovich’s works are, sometimes noticeably, sometimes less obviously, carrier bags in themselves. The artist explains in an interview: It’s a narrative-based art, but it’s not an art that delivers hidden truths; rather, it aspires or aims towards misunderstanding or contradiction [4]. Never allowing for straightforward readings, the works are carriers of elusive meaning, open to interpretation.


Andrés Aizicovich. Installation: La voz del interior, 2016. Copper, iron, vessels of different materials (cement, porcelain, and clay), wood. PROA - Centro Cultural Recoleta, Buenos Aires, Argentina. Photos: Patricio Pidal, Natalia Labaké.




Carrying the Load

That communication is not always an easy process is inherent to Aizicovich’s practice, which openly embraces moments of misunderstanding and things left unsaid. Based in Buenos Aires, where he studied at the Universidad Nacional de las Artes, Aizicovich has repeatedly spent time abroad at residencies. (I imagine that his stays in the United States or Germany are likely filled with the complications of language and meanings lost in translation.) The artist elaborates on this aspect of his work: My approach is playful, even when I’m dealing with topics that are heavy, like communication, human history, human interaction. The work must navigate its way through all these paradoxes with this sort of humor. I’m more aiming to create an atmosphere or process where people can find themselves, but at the same time they find themselves in the impossibility of communication and the awkwardness and the hardness of getting to understand one another. [5]

In a performative work from 2018, Tu dois porter le poids (You have to carry the load), it is more specifically the difficulties of intergenerational and family communication that come to the fore [6]. Unfurling in several acts, the work appears to tell the story of a family of four protagonists spanning three generations. Most striking is the image of the family shouldering a table and performing a type of tea ceremony in which their heads are the teapots and their hands the teacups. Communication occurs through the touch of hands, through sounds and smoke signs, which are always open for (mis)interpretation. The title alludes to the weight that comes with interpersonal communication. While undeniably humorous, Tu dois porter le poids ultimately confronts us with the absurd and difficult situations in human interaction, opening up a deeper discourse around interpersonal communication and intergenerational conflicts.



All Senses Combined

Aizicovich’s approach is a multisensory one. His works invite us to simultaneously look, hear, and even touch. He returns in several works to the concept of synesthesia, a neurological condition in which, simply put, the stimulation of one sense leads to the automatic and involuntary activation of another sense. This interconnectedness of senses, especially touch and sound, becomes most apparent in the closely related multimedia installations Contact (2019) and Synesthetic Lieder (2023). Here, Aizicovich addresses questions concerning forms of tactile communication. The basis for his considerations is the Cristal Baschet: a glass and metal musical instrument designed in 1952 by the brothers Bernard and François Baschet, pioneers of sound sculpture.
The instrument is made up of iron or steel rods that vibrate with sound when rubbed with wet fingers. In Aizicovich’s interpretation, the idea of the instrument is embedded in a larger installation, with the rods attached to metal helmets intended for performative activation. Resembling nineteenth-century diving helmets, they evoke a mysterious underwater world and subaquatic adventures akin to Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. This is not by chance, as the artist explains: [T]he image of the diver seemed profound to me,... with this paradox of going deep with the need to find something to bring to the surface and share. [7]

But what is it that’s being brought to the surface? When activated by performers wearing the helmets, the rods restricting their field of vision emphasize a simultaneity of closeness and distance. (I am reminded of today’s digital forms of communicating.) Aizicovich draws on both technology and mysticism—the touch of a virtual screen and the placing of finger on glass during a séance: in both cases, the touch of a surface becomes a ritual of contact. While the myriad fingerprints left behind on the metal rods do represent touch, the uncanny sounds they evoke ripple outward, perhaps transcending into the depths of the sea or the vastness of outer space.


Andrés Aizicovich. Installation: Contact, 2019. Stainless steel, iron, Cristal rods, glass, copper, bronze, Variable dimensions. Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Photo: Guido Limardo. Video by Ivo Aichenbaum.



The Teapot Starts to Talk

With works like Alfabeto en el aire and Contact, Aizicovich subtly invites us to think about more-than-human forms of communication. Beyond offering a playful approach to questions of human interaction, his works often allude to a travel of language and sound beyond the immediate human sphere. Where will these signals/messages end up? In a distant future, a faraway galaxy, or a different dimension? Who will be there to listen? The works of Aizicovich remain utterly ambiguous, as though one had encountered a civilization whose objects and rules and ways of living remain mysterious. Artifacts, but of what kind? Technological devices, but what for? His works feel simultaneously strange yet deeply familiar, as though simply looking at them long enough will reveal their true meaning.

In a lecture given on the occasion of being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2018, Polish author Olga Tokarczuk advocated for a tenderness in literature. She began by recounting her mother reading her a Hans Christian Andersen tale in which a broken, discarded teapot explains how it could still have been of use. “As a child,” she recounts: I listened to these fairy tales with flushed cheeks and tears in my eyes, because I believed deeply that objects have their own problems and emotions, as well as a sort of social life, entirely comparable to our human one.... The landscape surrounding us was alive too, and so were the Sun and the Moon, and all the celestial bodies—the entire visible and invisible world. [8]


For her, the teapot comes to symbolize this world of harmony in which everything is connected. She suggests that, through allowing for more tenderness in our lives, we can make this world visible again, bringing the teapot into existence. But it’s not just the teapots and cups populating the works of Andrés Aizicovich that reminded me of this lecture—it’s the tenderness with which the artist brings his creations to life, and the deep connection the viewer can form with each creation. As Aizicovich himself states in the aforementioned interview, his practice is about: approaching these hard sciences from a more sensitive place. [9]

The questions he opens up are universal ones, inviting us into his world to reflect on the meaning in our daily interactions with our surroundings. In the words of Olga Tokarczuk: Tenderness personalizes everything to which it relates, making it possible to give it a voice, to give it the space and the time to come into existence, and to be expressed. It is thanks to tenderness that the teapot starts to talk. [10]




Endnotes
[1]. Olga Tokarczuk: Nobel Lecture: The Tender Narrator, translated by Jennifer Croft and Antonia Lloyd-Jones, NobelPrize.org, Nobel Prize Outreach AB, accessed November 29, 2024, © The Nobel Foundation 2019. Published under the permission of the Nobel Foundation. 
[2]. Andrés Aizicovich: Alfabeto en el aire, UniqueArq, n.d., accessed November 29, 2024.
[3]. Ursula K. Le Guin: The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction (Ignota Books, 2019), 5.
[4]. Interview with Andrés Aizicovich: Salta art by Juani Llambías, video edited by Juani Llambías and Agustina Strüngmann, Buenos Aires, April 2024, Salta art (saltaart.org), 7:29, uploaded June 18, 2024.
[5]. Andrés Aizicovich: Andrés Aizicovich Unpacks Human Connection, film directed by Alexa Caravia for Fountainhead Arts, 1:15, n.d. May 2023.
[6]. Tu dois porter le poids was conceived for the Do Disturb performance arts festival at Palais de Tokyo, Paris.
[7]. Interview with Andrés Aizicovich, 1:48.
[8]. Tokarczuk: Nobel Lecture.
[9]. Interview with Andrés Aizicovich, 6:44.
[10]. Tokarczuk: Nobel Lecture.
 

About the author

Veronika Mehlhart is a curatorial assistant at Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Germany. She studied art history at the University of Bremen and the Braunschweig University of Art (HBK). In 2023, she curated the group exhibition Cleaving the wind into fragments at the HBK. 
Photo by Nerea Lakuntza.