Juan José María Tirigall, Drift Along the Edges of the Fragments, 2024
A plumber attempts to patch an irreparable system, wandering endlessly through the fractured terrain of a world built upon its own contradictions. The system is both tangible and conceptual, a sculptural landscape of ruptured surfaces and shifting forms. The leaks he strives to seal are unrelenting, his task Sisyphean. This is the premise of Drift Along the Edges of the Fragments, the latest work by Argentine multimedia artist and researcher Juan José María Tirigall, an interactive piece that fuses video game aesthetics, mechatronic sculpture, and projection mapping.
A research professor and director of the Graduate Program in Media and Technology at the National University of the Arts (UNA), Tirigall has long explored the confluence of contemporary art, science, and technology. His artistic and pedagogical commitments extend to promoting free software and the GNU/Linux operating system, reinforcing his interest in open, decentralized forms of digital production. His works interrogate the ideological underpinnings of digital culture while actively engaging with the material conditions of artistic production in the age of automation, interactivity, and machinic agency.
In Drift Along the Edges of the Fragments, Tirigall literalizes the historical and conceptual tension between contemporary art and mass cultural spectacle through an unmistakable referent: a kitsch Latin American plumber, borrowed from the lexicon of pop culture and the entertainment industry, who traverses an unstable, modular sculpture. This structure is no arbitrary construction: it is a 3D-printed reproduction of the infamous urinal Marcel Duchamp submitted to the 1917 Society of Independent Artists exhibition under the pseudonym R. Mutt. Unlike the institutionalized readymade, however, Tirigall’s urinal is in a perpetual state of disrepair, its surfaces cracked, its integrity compromised. The plumber’s ceaseless labor reflects an exercise in futility: fixing what is inherently broken, sustaining a system that resists permanence.
At the heart of the piece lies a dynamic interplay between digital simulation and mechanical instability. The fragmented urinal, set in motion by a network of motors and gears, continuously reconfigures itself, altering both the composition of the sculptural form and the terrain upon which the game character moves. This mechanical choreography transforms the work into an evolving, unstable platformer, a literal enactment of the precarious balancing act performed by cultural laborers, artists, and institutions. By embedding game mechanics within a shifting sculptural environment, Tirigall subverts the illusion of mastery often associated with interactive media, confronting players with a task that is neither winnable nor resolvable.
The artist’s decision to deploy a pop-cultural avatar adds yet another layer of irony to the work. If Duchamp’s urinal once destabilized artistic conventions, revealing the arbitrariness of aesthetic hierarchies, then Tirigall’s urinal exposes the absurdity of contemporary artistic production under digital capitalism. Here, the plumber, a character ostensibly designed to navigate and fix digital spaces, is trapped in an unwinnable game, his own agency curtailed by the very system he is tasked with maintaining.
Drift Along the Edges of the Fragments extends beyond mere critique; it operates as a living, breathing system of decay and renewal, exposing the fragility of both material and digital infrastructures. It questions the labor conditions that sustain artistic practice, the mythology of repair as progress, and the role of the digital artifact in an age where art is as much an object of preservation as it is an act of endurance. Tirigall’s work reminds us that art history, like any system, is not a static monument but a perpetually shifting construct, which demands not just interpretation, but some special kind of navigation.
Drift Along the Edges of the Fragments is currently being exhibited at the Centro de Arte el Obrador, within the framework of the exhibition Gravitating the ground.
LINK: Juan José María Tirigall