MÁQUINAS DESEANTES
RIO Y MEÑAKA @RIOMENAKA
11/10/2025 - 08/11/2025
MADRID
DESIRING MACHINES
suave / ˈswɑːv / smoothly gracious in manner.
Everyone says she’s as suave in person as she is on screen.
En persona i a la pantalla..
Fragment from Alba Mayol’s poem “Dura vol ser carnosa,” in Blanca Arias’s book Blandito blandito.
At some point we stopped imagining the cloud as a white, weightless vapor. We learned it is made of vast industrial warehouses, endless corridors of metal racks, cold lights flickering, fans humming like a constant breath. Thousands of square meters occupied by servers that store our photos, conversations, 3D models, desires, and errors. Everything we believe to be intangible has a mailing address, a temperature, a weight. The cloud takes up space.
“Machine” comes from the Greek mēkhanḗ: device, ingenious resource, a means to set something in motion. It was not always a physical apparatus; it could also be a stratagem, a way to bend the course of events. They say it shares a root with magh- (power, to be able), the same one that shaped words like magic and majesty. “Desire” comes from the Latin desiderare: to feel the lack of the stars. It was used when a navigator, looking at the sky, could not find the sign they expected. A longing guided by astronomy: waiting for something that shines far away and has not yet arrived.
My objects lived there first, in the cloud as data, among hard drives and fiber-optic cables that cross oceans. They inhabited an industrial landscape. They were lines of code and polygons on a screen before condensing into something I can touch. Because every day we move parts of our lives into those places, trusting they will always be there. The pieces are born from a common file that circulates through the network. That endless thread that appears on screens with the promise: “This is the cutest thing you’ll see today.” Gentle gestures. Black boxes. We know the inputs and outputs. Inside, there is an opaque combinatorics that nevertheless produces forms. Each work acts as an interface: it receives input and returns output. We do not know what has happened, but now it is matter.
I think of Deleuze and Guattari’s desiring-machines: it can be distilled into gears that never stop producing connections. In my pieces, that digital flow becomes volumes that touch, embrace, repeat, and multiply. What was information is now skin, fold, relief that recalls a muscle. A cloud that has weight and occupies space. Desiring Machines presents a system .