Mariana Castillo Deball is fascinated by the mechanisms we use to organize our lives. She investigates our mania for controlling unpredictable existence through systems of archiving, ordering and distribution. But more than that, she is fascinated by the margins of such structures where leakages inevitably occur. She sees these leakages as positive because they disrupt certain ordering systems, and foreground what lies behind.

For the project she developed with If I Can’t Dance, Mariana Castillo Deball investigated what she thought of as the rather impenetrable world of technology – where you know how to work things, but you don’t know precisely how they work. Her project, titled Blackboxing suggests a process that “investigates the way scientific and technical work is made invisible by its own success”.