iMAL

30 Quai des Charbonnages
Koolmijnenkaai, 1080 Brussels
Art Center for Digital Cultures & Technology

SLATO/OTLAS

About the artists

SLATO, OTLAS and TALOS are among the names from which a group of researchers operate. What they have in common is that their privileged fields of study are made up of a sediment of practices and discourses from which proliferate a large number of images, objects and documents.

Researchers are always concerned in the same way. First of all, they collect documents that condense the thickness and preserve the complexity of the relationships between beings and the things that make them. They then encode these documents in a relational database. Eventually, they subject these documents to more or less extensive transformations and thus manufacture new documents. Finally, they transit these documents from the database to exhibition spaces.

WHAT DOES THIS HAVE TO DO WITH EVERYTHING ELSE?

SLATO's investigation takes as its starting point the city of Bombay, which, at the end of the 19th century, was the scene of a population control system set up by the British colonial power to stem the spread of a plague epidemic. OTLAS is interested in the clay soils consumed for pleasure by people from diaspora communities; a cultural phenomenon sometimes referred to as geophagy.

WHAT DOES THIS HAVE TO DO WITH EVERYTHING ELSE? has been presented at iMAL in February-March 2021.

Credits

The SLATO and OTLAS project is supported by Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles / Arts Numériques.

The second residency is part of a series of iMAL residencies supported by COCOF