Lecture: Martín Chirino and the Sculptural Reinvention of Futurism

Between 1990 and 2017, Martín Chirino created the seventeen sculptures that make up the series Homenaje a Marinetti (Homage to Marinetti)—a unique cycle within his body of work that poses a fundamental question: why would an artist who had made slowness, reflection, and an intimate engagement with material the guiding principles of his practice choose to turn his attention toward an avant-garde movement that had elevated speed to one of the great myths of modernity? Taking this apparent contradiction as a starting point, this lecture proposes a new interpretation of the relationship between Chirino and Futurism. Far from adopting Marinetti’s political and aesthetic ideology, the Canarian sculptor engages in a critical appropriation of his poetic theory—stripping speed of its historical and ideological baggage to transform it into an essentially sculptural category. Through a dialogue between poetry, sculpture, and philosophy, the lecture will examine how Chirino’s "open spiral" transforms Futurist speed into a radically different spatial and temporal experience. This exploration culminates in an interpretation of these sculptures through the lens of Gaston Bachelard’s "philosophy of the instant," which allows us to understand speed not as mere displacement, but as intensity and inexhaustible possibility. Ultimately, Homenaje a Marinetti reveals one of the most fertile paradoxes in Chirino’s work: the ability to make speed visible without representing movement, and to transform the stillness of iron into a form of time.