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The term affect began to find its way into the texts of artistic proposals at least 8 years ago. At that time I was living in great surroundings and I received some essential texts which I was able to read in company. When one does not know how to read, reading in company is better. Using affect was a marvellous solution; with one fell swoop it resolved many of those dead-end streets of artistic practice. While there are matters that it is better not to put into words, there are fewer and fewer bastions where we can show something without sullying its sacred entity by adjectivising it. Affect was useful in that it enabled me to postpone any question as to the usefulness of art. Its ultimate destination lies in its potency. Like the muzak in an office, its effect is not felt in the short term. An art object affects the different settings in which it is exhibited and that affection subtly changes the way a given number of individuals act. By naming the affect, one is naming the origin of our drives and where they go. So simple. It inserts a much more incontestable, less capricious corporeal dimension. I used affect in my art experiments and in many other tasks; for example in Sabadell, where at that time I was running a space for residencies, with performance, which is where I first met Irati. There I tried not to use it just as a buzz-word but to positively put it into practice. The ideas was that everything that affects in a space like that, should add something — or at the very least, should take nothing away from it. Being able to keep your studio keys at night without having to ask for them the next morning; having the photo of all the residents in the bar and your name on the door in chalk; always having colleagues working in other studios; the fact that everything is full (for God's sake!) and everyone has the space she needs, even if that means hearing the ring tone from the AmÊlie theme tune on people's mobiles; having a working Internet connection; removing hair from the plughole of the shower and preventing it from flooding; being able to sleep in the apartment on warm nights; not having the alarm going off; having a fridge that closes; cooking together. To sum up, the fact that the advertisements for activities on neon-coloured paper are posted using neon-coloured Sellotape!
I have an urge to serve up confrontation as the main dish, and remove affect from the starters altogether. Playing at bringing untrained concepts to the table, without the veil of the academy, for the simple three-card-trick fun of moving concepts around into one order or another. Using confrontation as the topos of the next vectors I am going to cast. This back of mine which I feel supported against the back of the sofa when I am lying down and which I can only surprise with the use of a mirror.
BARRIEK 2020 , Sa la Rekalde (Bilbao)
vector: interactions From there we could put order on our gestures, our daily performance in human interaction: the visit to the bar or the bathroom in a shared apartment, to the dentist and in the waiting room, the trip by bus or in the lane of a swimming pool. I lived for four years in the Basque Country, and I had ties to the place for quite a bit longer. I cannot say I know anything, but I felt I understood that confrontation is a healthy sport, well exercised indoors and outdoors. Any meeting, chato of wine in hand, pits red against blue, face to face; today it will be red and tomorrow blue. In the mere encounter lies the desire. Exercising a critical muscle that distances us from the lethargy even if there is a danger of turning from confronting to confrontation. From that Basque Country comes Irati. It was there that she trained and she has been coloured by other contexts in which she spends time. As long as I have known her, her work has always revolved around the same axis, orbiting at a greater or lesser distance. An axis that speaks of mutable volumes and poetic resistances.
vector: mes The body of the wrestlers as a literally embodied example and an auratic demonstration of confrontation. Bodies that stand before other bodies, that are compared and defined in that questioning. A fragile border separates the two skins, their limits unclear. They have no inside and outside, no positive and negative. The fiction of the self is made manifest. The confrontation involves accompanying in the fall. There is a negotiation between one and the other in everything at every moment, like a constant squaring off, a comparison, more of a dance than a fight, where there is no triumph. There is no presence without reciprocity.
vector volumes Let us now extend the notion of body to any physical object. Bodies, volumes whose status is necessarily altered when they stand at a given distance from other volumes in xyz axes. The proximate relationship between spoon and dish announces the soup and at the same time, summons the diner. In the confronting of bodies, we add the dimension of a sign. At the end of the day, one of the main behaviours of an artwork is the total comparison and contrast with everything that surrounds it physically and symbolically. The measure is everything, five centimetres up or down makes a definitive difference. The power of the encounter is an ever-new opportunity. I do not say that there is no work without a spectator, but that there is no work without confronting.
vector stops We have experienced a similar lapse over the last months, in the anomalous, in its opposition to the order of the world. The closing of borders, the travel restrictions and the quarantine now being imposed in response to the virus are, on the surface, medical measures, but they are also symbolic, resonating with the same basic logic as the construction of physical walls for political reasons. It seemed like an attempt to defuse even further the drive to grow by amputating confrontation, contagion. A rehearsal in standardisation towards grey.
vector times Finally let us make room for the temporal aspect. Art emerges from a very specific place and time but it can be frozen to be retrieved in the future, even to connect with the ancestral. It even draws on anachronistic realities and eras. In art, as in the fiesta, time is measured from the exceptional. It is a period in which the rules are suspended and licence is granted. The fiesta follows an internal code, it is played out according to a ritual; dance, song, drink and food, there is a tendency to excess and obsession. There is no fiesta without regular work or life; no object is sacred if it cannot be sullied. The fiesta brings regular life face-to-face with its inverse; it re-establishes the order of the world. The fiesta is collective; it is performed in order to collectivise. Art as an individual instrument of this.
I want to devote this paragraph to concluding and to thanking. This text arose out of a period of time Irati and I shared at L’Estruch. Out of the way things return. Out of a lockdown. My first thanks go to the italics that have enabled me to remove any quotation marks, any trace of a quotation from this text. And then to Sofía and her tireless readings of this document, to Luz for her example in the details, to Diego for his peace, to Sil for being so brave, to Martin for his reflection, to Cate for being so close, to Jorge for his confidence, to Diego and Julia for their temperance, to the Cris’s for the laughter and the comfort, to Julia for her example, to Fer and Elise for my second home, to Clementti Canelas for being a second family, to Jana and Jota for everything and also for the italics, Anna and Alex for their Valentina, to Manuela for much more, to the Tractoras for the lighthouse, to the FueraFueras for their heart and support, to lxsquecorrenporahí, to the Sants for being there, to my family for their generosity and to Aina and Eloi for their joy, to Quim because he helped me to read, to the utopian body, to the catch, to the eternal reference of Preciado, to many other readings that are nearby but too distant to be cited, by people whom one reads in their haptic way, to the methodology of Jara which I sneak a glance at, to Mafe's answers, to Hypatia soon, to Paula too, to Dorothy present, to Marder for the pandemic articles he sent me and some lines from his pyro-politics with which I end the text. To Covid for this shitty feeling, halfway between selfishness and anxiety; thanks to the people who have been there, those who have not and whom I forget. To Iván for coming out of this! If the phone of the person in the next studio bothers you, you can go and talk to her, confront it, resolve it and create a new status between the two, possibly more cordial.Risk must be assumed, not evaded, so that the political ontology of human beings does not dissolve in the sea of indifference, apathy and neutralisation typical of liberal parliamentary democracies.
s ta t e ment oriza irati i n with(in), with(out) me. eflects the attraction provoked by an image, its signifiers (sign) and its effect (action). When I was researching and archiving classical corporealities in Olympia (Greece), I came across what is probably the first depiction of contact between two human bodies in western art. It consists of a painting of a wrestling exercise on a Greek vase. Unlike previous depictions of human bodies, the fighters come in contact with one another; rather than being isolated individuals, they are interacting corporealities. I have yet to corroborate that this is indeed the first artistic representation of body contact in the West, but that awareness of its effect —whether real or fictitious— affected my way of looking and feeling. The sign that forms this gesture depicts a scene for inter-relationship. It is a form with a tangible sensitivity, a precedent for our increasingly hyperconnected, influenced and technified society. Our experiences are registered and canonised in their constant transformation. And so, with(in), with(out) me is structured around the tension between the performative (the shared experience), the reality of the event (the objective action) and the simulation (artistic object). The device documents a range of actions related to contact wrestling and its associated classic ritual, in what is nowadays called freestyle wrestling—commonly represented as a fight between blue and red. My artistic research focuses on the action leading to the knockout position, the move that renders the opponent incapable of continuing to fight. In the scene, the exercise of positioning the body is expressed in fragmented form, to create the rhythm of the piece. There is an interest in the sculptural element of movement; the scene highlights the permanence of the gesture, the transferral of the sign to the body and the body as a sign in its durability. What do we experience when we accept the idea that human contact begins with a fight? How does that image question us in our present society? It is an exercise of abduction, of the relationship with the other (body), not of the other. It means coming to view the other's body as a living extension of our own. My thanks to the Women's Freestyle Wrestling Club of Munoa (Barakaldo) for their free and active cooperation in the making of this piece, and to the beach at Larrabasterra for its infinite beauty.
This exhibition has been possible thanks to the collaboration of Fundación Bilbaoarte. Opening hours Monday to Saturday: 11:00 - 18:30 Sunday and holidays: Closed