MANTI-CORE is presented as a processual installation combining the languages of artists Leo Pum and Carlos Saez, functioning as the scenery for the “Miss Espacial” event in the independent space Pluto, where the Espacial 2023 grant is presented.
Based on the skeleton of an obsolete vehicle, interventions are carried out throughout the event that adapts to the time of night and the corresponding performances, thus generating a living and constantly changing chimeric scenography.

The first action that opens the event and presents the installation is the live performance of “Viscera”, where Leo Pum and his colleagues from RIIIM perform an archeology of this half-buried vehicle in the dark. Using power tools, Leo conducts a ritual where he extracts different parts of the car, only illuminated by a flashlight and maps multiple laser levels, which he uses as a base to intervene on. On the other hand, RIIIM uses the vehicle’s miking and the tools’ sound to generate live an ambient sound piece where you can feel the most visceral and hardcore side of the installation. As a result, we see a site trace of techno materialism typical of the imagination of a dystopian-futuristic video game.

The Miss Space event, curated by Carlos Saez, has festive, fun, queer and alien overtones. For this reason, in the middle of the show, Carlos decides to add an eight-meter hairy tail to this site, thus generating the angular point of union of both languages. In this way, the installation becomes a creature, a temporary manticore, the product of the union of the living and the not-so-living, which reveals the nature-technology contrast from fantastic biology. A mythological figure created from a giant prosthesis shows the transformation and expansion of the limits of form and identity from morphological freedom.

This stage then remains as the place where the artists perform: Cuarto de Pastilla (@cuartodepastilla), Joven de la Perla (@jovendelaperla), Vera Amore (@vera.amore), Elvira del Rocío (@elvira.del.rocio) and Pablo Oria (@pablochouchou). At the same time, Carlos Saez and Leo Pum intervene through lighting or smoke, generating different environments that adapt to the guest artists’ concerts.

— Leandro Mora