For their sixth solo exhibition at Galerie Chantal Crousel, Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla invite viewers into an immersive meditation on perception, embodiment, and the entanglements of the organic and the technological. Sensing unfolds as both an inquiry and an experience, foregrounding the elusive textures of sensation that evade quantification yet shape our relationship to the world. Through works that draw on seismic data, sensor-responsive glass, and the adaptive logic of tropical lianas, the Puerto Rico–based duo maps the porous boundaries between body, environment, and infrastructure.
ORDER IN PRINT AND DIGITAL
At the heart of the exhibition is Pulse (2025), a series that transforms the “Earth’s Pulse”. a faint, recurring seismic signal, into hybrid compositions where scientific record and human gesture collide. Allora & Calzadilla’s interventions on seismographic printouts evoke not only the mechanics of measurement but also the ineffable qualities of intuition, memory, and corporeal rhythm. Here, the artists challenge the authority of objective systems, inviting viewers to consider what remains irreducible to data: the subtle, embodied ways we attune to planetary and personal cycles.
The Lightbound sculptures extend this inquiry into the domain of energy and adaptation. Modeled after the climbing vines of Caribbean rainforests and animated by Paris’s electrical grid, these illuminated glass forms pulse in real time, responding to the city’s shifting energy flows. The process of their making, an intimate choreography of breath, gravity, and molten glass, underscores the body’s role as a sensing instrument, while the works themselves reveal the hidden infrastructures that mediate contemporary life.
Throughout the exhibition, Allora & Calzadilla’s practice is grounded in research yet open to poetic speculation, moving fluidly between scientific rigor and the generative power of metaphor. Their work asks how we might cultivate a heightened sensitivity to the invisible forces, vibrations, energies, pressures, that shape our existence. As environments become more fragile and technological mediation more pervasive, Sensing ultimately proposes attunement as both an aesthetic and ethical imperative. The artist duo sits down for an interview with DSCENE Editor Zarko Davinic.
Courtesy of the artist
Pulse translates a highly technical seismic signal into something deeply somatic and affective. How did you negotiate the tension between scientific legibility and the risk of aestheticizing data, and where did you decide that “feeling” should override “accuracy”? – When we looked at the seismographs, tools that register the planet’s rhythms, we immediately thought of electrocardiograms, which register our own. Drawing into the seismograms allowed us to surface what the data cannot hold: intuition, memory, and the body’s ways of sensing. We never set out to present the seismic data as a neutral fact; every measuring system has limits, it inevitably leaves things out. During a research trip for another work, Penumbra, we visited the tomb of Édouard Glissant in Martinique, where the inscription reads: “Nothing is true, everything is alive.” That sentiment captures our approach: accuracy matters, but it cannot speak fully to the entanglement between human gesture and planetary rhythm.
We’ve long been interested in phenomena that hover between presence and absence, that ask us to tune our attention differently.
The “Earth’s Pulse” is a faint, almost ghostly phenomenon that repeats every 26 seconds. Conceptually, what drew you to this specific signal, and how do you think its periodicity resonates with human temporalities such as breath, heartbeat, or ritual? – We were drawn to its subtlety, a steady but almost imperceptible oscillation. Its rhythm echoes the body’s cyclical movements: breathing, pulse, sleeping, waking. It feels like a quiet survival signal from the planet, always returning, constantly shifting slightly. We’ve long been interested in phenomena that hover between presence and absence, that ask us to tune our attention differently.
In Pulse, your hand-drawn interventions literally cut across the grid of seismographic traces. How do you think about the ethics and politics of “interfering” with a scientific record, and what does that gesture say about the authority of so-called objective measuring systems? – For us, Pulse is not about altering the scientific record but entering into conversation with it. Scientific tools carry the values and assumptions of the systems that produce them. By drawing across the traces, we make visible what those tools cannot register. It reminds us that intuition, emotion, and personal history continually shape how we sense the world, even within scientific practice. The drawing becomes a form of critical re-sensitization, a way of reopening what has been narrowed.
For us, Pulse is not about altering the scientific record but entering into conversation with it.
Your work often foregrounds what escapes technical capture: intuition, memory, and decentralized flows of emotion. When you were developing Sensing, were there specific experiences or sensations you felt could never be translated into metrics, yet still had to be present in the work? – Yes, those perceptions that arise before language: a faint hum, a bodily vibration, a memory that lingers without form. These sensations resist conversion into metrics, yet they profoundly shape how we relate to our surroundings. Sensing is an attempt to make space for those quieter experiences and allow them to guide the work.
Lightbound is modeled on the adaptive intelligence of lianas, while being wired into Paris’s electrical grid.
How do you understand this coupling of rainforest ecologies and metropolitan infrastructure? – Bringing these systems together reveals how intertwined ecological and human infrastructures truly are. The vine’s adaptive intelligence and the electrical grid’s complicated, often exploitative history, especially familiar to us in Puerto Rico, are not separate narratives. They show how environments and power systems continually shape one another, often beneath the threshold of awareness.
the artists and Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris. Photo: Jiayun Deng — Galerie Chantal Crousel
The glassblowing process in Lightbound involves breath, gravity, and heat in a very literal choreography. How did working so closely with master glassblowers shape your understanding of the body as a sensing instrument? – Glassblowing makes the body’s intelligence visible. Breath shapes the expanding form; heat and gravity guide every movement. It reminded us that sensation, pressure, vibration, tension, passes between bodies and materials. In Lightbound, the artisan’s breath becomes part of the sculpture itself, showing that sensing is always physical, entangled, and in constant flux.
Sensing is an attempt to make space for those quieter experiences and allow them to guide the work.
By connecting Lightbound to real-time fluctuations in the city’s energy load, you make visible an infrastructure that usually recedes into the background. What kinds of “energy behaviors” or rhythms have surprised you most, and how do they inflect the way viewers read the sculptures? – We were struck by how alive the fluctuations feel, they accelerate, strain, settle, and rest almost like a body. The sculptures translate these shifts into light and movement, giving viewers a perceptible sense of the city’s own pulse. The work draws attention to infrastructures that usually recede into the background, revealing them as active forces in daily life.
Your practice has long engaged with sites marked by colonial and military violence, such as Vieques and Puerto Rico more broadly. In this exhibition, how do you see the ecologies of light and seismic vibration intersecting with histories of extraction, occupation, and infrastructural neglect? – Place holds memory, sometimes quite literally, as a material scar. Light and vibration may appear immaterial, yet they carry the marks of political and economic decisions. Whether through unequal access to energy or increased seismic risk caused by extractive industries, the signals we work with are never neutral. They are shaped by these histories and bear their weight.
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Many of your earlier works deal explicitly with sound, music, and voice. In Sensing, the seismic prints and illuminated glass seem almost like “mute” instruments. Do you think of these works as scores, recordings, or even silenced voices? – All of these resonate. The works function as scores that invite viewers to tune their awareness. They are recordings of forces, bodily, electric, seismic, atmospheric, that shape life. In earlier works we engaged more directly with voices quieted by larger powers, systems, histories, communities. With this series, the turn is more personal. We devised our own system, a compositional grammar of color, pattern, and form through which affect can emerge. As Walter Pater wrote, “all art constantly aspires to the condition of music,” and these works move in that aspiration.
The drawing becomes a form of critical re-sensitization.
You often operate at the intersection of rigorous research and poetic speculation. For this exhibition, what kinds of scientific or technical collaborations were most formative, and where did you feel it was important to depart from research and allow fiction or metaphor to lead? – Research provides our grounding, technical understanding, data, and historical context. But the work ultimately lives in the questions that research cannot answer. Metaphor and imagination open a space where the material can shift and breathe. In Sensing, scientific inputs served as starting points; intuition and formal experimentation guided how those signals transformed into new perceptual experiences.
How do you imagine the role of the viewer within this ecology of sensing: as observer, as sensor, as co-processor, or perhaps as another vulnerable body within these same systems? – The viewer is not simply observing, they enter the same field of forces. Their body registers vibration, light, heat, and rhythm just as the works do. In that sense, they become another sensing instrument, another presence within the circuit, blurring the boundary between observer and phenomenon.
The trace we hope to leave is not a message but a shift in perception: an awareness that sensing is both an aesthetic and an ethical act.
Looking back from Chalk (Lima) and the Vieques works to Sensing, there is a persistent concern with traces, imprints, and residues. In this new exhibition, what kind of trace do you hope remains with viewers after they leave the gallery, and how would you like them to carry this “attunement” into their own environments? – We hope they leave with a heightened sensitivity to the subtle exchanges, vibrations, energies, pressures, that shape daily life yet often go unnoticed. The trace we hope to leave is not a message but a shift in perception: an awareness that sensing is both an aesthetic and an ethical act, especially at a moment when environments are increasingly fragile, and attention is commandeered by capital.
Originally published in DSCENE “The New Disorder” Issue.
