ALLORA & CALZADILLA: SENSING
For their sixth solo exhibition at GALERIE CHANTAL CROUSEL, Puerto Rico–based artists Allora & Calzadilla navigate the porous boundary between the embodied, organic perception of living beings and technology’s typically externalized, digital, and therefore apparently “objective” measuring systems.
November 29, 2025 — January 15, 2026
Through paintings derived from seismic data and sensor-responsive glass sculptures, Allora & Calzadilla sound out what it means to sense in environments increasingly dominated by sensing technologies in the service of extractive logics. At the same time, their practice draws attention to the subtle, often ineffable textures of somatic experience—decentralized flows of emotion, intuition, and memory—that remain irreducible to metrics. By foregrounding what challenges technical capture, Sensing engages viewers in the eco-poetic entanglements of material reality, destabilizing the boundaries of quantified perception and illuminating the mysterious bonds of matter and signal.
In the main gallery, a new body of work titled Pulse (2025) invites us to contemplate the interdependence of human gesture and planetary rhythm. Each iteration of the series begins with a 24-hour printout of the so-called “Earth’s Pulse”—a faint, recurring seismic signal detected every 26 seconds by global monitoring stations. Arranged in precise grids, these records are then transformed through the artists’ hand-drawn interventions. Delicate linework cuts across disparate seismogram traces, introducing new temporal markers and aesthetic connections that defy the logic of pure measurement. The resulting compositions become hybrid forms—part scientific document, part gestural drawing—that fuse Earth’s slow, inaudible beat with the human impulse to respond, resonate, and reimagine through corporeal expression. With Pulse, Allora & Calzadilla ask not only what can be recorded, but what can be felt—and how this attunement links us to deeper planetary, trans-historical vibrations.
Further into the exhibition space, the recent Lightbound sculpture series (2025) expands the artists’ inquiry into the interplay of technical and embodied sensing, opening onto unseen forces that generate unusual sculptural forms. Modeled after the adaptive intelligence of climbing vines in tropical rainforests such as those in the Caribbean, each sculpture echoes the liana’s capacity to reach toward the sun. These entangled plants navigate their surroundings by sensing light and spatial cues, advancing in collaboration with other plants and agents of the rainforest. The sinuous, elongated volumes of Allora & Calzadilla’s Lightbound works are not mere representations of nature, but the outcome of a process that mirrors its sensuous logic. Working with molten glass, the artists collaborated with master glassblowers in an intimate choreography of heat, gravity, and breath. The human body—specifically, the glassblower’s exhalation—becomes an instrument of transformation, channeling energy into form.
Threaded with fiber-optic filaments and directly connected to Paris’s electrical grid, the sculptures pulse in real time with fluctuating intensities of light, responding to the city’s shifting energy load. By revealing infrastructures that usually recede into the background, Lightbound stages a convergence of bodily adaptation, technological mediation, and the resilience of ecosystems—specifically those, like Puerto Rico, under colonial rule. It underscores the artists’ long-standing inquiry into the ecopoetics of light—energy understood not only as a carrier of information, but as a planetary force shaped by flows of capital, history, and ecological vulnerability.