Pseudo-Totems — assi abogado

Pseudo-Totems
Fabric print on metal framework
Single-channel video installation
2026

Pseudo-Totems is a series of reinterpolated relic forms constructed through the deliberate mash-up of archaeological and ornamental references from Southeast Asia and the Middle East. Fragmented and recomposed, these forms dissolve singular origins and reflect how cultural meaning shifts under conditions of circulation, translation, and erosion.

Printed on fabric and suspended using industrial metalware, the installation occupies a space between artifact and debris, museological display and provisional structure. Rather than restoring or preserving cultural specificity, the work holds its fragments in suspension and foregrounds the flattening of difference under globalized visual culture, resisting resolution into fixed narratives.

The projected visuals operate as a moving counterpart to the suspended forms. Shot as recordings of moments in transit, the videos capture a continuous state of passage, movement without arrival and direction without resolution. The road functions both literally and symbolically as a site of anticipation, longing, and deferred destination.

The footage carries a melancholic register while remaining quietly hopeful, where motion becomes a form of faith. The act of recording while moving reflects a belief that progression itself can hold meaning, even when the endpoint remains unseen.

This warmth is deliberately disrupted through the intervention of algorithmic codes, patterned overlays, and dithered textures, introducing a digital logic that contrasts with the intimacy of the source material. Rather than clarifying the image, these interventions fracture it and interrupt emotional continuity, exposing the systems that mediate contemporary experience.

Across both material and moving image, the work situates the viewer between human yearning and machinic abstraction. The road becomes a site where memory, desire, and technological mediation converge. Rather than resolving this tension, the exhibition sustains it and suggests a form of subjectivity that exists in perpetual transit.

Pseudo-Totems is presented through Relic Suspension’s takeover of Secta Collective’s ArtHub. Operating as a multidisciplinary incubator for (in)formal practices, Relic Suspension situates the project across research, material inquiry, and speculative reconstruction, activating retrospection as a mode of present engagement.