Totem | evolving installation (2024 – )

In Castelló’s ‘Altares’ series, worn-out machines come to life powered by electricity. They enter into a dialog with each other and with her media artifacts. These works are perhaps an homage to iconic works by Cildo Meireles (Babel 2001), Nam June Paik and Benoît Maubrey. They are also inspired by Mexican altar traditions, set to connect with the world of spirits,as well as immersed in a personal narrative. Totem denotes an object of symbolic or ritual significance. Here, discarded technological devices are reactivated and configured as contemporary ritual structures.

The totems/altar series evokes an atmosphere of surrealist religion, consumer critique, and mourning waste. These garbage installations feature radios, cassettes, cables, records, computers, and record players—both old and functional—blending evolution and progress with sound and catharsis—¡Santisima electricidad!
Since June 2024, the evolving installation Totem has been “living” in the display window of the very special space Koje (formerly Setzkasten).

The choice of this location is far from arbitrary. Setzkasten, renamed Koje in 2025, located in Vienna’s 17th district, was once a perfumery, dating back to the 1950s. In 2014, it was gradually transformed by Stefan Vogelsinger into a hybrid space: laboratory, workshop, darkroom, and a place for community gatherings centered around experimental music and analog video.
Numerous drawers and display cases still recall those earlier days — now without perfumes, but filled instead with functional and dysfunctional machines, tapes, cables, toys, microphones, and more.

The altar Totem does not stand alone; perhaps it communicates with the devices inhabiting this place, rich in history and movement — at once a site of creation and emergence, as well as a cemetery of machines.

“… das Wiederentdeckend, das Ausgraben und die Umzweckung der alten Audio-Maschinen, Audiogeräte, die auf der Müllhalde der rasanten technologischen Entwicklung gelandet sind und somit gewissermaßen verschüttet waren, sind eine Art Trauerarbeit.

“…the rediscovering, the unearthing, and the repurposing of old audio machines—audio devices that have ended up on the landfill of rapid technological development and were thus, in a way, buried—are a kind of grieving process.” 
(translation deepl.com & Castelló)
Philosopher Alice Pechriggl / Austrian Radio / Radiokolleg – Unstrumente!
18. June  2013

 

the Totem series are part of the PEEK research project Spirits in complexity — Making kin with experimental music systems, funded by the Austrian Science Fund

[Grant DOI 10.55776/AR821]