When Language Becomes the Matrix of the Artwork
In the contemporary art system, the curatorial text is not a simple commentary. It is an infrastructure. It positions the artwork, inserts it into a discourse, legitimizes its symbolic existence, and stabilizes its value.
A well-constructed text reduces interpretative uncertainty.
It builds context.
It activates genealogies.
It mitigates risk.
It is not only theory. It is an economy of meaning.
From this awareness emerges Reverse Engineering of the Curatorial Bullshit, a project promoted by the Museo del Metaverso together with C.A.R.P., taking place in the virtual space of Craft, in the region of Uqbar.
A Radical Inversion
The project begins with a simple question:
What happens if the curatorial text does not accompany the artwork, but precedes it?
What happens if the artwork does not generate the text, but the text generates the artwork?
Here, the process is reversed.
An image is not interpreted.
A text is translated into an image.
The title is deliberately provocative. It is not an attack on curatorial practice. It is a methodological statement. An operation of reverse engineering: analyzing a structure, understanding how it functions, and making it explicit.
The Text as a System of Legitimation
Within the contemporary art system, the curatorial text performs a structural function. It does not merely describe the artwork; it places it within an institutional, theoretical, and market field.
Its role is not to say what we see, but why what we see matters.
Through conceptual combinations such as:
relational field
affective topography
posthuman perception
transitory ontology
visual ecosystem
the text does not define in a closed way. It constructs an interpretative horizon.
Ambiguity is not a flaw. It is a resource.
The narrative structure is also recognizable: assertion, displacement, opening.
“The work does not describe, but evokes.
It does not represent, but activates.
It does not close, but opens.”
A dynamic that keeps the discourse in a state of continuous intensity.
From Language to Form
Reverse Engineering does not merely expose these mechanisms. It uses them.
The curatorial text becomes the starting point for visual production. The works do not illustrate concepts; they materialize linguistic structures.
If the text speaks of ontological instability, the image produces formal instability.
If it evokes hyper-vision, the composition saturates the gaze.
If it defines the body as interface, the figure fragments and becomes medialized.
Language becomes material.
Rhetoric becomes architecture.
Abstraction becomes surface.
Museo del Metaverso – Uqbar Region
The exhibition will take place in the region of Uqbar, within the virtual world of Craft, where the Museo del Metaverso is based. It is a space where the relationship between real and virtual, text and image, critique and infrastructure becomes operational ground.
📍 Open call until February 28, 2026
📍 Works must be installed by March 14, 2026
📍 Opening: March 20, 2026
📍 Museo del Metaverso – Uqbar Region (Craft)
Not a Denunciation, but an Inquiry
Reverse Engineering of the Curatorial Bullshit does not aim to expose or ridicule. It is not a satire of the art system.
It is an experiment.
It makes visible the functioning of curatorial language as a device of power and value production. It shows how discourse can precede the image. How legitimation can become raw material.
If the text constructs the artwork,
then it can be dismantled.
And reconstructed.
Not against the system.
But within it.
