Aguamala is next evolution in Arango’s constant performative artistic mutation. Born from the happenstance juxtaposition of two unrelated images in order to break the constant danger of the image’s subversion and re-purposing by the next curator, the project found its name when the artist remembered a visit to the Monterey aquarium in California. In Colombia, the term ‘aguamala’ is what they call the jellyfish. The term itself is composed of two terms with usually opposite meanings; two words that usually go one against the other.
Seeing the jellyfish’s movement in water, Arango came to the realization, not of a metaphor or some kind of symbol or analogy of his artistic process, or even his life, but the performative realization of an ongoing multilayered synecdoche: a) one’s resilience to a difficult past; b) the entrapment of one’s professional commercial work; and c) the way to finally get out of the nexus by the juxtaposition of two unrelated terms, and the subsequent search to create universal meaning, just like base pairs compose our entire DNA.
The Aguamala project is as sort echo of one's own resilience, and a paradigm to make sense of the past and survive the present and project into the future. We are connected to all the more primitive lifeforms that came before us in evolution, but still echo the fast that we are still trapped between our resilience of day to day actions to sustain our existence, and the fact that most of the time we are swept by the strong currents of life that take us to place we do not wish to go
The daily resilience we need to perform to keep on moving, as well as the the reality that we as higher organisms are also related to those lower organisms upon which evolution has built to help us gain consciousness of ourselves, and consciousness of this very connection. It's a double helix synecdoche: one strand spiralling outward, from the individual to the universal, and the other spiralling inward from the abstract to the practically personal.