TRYDAY: The Conductive Desert: Absence / Longing / Saturation

Trydays are one-off public events at V2_ that give artists the opportunity to test new work in front of an audience. These evenings function as open moments of experimentation, where installations, performances, and research-in-progress are shared and explored. Trydays create space for dialogue, feedback, and exchange between artists and visitors

Flavia Dzodan is an Argentine artist, writer and researcher based in Amsterdam. Her work spans sound, moving image, computational performance, writing and independent publishing, and follows the political life of classification: how colonial taxonomies, institutions and computational systems organise territory, perception and possible futures. Her current research develops questions of affective logistics, algorithmic haunting, latency and infrastructural violence. She is Professor (Lector) and head of Algorithmic Cultures at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie and Sandberg Instituut.

The Conductive Desert: Absence / Longing / Saturation is a live audiovisual performance by Flavia Dzodan and a continuation of Absence / Longing / Saturation, first presented at V2_ in 2025 as part of the exhibition The Illusion of Thinking.

The earlier installation traced absence, longing and saturation through transatlantic latency, networked transmission and the Argentine littoral. During its development, a fourth work, Affective Asymptote II – Littoral Longings, began to push beyond the original trilogy, following the littoral inland toward the historical infrastructures through which territory becomes available for extraction. The Conductive Desert develops that movement further: from Atlantic cables and coastal latency into colonial desertification, mining, archival film, aerial violence and the historical production of extractable territory.

For its expanded V2_ iteration, the performance brings the 1919 Dutch film Het Argentijnsche vleesch into this historical circuit. Made five years before the Napalpí massacre of 1924, the film presents Argentina to a European audience through cattle, slaughter, flesh, territory and export abundance. Its importance to the performance lies precisely in this chronology: before the massacre occurs, a visual regime is already making Argentine territory legible as productive abundance and exportable resource. What the image makes available and what remains outside its frame become part of the same historical field.

The performance moves through four interconnected sections. Transatlantic Drift follows the route between Amsterdam and the Argentine littoral through network latency, geographic coordinates and transatlantic fiber-optic infrastructure. The Apiri Probe turns toward colonial Andean mining, reconstructing the involuntary “ay, ay” recorded by Charles Darwin from Indigenous and mestizo workers carrying immense loads through vertical mine shafts. Here the body appears as an energetic substrate: metabolic expenditure transformed into mechanical lift. Transatlantic Conduction brings these systems together at the Argentine littoral, where nineteenth-century telegraph cables and contemporary fiber-optic networks intersect with a coastline marked by colonial violence and the dictatorship’s vuelos de la muerte. Signals cross these territories through latency, packet loss, routing deviation and degradation rather than frictionless connection.

The fourth movement, Los cuervos no volaban, turns the conductive circuit upward. Taking the Napalpí massacre as a historical hinge, it examines the aerial as a logistical and administrative position: a vertical asymmetry from which territory can be surveyed, classified and acted upon while those below remain exposed to its consequences. The Dutch film enters this movement as part of that perceptual architecture, producing a landscape of abundance immediately before the violence through which territorial availability would continue to be enforced. The five-year interval between the film and Napalpí becomes part of the work’s temporal structure: an image of the abundance of flesh precedes an event of mass violence without either being reduced to an illustration of the other.

In this project, “desert” does not name an empty geography. It names an operation through which inhabited territory is rendered empty, delayed, insufficiently productive or available for another future. The work follows the infrastructures through which bodies, land, images and signals are reorganized for circulation, extraction and command. Sound is generated and transformed through SuperCollider, network data, livestream-derived signals, archival traces and spoken text. Rather than reconstructing historical events or offering narrative resolution, the performance places incompatible temporalities into proximity: colonial labor, archival film, massacre, telegraphy, contemporary networks and the ordinary circulation of the present.

Returning to V2_, where the project’s earlier grammar of absence, longing and saturation was first installed, this expanded iteration asks what happens when historical violence ceases to appear as an event and instead persists as infrastructure: embedded in the systems through which bodies, commodities, images and signals continue to move.