Maite Iribarren Vázquez

Amenities, Cooling Unit 1, 2 + 3, 2025

Cooling Unit 1
copper, silicone, ice
9”x3.5”x3.5”

Cooling Unit 2
copper, silicone, ice
15”x19”x5”

Cooling Unit 3
copper, silicone, ice
28”x19”x11”

Coagulators 1-8
roto-cast plastic, humidity, agar agar
gelatin, berries, install with AC, freezer,
hot plate, pot, tubing, bucket, humidity, extension cord
5.5”x12”x3.5” to 17”x19”x27” & 52”x20”x12”

These Cooling Units belong to Amenities, an absurd but functional sculptural system and choreography between reimagined infrastructure and the body. It was installed at Foreign & Domestic in NYC. All three Cooling Units are watertight brazed hollow copper vessels with cast silicone plugs sealing an opening on top. In Cooling Unit 1 I raised the sheet through cycles of annealing and hammering two domes, a cylinder and asymmetrical hourglass on steel stakes. The plastic Coagulators in Amenities were made by dissecting, heat forming and welding roto-cast plastic traffic barricades. In Amenities breath, heat, and water circulate through meticulously fabricated devices— freezing, dripping, and reabsorbing. I perform their maintenance and labor. This piece and the installation it is a part of was created to reflect on labor typically hidden in the built environment through meticulously crafted copper sculptures made to almost pass as industrially manufactured condensers while feeling uncannily bodily. I enacted labor embedded in amenities such as air-conditioning by performing the Sisyphean maintenance of these analog condensing coils or Cooling Units designed to inefficiently collect breath or humidity from the air when filled with ice water, functioning similarly to a cold drink in the summer. Through these intentionally overcomplicated forms I caricature the absurdity of systems where arbitrary complexity is incorporated in order to extract profit.

The following texts narrativized the performative installation.

A worker drags a bundle of debris from a water intake screen at the East River Generating Station. The water flows past him, over a natural gas turbine condenser that spins a generator routing power through the Cherry Street substation and the underground Cooper Square network feeder to a transformer under Henry street, the 24 Rutgers service meter, and a Foreign & Domestic outlet. Connected to this outlet, an air conditioner’s internal condensing coils turn the breath of a woman in the gallery into water. It trickles into a bucket weighing down a Coagulator. Maite collects liquid breadth from the bucket with an ice tray, which she puts into a freezer connected to the same outlet as the AC. She removes the blue silicon plug from a wall mounted Cooling Unit and siphons out some of the water inside the copper organ to make room for frozen breadth. This leads the Cooling Unit to condense the breadth of another woman in the gallery. It drips into another Coagulator. Maite pours the second woman’s breath from the Coagulator into a pot on a hot plate connected to the same outlet as the AC and the freezer. She mixes agar agar into the pot of boiling breadth and pours it into another Coagulator. Her friend adds a couple of berries to it. Another adds sugar. It sets into a gelatin that Maite takes a bite of. She takes a big breath and puts another ice tray full of liquid breath into the freezer.