INTRA exhibition, Artistic practice as a model of experience

No yo (2018) is a video work that explores the different problems related to the voice as a physical phenomenon in speech and discourse. It is a series of six episodes that each correspond to a different character, all of them seemingly narrated by a female mouth, which out of context, and appears in the middle of a solid block of white flesh/makeup/nude skin colour. The female mouth serves as visual support for a voice, but the sounds of the voice (the words spoken) do not emanate from this source. The mouth (Ikram Bouloum) appears to say the words, but neither the voice, nor the words (Lúa Coderch) belong to it. The mismatch or discrepancy between the two speakers is resolved (and not always) by violating the image, giving the mouth a certain mechanical appearance. No yo takes as its title and starting point a play and film by Samuel Beckett, from the early 1970s (or at least the memory of having seen it two or three years ago). In Beckett's original piece, a woman's mouth appears out of context in the middle of a solid black block, and it recalls, in an interrupted narrative, several episodes that it denies having happened to the speaker.

_fantàsticas_<3 (2019) is a video whose title alludes to the double meaning of the word, i.e. that of being illusory and extraordinary. cap_1 love_ patriarchal_screens_projection is the first of four chapters, still under construction, and which address the relationships between "politics_body_language_I_love". It is a video that combines the tales of love that exist between mother and daughter, and the cognitive and emotional mechanisms that operate in the love experience and its link with the techno-patriarchal system.

Santuari profà (Profane Sanctuary)

This is the architectural model of an evidently formal character that is inspired by Deyan Sudjic's theories on architecture and power. The work seeks to show how architecture has always been dependent on the patronage of factual powers, speculative investment, or religion. It outlines the lack of ethics and morality in monumental projects, the megalomaniacal delusion of the powerful, and of architects with respect to public space or the city as a democratic artefact.

Transfer Teixit viu (2018) is a performative and audio-visual work that demonstrates the primacy given to processes and emergent properties over results and isolated elements. In it, a physical net of wool demonstrates the position and intensity – the number of interventions - of each human agent within a certain temporal and spatial margin within a system of relationships, as well as this individual’s connection with other physical-symbolic elements that are part of the discourse and which also experience transformations (plants, stones, pieces of paper with annotations, digital devices, cables, projected images, aluminium foil, plastics, printed diagrams, sculptures, etc.).

In an advanced phase of the dialogue, the flows of tissue that derive from the movement of hands when speaking, and the changes in the interlocutors’ positions, who become—transmit each minor tension and fluctuation, and this in turn extends the transfer of knowledge into a physical dimension. The conceptual objective is to re-locate artistic research into an expanded perspective within the knowledge society, while assuming the value and problems that involve its relational, affective and sensory dimensions and, therefore, those that are not exclusively wielded and weaponised by capital.

This piece was part of the Art-Science-Society Transfers working board, which was led by Esther Moñivas Mayor, Alejandra López Gabrielidis and Beatriz Regueira, at the Shared Prototypes Symposium. Collaborative Artistic Experiences, which was held in November 2018 at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Barcelona. At the event, Neomaterialist methodological prototypes were put into operation within the ACTSE (art-science-technology-society-ecology) framework, using Donna Haraway’s concepts on the cyborg (1991) as a basis, as well as those concepts on diffraction and intra-action, as outlined by Karen Barad (2007).

The work I am presenting is the continuation of the Rock, Paper, Scissors project. It is a 3D sculptural piece that reproduces (on a small scale) the pick that my father and grandfather used to work with. The latter, as I explain in the article that appears in this publication, had been a prisoner in the workers' battalions, who were forced to rebuild railway lines after the Spanish Civil War by the Fascist dictatorship. The pick therefore symbolizes not only work, but also punishment and submission. Making it into a reproducible object facilitates debate with respect to my own memory, which is both personal and simultaneously shared by thousands of people. The small size of the work recalls pieces from board games, or souvenirs, or the exhibits in a collection, although in this case the original item of reference does not come from a work of great feats, but from everyday tools that are full of experiences.

My work focuses on the contemporary perception of time: this is a concept that has gone from a production system with its own predictable and patterned rhythms, to a system based on the transmission of data, the temporality of which is diffuse. This situation generates paradoxes and contradictions in everyday life, as it seems to make time pass at different rates in the same space. Pictorial actions, videos and three-dimensional objects, which enter into dialogue with the constructive elements of painting, go to make up a set of pieces that are characterized by the repetitive representation of certain materials, all of which have been assembled with the intention of awakening a specific imaginary world: fragments of stones with a high percentage of silicon, Prussian blue and marking paint.

In this context, flint becomes a fundamental element of this conceptual universe; its material qualities make it possible to unite two far-distant points in the history of technology: the tools of prehistory and the computing devices of the 21st century.

The work I have presented here stresses the more materialistic aspects of my current labours, and it presents these paradoxes and different rhythms in a suspended time. I have sought to slow down, or even stop, something that is practically impossible to hold back, given that we are constantly called to action in a call to "urgency", as Boris Groys notes. In contrast to what occurred in previous decades, in which knowledge, work and leisure were all separated by different temporal divisions, we are now forced to act, constantly living through overlapping times and rhythms.

This work, Apoteci (2019) has arisen from the continued dialogue between art, science and technology that I have been drawing on in my most-recent works. I have used a wide variety of media, such as meticulously-drawn botanical-like works, die-cutting processes and overlapping sheets of paper or, on this occasion, 3D printing.

In this project I tried to approach the behaviour and characteristics of a specific biological structure: that of lichens, with their symbiotic nature. These plants are able to store water thanks to one of their components, namely algae. I also considered the concept of layers, which is something intrinsic to 3D technology.
In order to start off with this initial idea, it was important to use a material that behaved organically and that gave meaning to my initial proposal. I tried using a translucent material, a mixture of ingredients from different algae and tubers that had high water-absorbent properties. The substance is gelatinous and moist to the touch, and it retains its characteristics for some 24 to 48 hours after being printed. However it later changes, depending on the conditions in its local environment. The model, once exposed to the air, gradually loses its qualities, it changes its appearance until it dries completely and its size is reduced until it is a mere tiny sample of what it once was.

What is really surprising, however, is that this same print, when rehydrated, is able to recover its original shape and retain all its original details and measurements. I am fascinated by its elasticity and resilience, which is one that is usually associated with living organisms. It is as if the printed piece encloses a memory that is capable of activating the opening of the apothecia of a lichen between the overlapping layers of material.

When you walk through the streets of the city, close to the facades, you can see "the face of architecture", where the buildings poke their heads out into the public street; you seem to sense some of the character, both of the city’s inhabitants and its builders, you perceive a way of life and a historical era.

It is in this journey between architectures and people, with a gaze that seeks to reject the whole, and focus on the fragmented, where we discover new formal relationships that exist between the facades of the buildings and where the limit is both border and nexus.

30/28-26 (2018) seeks to signal a precise line, one defined by the meeting of two adjacent facades. It is a sign of a space that does not reach a single place and invites the viewer to confront a line in the middle of two places.
30/28-26 points to a precise, real point, a division that does not reveal its interior - as a portal does - but only points to it, this is a limitation like the line, where one place ends and another begins.

The work comprises a line marked in blue on a concrete wall, in the same fashion as used by builders when marking surfaces. This line is flanked by ceramic tiles, which indicate the numbering of two adjacent buildings and it faithfully reproduces to scale—using capture and 3D printing techniques—where the mouldings of the plinths of two buildings meet at this point.

The utilization and ownership of the available space have established a limit, a line between the different constructions. This border, which internally takes the form of a surface, manifests itself in the public space, on the street, as a line where the buildings both separate and connect at the same time. This is a line that gives continuity to the architecture and that separates the people who live on either side of it.

Layers of the brain. Neural fictions that respond to interpretations of atrophies and obstacles that occur in the brain and that constitute the stress maps of dementias. The brain understood as a space filled with stars, a place where star cells are suffocated by a siege of axons and astrocytes.
Neuronal Fictions I. Drawing with coloured pencils on paper 100 gr/m2, 21 × 29.7 cm, 2019.
Neuronal Fictions II. Drawing with coloured pencils on paper 100 gr/m2, 21 × 29.7 cm, 2019.
Neuronal Fictions III. Graphite, coloured pencil, wax and text on paper 100 gr/m2, 21 × 29.7 cm, 2019.
Neuronal Fictions IV. Pencil on paper 100 gr/m2, 21 × 29.7 cm, 2019.
Neuronal Fictions V. Digital print and pen text on paper 100 gr/m2, 21 × 29.7 cm, 2019.
Neuronal Fictions VI. Pen drawing on paper 100 gr/m2, 21 × 29.7 cm, 2019.
Neuronal Fictions VII. Pencil on paper 100 gr/m2, 21 × 29.7 cm, 2019.
Set of Fictions. Coloured pencil, graphite and pen on paper 100 gr/m2, variable dimensions, 2019