Genealogy of forms in Sacha Kanah’s practice

Matter takes shape, bending to the impositions of the will. It is carefully selected for its intrinsic characteristics, but its unpredictability can never be ruled out.
On the contrary, uncertainty is a fundamental part of its evolution, and for Sacha Kanah (1981, Milan) it is an essential requirement.
A sculptor with training as an architect, he works with different materials and languages, functional to the production of “organisms” that move in a space that also participates in their formation.
The result is a genealogy of forms that arise from a series of favorable conditions, subject to the principle of constant transformation.
Experimenting with matter means encountering the unknown and investigating the possibilities of spaces (both internal and external), in which certain elements come together in a continuous negotiation between forces and abandonment.

Elena Solito: You trained as an architect, but you define yourself as a sculptor. When did your relationship with sculpture begin? Tell me about your beginnings.
Sacha Kanah: When I was about sixteen I found an enlarger for printing negatives in the attic of my house. I remember it as a very charming object, although I didn’t know how to use it. I remember the feeling of excitement and the desire to experiment. So I started collecting pieces and asking around, finally managing somehow to build myself a dark room, that I still find to be a very magical place (you know that kind of loaded silence, the red light, those ghostly images appearing in the acid bath..), with all the necessary tools to activate it, including taking pictures.
I think it all began there, playing with light, searching for some space to be inhabited.

E.S.: Yours is a vocabulary of forms in progress. They seem to maintain a subtle balance between the state in which they present themselves and what they could become if conditions changed. Forms that are often inorganic, but which seem organic, and in some cases really are (I’m thinking of Red touch yellow kill a fellow red touch black friend of Jack, 2020. Agave Americana, or to the use of algae). Creatures susceptible to accidental interference or errors introduced into matter, which you told me about on another occasion, so that they can self-generate, giving rise to formations that you hadn’t foreseen.
S.K.: I suddenly found myself drawn to some form of animism, like giving an incorporeal value to the world of phenomena, objects, and living beings, for which sculpture then becomes a possible outcome. Some things must be understood for the way they are or want to be, although I find identity very susceptible to circumstances. In the case of Red touch yellow kill a fellow red touch black friend of Jack I wanted to blur distinctions, bonding something wild to a designed space.
My focus is usually trying to reach a point where sculptures make themselves by themselves, guiding without touching. And then most of the times, things happen that cannot be seen or even sensed, because they are minimal variations, which nevertheless have the power to overturn a system. I find it very interesting how all the entities that exists in the space between things, on the invisible scale, act on what they touch, transforming reality, rendering it incapable of staying and at the same time structuring it, enveloping and penetrating everything within. I honestly never know how things will go and will become, I’m very open to contradiction; then there’s a moment when things start to change so I decide to stay, complying.

E.S.: I am thinking of Grex’s “creatures”, which you presented to the ICA Foundation. if the valves were removed from the containers, they would fill with air. Tell me how they were born and your collaboration with Progetto Ludovico.
S.K.: Someone once told me that “we are born symmetrical, but we die asymmetrical”. This idea, or fact, evokes the entire space of a lifetime, during which things develop an identity by constantly moving their center of gravity; everything absorbs and releases in its own way, with its own rhythm.
When you dive under a certain amount of water, the pressure transforms the alignment of your organs and compresses them, allowing your body to adapt to a different environment. You transform into something else, instantly. 
I started working on the idea of vacuum when I happened to see some videos of industrial silos and tanks crumpled like sheets of paper by atmospheric pressure, like exhaling and holding it there. I was struck by the way an invisible force had freed these objects from their industrial nature, making them almost animated, yet alive. A very large object, seemingly rigid and formally pure, that goes crazy over a detail, loses its symmetry and transforms into something organic in a flat dimension.
These works are about some space becoming drawings. Rehearsed moments within the cavities of tanks, interiors acting as skeletons, bonding with their own shell in their own specific way, following their given anatomy. Change a single piece of data and reality takes on new properties: when you have a fever, just a small difference in temperature makes your entire perception of things transform, having a dramatic effect even on your emotions. Personally, I have abstract dreams for which I have no language; I can imagine them, but I don’t know how to describe them visually with words. I like this kind of fragility.
With Progetto Ludovico, we decided to saturate the project room at ICA Milano with some very cumbersome industrial objects, although in another dimension.

E.S.: Science and nature are two aspects of your practice: the air taken from Grex’s creatures, the experiments on processes, plant organisms and water itself.
S.K.: I’m interested in the idea of hacking ‘nature’ to isolate and eventually reproduce certain qualities and attitudes. My work doesn’t aim to address any scientific issue, nor I think human infrastructures are conceptually and physically separated from nature, it’s more about the ‘other’ and the building of relations. I have a very liquid approach to things, and I’m not really interested in categories. I’d rather speak of this in terms of an open dialogue between synthetic and wild environments, where I explore spatial and material relationships with language, questioning issues of permanence, immateriality and desire; interactions and co-evolutions are related to corporeal life and material phenomena, including the inorganic world, technologies, and nonhuman organisms and processes. There are some specific sources that work as gateways to the unexpected. Because scientific research has very strict rules, it’s very hard to reproduce certain necessary conditions. Every ‘mistake’ in design has an organic shape: things happen out of literature, things I’m attracted to but I can’t explain, because sometimes things just fail, for apparently unknown reasons; and sometimes failure is the key to enter other realms.

E.S.: Technically the holes in the water are the result of an encounter between a chemical process and an ancestral ritual.
S.K.: Yes, starting from technical needs related to preservation. I find very interesting the idea that a ritual can become part of a chemical laboratory sequence, part of a method aimed at transforming functionality into faith, Waiting for something for something you don’t know about and that maybe will appear. The ritual helps things happen without being searched for.
Some water enriched with a mineral cocktail is injected or poured with special instruments into tanks of distilled water and kelp, in the filamentous form of alginates (ref.  1942 patent by William Peschardt). A gel membrane instantly forms defining the perimeter of contact between the two liquids, giving rise to a hollow body or “hole,” which begins its growth process. The final shape of the holes depends on some physical and chemical variables related to the environment in which they are generated, such as density, temperature, pressure, time, pH, currents, and the air inside the solutions.
In most cases, live grafts are used to define the membrane’s structure and the ways in which the holes interact and exchange with the outside world, such as nutrition or evacuation.
Water is used as a living mold, a genetic archive of forms, considering that all life is born in water. The result of this process, freed from the possibility of making it scientific, are the bodies and apparatuses of hybrid creatures, born only once.
Once extracted from their bath, the holes are subjected to a dehydration and shaping process inspired by Sokushinbutsu, a ritual practiced by Buddhist monks.

E.S.: The water in the sculptures in the Spazio Volta exhibition ‘Buchi nella trama’ (Plot Holes) curated by Edoardo De Cobelli, returns to its liquid form, freeing itself from the formations suggested by your experiments and interacting perfectly with the original nature of the space, formerly the fountain in Piazza del Mercato in Bergamo. Tell me about the exhibition and the decomposition of the text written by Treti Galaxie.
S.K.: The project is thus structured as an investigation into the ways in which organic matter can occupy space, when it aggregates to form a living organism. The sculptures are chrysalis, at different stages of their evolution. The works appear as remains of a process of self-mummification acted on matter in formation, imposed on a solution of water and algae. A natural process conducted with unnatural agency, a concrete chronicle of the encounter between human logic and the ubiquitous forces of Nature. The exhibition was about some memories of liquids set up in what was once a fountain.
“The text reports the transcription of the few legible portions of a long manuscript related to the research of Sacha Kanah. 
The essay was voluntarily destroyed by its authors. It has been decided to number the fragments in the random order in which they were recovered from the acid bath.” This was the introduction to what appeared to be the script for a fiction described as a list of holes.

E.S.: The MUSE – Science Museum in Trento has launched a project conceived and curated by artist Stefano Cagol, who has always questioned and engaged with contemporary issues through his work. “We Are the Flood – Noi siamo il diluvio” addresses the debate surrounding the Anthropocene through different languages, between art and science, of which a catalog published by postmedia books. You participated in the 2023 edition with your liquid creatures.
S.K.: The work I exhibited was a living kelp-hole, growing in a plastic tank of clear water I had extracted from the air of my studio as a byproduct of the drying process of the works shown at Spazio Volta. The exhibition site, the archaeological section of the MUSE, was very distinctive. I placed my tank on a Roman-era floor and left. As MUSE was three hours away by car I had decided to deliver the work myself, thinking It would’ve been nice to take this ‘hole’ for a ride, showing it some outside and maybe grafting it with difference. I had placed the tank on the passenger seat with the window open, there was lots of wind coming in on the highway.

E.S.: In the “Sleep Starts“ solo show at Clima, as well as at the gallery’s booth at this year’s Liste Art Fair in Basel, you added extraneous elements to the bodies produced for the holes in water series. Light, transparent sculptures caught in the temporary instability in which foreign objects hybridize with matter.
S.K.: I wanted to separate some of the sculptures from the ground still being able to feel gravity. While most of the pieces were suspended at mid-air, apparently floating and mapping currents through their lightness, some other layed on a series of pieces and fragments of toys and other objects that had been stolen by small kids, acting as vanishing points of pure desire. I imagined how a four year old could destroy language through the act of loving.

E.S.: What are you working on? What plans do you have for the future?
S.K.: Some contradictions and transformation.