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Miler Lagos
Los anillos de corazón esmeralda, 2022

Installation view: Abundant Futures. Works from the TBA21 Collection, Centro de Creación Contemporánea de Andalucía C3A, Córdoba, Spain, 2022
Photo: Roberto Ruiz

Miler Lagos

Collection

Abundant Futures

Collage from recycled newspapers, framed
155 x 155 cm
TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Collection

Part of the series “Los anillos del tiempo” (Time Rings), this paper collage by Colombian artist Miler Lagos depicts the layers of time inscribed in the growth rings of trees with neatly folded newspaper clippings. Lagos uses newspaper, a product of the wood industry, to create an image of the raw material the paper comes from: the horizontal segment of a tree trunk. The work plays on the dialectic between the deep time registered by the tree rings and historical time, the time of recorded or written history. The use of cellulose-based material highlights the different life cycles of matter and information. “Each ring of a tree is like a file of the time and place in the same way that each page of a newspaper is a file of the area and the time,” Lagos says. “This is the reason I want to use the newspaper. It makes the connection between print media and sculpture [tangible]. It made me think of print media and how many papers have been used to keep alive images from history.” Lagos’s reflections also extend to the technique of the collage, a visual language based on found materials and discarded fragments, on piecing together and layering, on deconstructing and reassembling images. This quasi-metabolic process could well be associated with the entropic circulation of information and the erratic and cumulative nature of memory in storing experience.

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Group exhibition: Abundant Futures
Venue: C3A Centro de Creación Contemporánea de Andalucía, Córdoba
Curator: Daniela Zyman
Exhibition 1 April 2022 - 5 March 2023

Manuel Muñiz Menéndez, “Miler Lagos: «El papel soporta ideas que se caen por su propio peso»”, in ABC Cultural, February 27, 2020.

Mary Gagen, “How using tree rings to look into the past can teach us about the climate changes we face in the future”, in The Conversation, November 2, 2021.

Emily Osterloff, “The 330-million-year-old fossil tree that's stood the test of time”, in Natural History Museum.