Lolo & Sosaku are an Argentinean/Japanese artistic duo. They operate from their workshop in Hospitalet—once an industrial neighbourhood on the outskirts of Barcelona, now transformed into a cultural district—experimenting with sound, stroke, form, and movement.
At first glance, they appear to be a duo. But, as they themselves explain, they are two plus a third agent: the multiple objects they invent, which are responsible for "delivering the final sound, the final stroke."1 Objects that Lolo & Sosaku have been transforming in cycles over their twenty years of work, which lead up to their current machines, and at the same time trace a continuity through their random instrumental value. Deploying these objects, both in the visual and sonic fields, they bring to light a persistent investigation into impact, hits, percussive force, accidental marks, and their [various] effects.
Lolo & Sosaku build and activate machine circuits that do not aim for functional efficiency or harmony. Paradoxically, they create the conditions of possibility and encourage what doesn't work, affirming that "error is welcome." Thus, in Painting Machines,2 even though each motor and mechanism produces a repetitive movement, randomness is introduced through fragility, precariousness, and balance of materials. Consequently, we as spectators witness a staging of the beauty of failure in action.
In their sound Performances, the machines multiply and overlap, distancing themselves from melody and from the unchanging techno beats. While Lolo & Sosaku stand at the centre of the scene operating the motors, they give-up control when frictions and resonances between the machines emerge, no longer knowing what is happening with the sounds. What arises at that point, they call "the language of the machines." New sounds that surprise them each time; for example, in a Performance in Berlin, a motor began to sound like an opera singer.3 Thus, their artistic interventions align themselves with the propensity of the machines, acting as other random elements such as to explore sound through chaos, maintaining a distance with the illusion of control and the presence of intentionality.
Lolo & Sosaku embrace the challenge implied by uncertainty and the temporality of the instant in order to invent a poetic practice with machines, outside meaning—oriented by contingency and failure. Their work is thus revealed to us as a counterpoint to the contemporary use of the machine by technological scientism—based on algorithm, prediction, and optimization—to suture any trace of singularity of jouissance and any hole in knowledge, a hole that recalls the aphorism, there is no sexual relation, which we will discuss at the forthcoming Congress.
[1] Lolo & Sosaku during the conversation held at their workshop in March 2025.
[2] Lolo & Sosaku, Painting Machines (2019), available online: youtube.com.
[3] Lolo & Sosaku, Performance (2024), available online: youtube.com. Performance is the name of both a series of performances and an individual performance from the series.
