It has been 25 years since T R I Á L O G O S, a legendary exhibition with which the Artizar Gallery reopened its doors in the year 2000, after more than a year of closure for personal reasons. This exhibition brought together the work of six Canary Island visual artists at different stages of their careers: the already established Luis Palmero, José Herrera, and Juan Gopar, along with those who were beginning careers that would later prove to be splendid, such as Santiago Palenzuela, Julio Blancas, and Sema Castro.
This exhibition included a publication in which six authors reflected in their texts on the works presented by the artists.
On the occasion of the 25th anniversary of this exhibition, the Artizar Gallery aims to pay tribute to this event by proposing a similar format but focused on some of the most prominent creators born in the 1980s in our islands: Marco Alom (Tenerife, 1986), Romina Rivero (Tenerife, 1982), Alejandro Correa (Tenerife, 1984), Luna Bengoechea (Gran Canaria, 1984), Federico García Trujillo (Tenerife, 1988), and Idaira del Castillo (Tenerife, 1986). These artists have been key figures in our archipelago for many years, leaving behind the “emerging artist” label and entering that challenging “mid-career” phase, where they are often at their most creative but far from the “protection” of academia and without institutional support.
MARCO ALOM / Text by Dailo Barco
LUNA BENGOECHEA / Text by Verónica Farizo
IDAIRA DEL CASTILLO / Text by Adonay Bermúdez
ALEJANDRO CORREA / Text by Dalia de la Rosa
FEDERICO GARCÍA TRUJILLO / Text by Diana Padrón
ROMINA RIVERO / Text by Eduardo Caballero
Nuestro paraíso perdido
Dailo Barco
(about Marco Alom)
So saying, her rash hand in evil hour
Forth reaching to the fruit, she pluck’d, she eat: Earth felt the wound, and Nature from her seat
Sighing through all her works, gave signs of woe,
That all was lost
Paradise Lost. Book IX. John Milton (1667)
We are descendants of a time and a place that transects us. In this case, the 1980s and a territory in the form of an Atlantic archipelago located near Africa. For some people, the imaginary we share is closely related to the experiences of childhood, children of a generation that, since the end of the dictatorship, embraced the concern for a memory of the territory and the construction of our own cultural heritage, articulated in the space between a national and global ideology, both specific and universal. The Canary Islands are colonised by external and internal mythologies that challenge us to think about ourselves today, without complexes.
The 1980s revealed the intensification of change experienced in the Canary Islands, which went from agricultural monocultures to the monocultures of tourism (both of them full of myths and ruins). Marco Alom experienced this first hand, inhabiting an area of Tenerife that stopped growing fruit in order for concrete block housing to blossom in its place. A landscape of transit where we would walk together as children: we visited abandoned farmhouses, seeing the mats where they used to sit on the ground to eat; we climbed onto rusty diggers that we pretended were military tanks; we swam in half-filled irrigation ponds where herons would dazzle us in flight; we went into Guanche caves that we investigated as remnants of a former civilisation on the brink of disappearance. The ruins of an accumulation of decomposing worlds, as childhood itself is. But that cannot be explicitly seen in any of Marco Alom’s work; instead, it lies behind the fabric of each drawing, like a screen that affords biographical privacy on the back to show an archetypal exaltation on the front.
Ruins are the genesis of a personal imaginary that tries to reconstruct in a poetic way the lack of a structure that has already disappeared. Like in Aby Warburg’s Atlas Nmemosyne, Marco Alom collects references that tie together stories and images from classical mythology, religion and pre-Hispanic legends of the Canary Islands with the places and people that inhabited that dissolving world that marked his childhood, where the loss of the landscape builds heroes and monsters with the passing of time, evoking analogies in the spectator and situating them in an open cultural cartography. This way, paradise is recovered through drawing, confronting the epic of narration and technique with hell. Composing the line of a song turned into a distant echo in the Badlands, both El Lajial in southwest Tenerife, where he developed his work with pencil in hand, and the island of El Hierro, where he found his maturity with a pen.
The word ‘lajial’ in the Canary Islands refers to an area of solidified lava flow, a time condensed in rock that reaches its limit where the territory ends, like lava in the sea. From that border, birds soar like our imagination, burning everything in their path.
All that glitters is not gold
Verónica Farizo
(about Luna Bengoechea)
I
Walter Benjamin begins his well-known tract Experience and Poverty (1933) by recalling a fable contained in children’s books when he was young. It tells the tale of an old man who, shortly before dying, confided to his children that there was hidden treasure in his vineyard. To find it, they just had to dig. And so they did, they dug and they dug, but the treasure never appeared. When autumn came, however, the vines were laden with fruit. According to Benjamin, the moral of this story is that the treasure was not gold, but an awareness of the importance of hard work and perseverance, which will bring true riches.
For Benjamin, passing down this kind of knowledge is about sharing experience across the years; it’s about story-telling and the oral transmission of knowledge from one generation to the next through stories and tales, leaving an indelible mark on the person who receives such wisdom. Experience as such, therefore, brings about change in the person who must endure it, a change that can no longer be erased. And yet, for so long now nothing appears to be leaving a mark on us. These are the consequences of a modernity that Benjamin was quick to include within a constellation of concepts and which, in the case at hand, could well be situated within the so-called “impoverishment of experience”. A debilitation and a poverty that has to do with the application of a technique that, instead of serving our productive development and that of our society, was fatally employed as a destructive force. This is what the author recounts in another passage of Experience and Poverty, specifically when the soldiers returned silent from the battlefield after the First World War, unable to share anything they experienced or to utter a single word. Silent, because the destruction of cities and of human life had reached such levels that, upon their return, everything, except for the clouds, had changed.
II
Has anyone in recent times been able to hear a good story? The ability to tell a story involves many things. It’s not a matter of merely entertaining your audience; it’s about alluding to a common framework, to a territory where there are still things to share, to a place where communication is more than mere dialogue with words travelling from one place to another. Instead, they mark out a space that belongs to us all, allowing us to recognise ourselves in other people because they allude to a structure of shared references. However, as Paul Celan once said, in the twentieth century all the bridges had been broken and strangeness became part of our everyday existence. And this certainly seems to be the case, because modernity presents a dialectical tandem between emancipation and domination, between nature and culture, opposites that continue to be held taut by the very logic of modernity we have inherited.
The work of Luna Bengoechea is inserted within this critical reading by addressing the problem that characterises food in late capitalism. The food industry in the 21st century materialises better than anything else the tension that occurs in the growing / manufacture of our food. Since time immemorial, the feeding of living beings has shaped populations and determined their customs, has carved out the paths followed by those first nomadic communities that sought sustenance and has transformed vast territories into landscapes full of lines and colours with the advent of agriculture. Human beings had a direct relationship with the earth and nature, and subsistence and maintenance stemmed from an organic relationship: human beings worked, and the land provided. It was a gruelling world, too. Working days stretching from sunrise to sunset, physical exhaustion, battling the elements and everything that cannot be controlled would eventually be solved, presumably, through the application of a technocratic and systematising rationality, which was also required to meet the need to supply en mass the population that began to strain the cities at their seams, while leaving the countryside empty. Our present has inherited this scenario, while adding to our problems major disasters in a food industry typical of a neoliberal economy that has prioritised the million-dollar extraction business that promotes ultra-processed foods and genetic engineering, reducing the nutritional capacity of what we consume. As we said before, things have long since stopped leaving a mark on us. We are impoverished, each and every one of us, and Luna Bengoechea knows this all too well.
Her plaster renditions of fruits and vegetables created as part the It’s alive series show serialised figures in the shape of papaya, cucumbers, corn and tomatoes. Four basic foods, from the Americas and Asia, that have accompanied human beings since ancient times. And yet, nowadays, we are hard pressed to find a fruit or vegetable that has a genuine smell or flavour. It seems a contradiction, a sleight of hand, a fruit that is not fruit, that I ingest as such, but which does not nourish me, which does not satisfy me, which leaves me with the same feeling of emptiness as if I had eaten one of the beautiful yet lifeless pieces of fruit created by Luna Bengoechea. These beautiful pieces have what Benjamin saw in Baudelaire and Grandville, the living and the dead, together, as a dialectical pairing typical of modernity, like a great drama presented as a macabre feast through consumption. Nothing is what it seems. These pieces were presented in 2016 forming large carpets where the figures were arranged in strict lines. The reference to serial production underscores the difference between original and copy, between the fruit-fruit and the fruit that is not fruit, but which, nevertheless, is presented as such. They are consumer objects, ultimately similar to those lining the thousands of kilometres of supermarket shelving. Manufactured objects that are a type of fruit and vegetable typical of our century, which leave no mark, which have no smell, which do not keep us alive, but which, at the same time, gleam and seduce me, appearing before me like a beautiful spectacle: is it a food or an object of desire in a display cabinet?
III
The series of black and white photographs titled Spill shows fruits partially bathed in black liquid. They are neat, aseptic images, dominated by the colour white, except for the dark stain. It could be a pretty piece of fruit, coated in chocolate, but it does not appear to be so. Luna Bengoechea is playing with dual valency again. Her images are torn. The beautiful fruit breaks, as in It’s alive, and what it appears to be turns out to be something else, because, obviously, the fruit is covered with oil. So-called ‘black gold’ is at the heart of our food industry, as its use is necessary for the unlimited extraction of natural resources. Luna Bengoechea quotes the words of Yayo Herrero, who argues that what we eat today is nothing more than oil, since this fossil fuel is what has enabled a radical industrialisation of food that requires powerful machinery, chemicals and a robust transport network that crosses the planet from one side to the other. However, none of this is contained in the fruit and vegetables we buy. That is the magic of capitalism, to conceal the conditions under which the objects we consume are produced, and also to conceal, as Benjamin says, the relationships of display and consumption. So food is spectacularly beautiful; fruit is shinier than ever when it is available in the shops, but imprinted upon it is the destruction to which we are subjecting the planet. Of course, the important thing is that it looks good, that it encourages me to buy it, but that it does not talk to me, that it remains quiet, that it does not tell me how much energy and how much deterioration it has cost to bring this beautiful banana to my home. The important thing is that the phantasmagoria always remains alive.
Tinder gold
Adonay Bermúdez
(about Idaira del Castillo)
Instead, observation is increasingly exteriorized; the viewing body and its objects begin to constitute a single field in which inside and outside are confounded. Perhaps most importantly, both observer and observed are subject to the same modes of empirical study. (1)
In Techniques of the Observer (1990), the American art critic and essayist Jonathan Crary analysed the transformation of the gaze in modernity, taking into account new modes of observation conditioned by technological development and changes in subjective perception. Crary argued that the gaze is not a neutral or universal act, but a historical construction determined by the optical devices and sociocultural conditions of each era. This awareness of voyeurism, interpreted as the furtive observation or the prying gaze, is a highly attractive mechanism for theorising about the dynamics between public and private, between spectator and work of art, or between subject and object.
Idaira del Castillo, with her keen eye for observation, builds scenarios in which the gaze acquires a dominant role. Of course, her voyeuristic approach is at all times removed from the male gaze(2), that masculine or masculinised gaze that cinema has perpetuated for decades, about which the British theorist Laura Mulvey spoke in 1975. With our artist, characters are not observed as objects nor is there any obvious imbalance in power relations between the gazing subject (active) and the observed subject (passive). Nor is there a feeling of confinement, despite the fact that the action can be developed in a confined space. On the contrary, Del Castillo creates environments where the voyeur – us – is part of the scene itself – sometimes in a joint leading role sometimes as an extra –, promoting emotional dynamics between the observer and the observed marked by horizontal dialogue and respect.
The American theorist Rosalind E. Krauss, recalling the texts of Jean-Paul Sartre on Marcel Duchamp’s well-known Étant Donnés (1946-1966), reflected, so to speak, on a third character: the one who observes the voyeur. And what happens if the voyeur discovers they are being watched? What if someone surprises us spying on the characters created by Idaira del Castillo? However, as we know, what happens next in this scenario is not the performance of the show, but the interruption of the act.(3) The voyeur solidifies, the body of the observer [becomes] an object for consciousness(4), becomes visible to others and their espionage becomes a shared episode and, therefore, a collective gaze. Sartre said that the voyeur who has been caught by a third party loses power and assumes a position of shame before the person who catches them in the act. Shortly after we can see, we are aware that we too can be seen(5), reminding us of British art critic John Berger. However, in the work of Idaira del Castillo, surely due to the lack of peepholes and nudes, the opposite happens: there is recognition in the Other and that group feeling is reinforced; after all, in the twenty-first century with the all-powerful social media, we are all voyeurs.
In this respect, Idaira del Castillo not only documents the everyday, but reconfigures it and transforms it into that perfect place to reflect on the gaze and its ethical implications. The act of looking at the everyday, like those who delight in a theatrical performance that shows the commonplace tensions between reality and its representation, provokes an aesthetic experience that sits between familiarity and transgression. Del Castillo teleports us to the seventeenth century, to the domestic scenes popularised by Dutch painting in which the viewer accepts the role of silent observer. Think back to paintings such as Johannes Vermeer’s The Milkmaid (1658-1660) or Judith Leyster’s The Last Drop (1629) in which intimate moments are revealed, seemingly banal and alien to the eye of the spectator, whose gaze bursts into the scene intrusively and adopts the position of an external observer who profanes the limits of others’ privacy. Idaira del Castillo takes up this baton and introduces us to the satisfaction of looking that transcends mere perception; after all, observing is also an act of surrender. The actions performed by those who are being observed are not really relevant; it makes no difference whether they are pouring milk or staring at their mobile phone; what really interests the artist is that invasion of the private moment and the possibility of seeing ourselves reflected in the other.
They are seen from their respective territories, from the other side each time. It almost appears to be the diluted memory of a reflection, one that plays a basic role in the highly complex process of shaping subjectivity: we are conscious of our Self through the vision of the Other.(4) Here Estrella de Diego, clearly referencing Lacan, helps us to highlight two highly relevant aspects in the work of Idaira del Castillo: on the one hand, that Self as a construct structured through the relationship with the Other using everyday life; and, on the other, the reflection of the artist herself, that is, self-portrait. At this point, we must stress the need to forget the classic vision of reliable self-representation and instead embrace a much more open interpretation where self-referential possibilities are more tenuous. Since the beginning of her artistic career, Del Castillo has repeatedly represented scenes of an intimate nature, many of them based on her own experiences. However, in other cases, her production draws from anonymous figures or images taken from the internet, as is the case of Tinder Gold. Even in these cases, the artist establishes a dialogue with her identity, incorporating subtle references to her subjectivity.
The work in question presents the image of a young woman dressed in lace, absorbed by her mobile phone. The title of the piece suggests that she is browsing the paid version of a popular dating app, which places the scene in an easily recognisable context within the contemporary experience. The familiarity of this image lies in the omnipresence of platforms such as Tinder in current relationship dynamics, either from the personal experience of the viewer or from their indirect knowledge. However, the interest of this piece is intensified by understanding its self-referential dimension: the artist projects in this representation a reflection of her own experience since, during a certain time in her life, she used this dating app. It is at this moment that the wise words of curator and art critic Carlos Díaz-Bertrana resonate when defining the work of our artist as a poetic that is as intimate as it is universal.(6)
Idaira del Castillo is intimacy and everyday life; she is observation and a sequence of apparently insignificant or trivial moments, but imbued with a deep emotional and symbolic charge. She is luminosity, recovered fabrics and melancholy tonality(8). She is painting, rhythms, raucous chromatics and textures. She’s nostalgia, a cat and an unhinged smile. She is distortion, memories and Carioca magic markers. To enter the brazen universe of our artist implies giving free rein to encounters, to movements, to letting oneself be pierced by missteps(9), as the curator and art critic Dalia de la Rosa would say. Idaira del Castillo seduces, stitches together and hooks us; she’s the person you will inevitably make a match with on Tinder.
(1) Crary, Jonathan: Techniques of the observer, on vision and modernity in the nineteenth century. MIT Press. Massachusetts, p 73.
(2) Mulvey, Laura (1975). Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. Screen, Volume 16, issue 3 Autumn, p 11.
(3) Krauss, Rosalind E.: El inconsciente óptico [The optical unconscious.] Editorial Tecnos. Madrid, 1997, p 122.
(4) Krauss, op. cit., p 123.
(5) Berger, John: Modos de ver [Ways of seeing.]. Editorial Gustavo Gili. Barcelona, 2001, p 15.
(6) De Diego, Estrella: No soy yo. Autobiografía, performance y los nuevos espectadores. Ediciones Siruela. Madrid, 2011, p 60.
(7) Díaz-Bertrana, Carlos (2022): Idaira del Castillo, el dibujo umbilical. Canarias7.
(8) Castro Flórez, Fernando: Hilvanando la vida. [Consideraciones sobre el imaginario cotidiano de Idaira del Castillo]. CAAM – Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno. Gran Canaria, 2025, p 16.
(9) Quote taken from the text Dibujar contra el olvido: madriguera, gato y olor impregnado written by Dalia de la Rosa on the occasion of the exhibition Mercurialis annua Hyles tithymali or henbit dead-nettle juice for the Barbary spurge hawk-moth by Idaira del Castillo at the Casa-Museo León y Castillo de Telde. Gran Cana
Después de la atmósfera acerada: densidad y vibración.
Dalia de la Rosa
(about Alejandro Correa)
… we have just begun to take the first steps where, never before has contingency spanned as many potential successes and advances as failures and setbacks. This condition that we can always conclude or postpone, considering that: what has to happen has not yet happened; but, at the rate things are going, we will soon see it.
Ernesto Valcárcel.
In February 2013, for the first time I came across a work of art that would over the years become locked not only in my own imagination, but also in the minds of all those who are drawn to images that pull us towards the edge. In those years, we could not remain blinkered to the economic crisis and community assemblies, political upheaval and the generational vertigo tipping us towards failure. In some ways, the whole generation born in the 80s have experienced certain paradigm shifts; like the fact that the work ethic culture is a tool of capitalism, that failure is another stage of life and that we would face contingencies within the welfare state that would force us to rethink our relationship with the collective, the notion of consumption, the fragility of nature and that, in the end, we belong to a symbiotic community that is based not only on human relations, but also on our relationship to the non-human.
These contingencies are not static; they surface from time to time, and our historical memory forces us to think, rethink and position ourselves critically in the conditions in which we exist. So time does not allow us a static contemplation of history. Instead history interacts with our minds almost like a mirror, as if we are constantly looking back at the past from the present. Perhaps all these questions seem disconnected and the relationships between them banal, even, but in 2013 Alejandro Correa Izquierdo presented a series of paintings at Galería Stunt that drove me to take such an approach, one that I had no name for as yet. Until now.
Today, as it did back then, the work of this artist feels —because feeling is the most appropriate way to relate to it— mysterious, and images from the history of art, from the English and German romantic aesthetics, but also from literature and poetry swarm to the forefront of our minds…. I am thinking here of the atmosphere captured in Goethe’s Faust, of the stories of Poe. But what is slotting back together in my head, today, is how all that Western culture feeds into a prevailing contemporary aesthetic that has shaped the way we relate to beauty, society, politics and even territory. Romanticism is a current of thought and an aesthetic that goes hand in hand with humanistic development, science, exploration, but from a certain place of discomfort, since the romantics saw the growth of the rational and the instrumental beginning to highlight the idea that nature has as its foundation a mechanism that can be known, and which can be used for our own ends(1). The world was used as a mechanism at the height of the Industrial Revolution, and I can’t stop thinking now that the first characters represented by Correa Izquierdo back in 2013 were potential protagonists of a social history that moved in an atmosphere of steel, smoke, iron and technical evolution and that nature responded with those incipient trees of branched trunks and dark leaves in a context in which architectures seemed to intersect. Now, I can only connect those images with the baggage that has been gaining traction during these years.
I sense that Correa Izquierdo takes up his position from this place, although I suppose, as Ernesto Valcárcel writes in a text about this artist from 2019, that Duchamp is right and, once the work comes out of the studio, the looking subjects have their own interpretations of the fact. Over the years, I have sensed that the relationship between pictorial matter and the artist’s discourse go hand in hand, even if this is never made explicit beyond the power of introspection, the need to show the importance of nature and how subjects relate to these two symbolic spaces appearing and disappearing from the frame of reference of his painting. So, recalling Valcárcel again, I find myself “guided by my own sensations” when contemplating a work of very low density, which offers a stillness as strong as that of the most abstract painting, which gives way to a place where imagination and memory coexist as materials in constant vibration. This vibration, especially now in the images that are part of this exhibition in 2025, translates into a tinkling image that vibrates and gradually takes shape from the distance into the foreground. In other words, the whole scene develops almost kinetically and when it reaches us we feel that beating; we can even feel its composition.
In these works, as in many others, from the most abstract through to thousands of dots, that feeling of growth is evident, like a dense light coming from the back of the picture. That flash is, for me, the evidence that, beyond the artist’s intention, what we see are sparks of the present, of the questions that call to us, of the situations that surround us, of the fears that accuse us and of which both time and matter are two perishable spheres. Correa Izquierdo begins from the imagination as a space for the creation of his scenes or intentions, but the observation of his context —he lives in a secluded place, surrounded by nature— prompts you not only to narrate the modelled images that have the ability to ask us questions, but also to generate visual confluences.
I see this capacity for observation as an act of disassociation, which allows for an almost transcendence of the gaze when observing something concrete. A transcended gaze, which takes us away from the noise and concentrates on details such as light, the materiality of nature and the architecture that sometimes appears. This way of looking is cellular; it separates and distinguishes the micro from the macro and breaks down into an infinite number of small movements that seem to be chemically forming the matter of the image. I wonder if we are not contemplating images that speak of the origin and closure of the world, images of our generation that speak directly to our face? Beyond looking for references as I clumsily did in 2013, I now realise that what Alejandro Correa offers is his way of understanding the world, of analysing its functioning, but in the sphere of the infinitesimal, like thousands of quaking particles that progressively shape the matter that in turn shapes us and which are magnetised around a nucleus —perhaps like the Earth’s core— forming lines of meaning, spaces of meaning and balance; in other words, horizon lines.
The horizon throughout the narrative of his painting has been progressively changing, and figures, architectures and nature have been related to that loss, absence or dissipation so as to be constantly rearranging. I say again that sometimes all his work seems like a cosmic journey, in the sense of particles that approach one other and form images of the past and the present without the presumption of a sidereal future. In 2016, with Horizontes, there was a happy alignment of a natural geography, where the air was not completely saturated and the trees were overwhelming structures, almost sacred and of mystical beauty. Meanwhile, we get the impression that in 2019 a shift in perspective or a deepening begins to occur. As an aside, we do not know whether Correa simply scrutinises the sky, the ground, or expands matter so many times as to break down reality. There, in DUM, I lost my horizon, I became destabilised, but for some reason I did not break down completely because, fortunately, the painting/canvas is finite and I managed to get out of it. Sometimes, the very act of contemplation is about giving yourself over completely to the object of your gaze, and it is not always easy to emerge unscathed from something that appeals to your way of looking and understanding what surrounds you. Because every gesture has connotations; it puts new meanings on the table or it acts, once again, like a mirror. It is up to us whether we react violently or serenely to what we see reflected back.
As these horizons change the arrangement of matter, time is occurring. Thus, the Meanwhile for the artist is embodied in a concern that ultimately has been woven into all his work from the very beginning – time – both on an abstract level and in its carnal quality of the rusting of matter. And this reconnects me with my first impression of that Steely atmosphere of 2013.
Years have gone by, and I see much more than a late-romantic filiation; I perceive a way of indicating to us his vision of the world, of the interior, of the quantum. Scenes without a temporal order have passed before our eyes, sometimes very blurred and others totally abstracted of a concrete representation. Because this “delightful terror” or “romantic future” of Romanticism is no longer moral; now the visual body that surrounds us is of such crudeness that it is capable of numbing the critical nerve, of making us feel totally separated from the conflicting realities that are on the other side of the screen.
It is for this reason, as was the case previously with those pieces, that the work of this artist supposes a constant dichotomy between the act of retreating in a haven and the feeling of contemplating something that is wholly plugged into our time; that Meanwhile that is peculiarly Correa’s. From this point of view, his pictorial practice is dissenting; it is beyond all empty contemporary nomenclature and is also a draw for those tired or superficial eyes that just want to rest. But ultimately it is a lure, because you are taking with you an image that will ask questions later, which carries with it connotations about the dynamics of relationships between subjects, between subjects and the environment, and how this wields the power of a reaper that turns against itself and everything else…. And it is at that point that we find ourselves; in a dense and vibrant place on the edge of the horizon line.
(1) Safranski, Rüdiger. (2009). Romanticismo. Una odisea del espíritu alemán. Barcelona: Tusquets Editores, p. 174, 175.
Phonofiction trialogue
Diana Padrón
(about Federico García Trujillo)
You can feel the beat…
but the music only began after we started to expand.
At first, everything was just one dot.
Do you remember?
Before anything else, before space, before time, we were all squeezed into one tiny dot. There was no up or down, no inside or outside, but there we were, packed together, with no space to stretch or yawn from boredom… until finally Italo Calvino decided that everything should explode and boom! …we scattered across the galaxies. Only then did we start to feel rhythm in the cosmos, music…
.. . . . . . . . . . . and I can sing the song.
And we hadn’t met again since then,
had we?
It seems that the Hubble Telescope has confirmed the rhythmic expansion of the universe, but this was something that had not only been sensed by Pythagoras, but also by John Cage and certainly the Space Cats who, from their hometown of Witbank, created fresh, raw Afro-disco full of cosmic layers for us to dance our way through.
But are you gonna dance?
I reckon so; you have to: for months and months now, Federico García Trujillo has been patiently painting his Space Cat, layer upon layer, to the rhythm of the music. By the way, did you know that the Latin word capa means both layer and cape, therefore sharing its etymology with the item of clothing that Dante imagined himself with, first descending through every layer of the earth’s crust to Hell and passing through every sphere of Paradise later? Each of these phases represented a learning process, a process aimed at acquiring a skill, knowledge…
Oh really? Do you think so? Well, you’re right… that way of imagining the world is found today in video games. In Gravity Rush, for example, it is possible to sneak through cracks in time, phase by phase, layer by layer, to reconstruct the meaning of our memory…thanks to a cat from outer space. Of course, that’s what it’s all about! Going through each of these phases of work, each layer of paint, to find the multiple meanings of the image! But why am I talking about image when we’re standing in front of a painting? Well, the way I see it, the painting became an image, an artefact, when it went from being a two-dimensional dimension to a palimpsest of representations. Beneath one image, there is always another image, Douglas Crimp said a while ago.
Or do I have to play it harder?
Beneath each painting in the P. As Music series by Federico García Trujillo are more images or ready-mades, representations found or appropriated, what does it matter? It’s about recognising those multiple meanings -decisions- that occur with each layer of paint. Yes, of course, you can call it “pictorial conceptualism” and yes, of course it must have taken into account the work of Gerhard Richter.
How? Who said a painting can only be two-dimensional?
Shhh…! Did you hear that?
“Non ragioniam di lor’, ma guarda e passa”
… that’s what the mysterious cat just said, mere moments before turning its back on us, stalking its way through that cosmic snow. Our cat – a kind of Virgil from the age of Instagram – seems to invite us to embark on a geological journey inside the painting and offers to guide us through each layer. And we must dance our way through, defying gravity, through a sonic fiction, phonofiction, which “opens up the secret life of forms”. Isn’t that right, Kodwo Eshun? What if we end up in hell or, worse, without music, in one little dot?
Let’s get dooown; to Mother Earth.
Projecting the wound: rituality, community and memory
Eduardo Caballero
(about Romina Rivero)
A wound must be reopened if there are signs of infection or if it is failing to heal properly, as this can cause chronic pain or reduced mobility. And if the wound closed with foreign bodies trapped inside, it must also be reopened to remove them.
Can there be such a thing as shared wounds? Personally I think there can, that they are increasingly numerous and that they are not necessarily shared by bonds of proximity. Nor do I think we know exactly where these wounds are; what we do know is that they hurt or at least niggle away at us and prevent free movement.
If we don’t know where these wounds are, where do we open to heal them? We sense, we sense foreign bodies with which we long to maintain a more direct bond, to undo their alienness, to find the wound and do what is necessary. But, they have long been trapped beneath the sutures of an improperly treated wound. The alternative, then, lies in the possibility of developing a form of spectral diagnosis, delving into the ability to explore the non-visible, to perceive the resonances that remain trapped, engaging in dialogue with ghosts, with the non-living, to bring into the present traumas of the past that still hurt us deeply today, deep inside, wounds cauterised with lead, whose toxic sequelae now hamper the possibility of healing. The spectral demand that we inhabit a dislocated time that moves freely between and interlocks past and present, which transcends the imposed logic of a linear time and warns us that what appears to be distant is perhaps much closer.
Opening and reopening these wounds allows us to delve into the stories that have been hidden beneath the scars, into the life stories of Others that are partly responsible today for preventing the eternal advancement of Otherness as one of the foundations of the world we inhabit, obstructing the dignity of most of those who live in it.
We inhabit such a deeply rooted framework of reality that it becomes invisible to us. We move within it, transform ourselves within its boundaries, without stopping to notice its presence, question its contours, detect the wounds that it inscribes on our body. Complex and necessary is the exercise of situating oneself within the boundaries, within the unintelligible, of questioning language because even words are traitorous in the construction of an alternative reality; they are regulated, imposed from the centre and from above, supplanting other communication systems such as the orality of indigenous cultures that have not only been a vehicle of information, but also form deep connections with the environment, collective memory and the spiritual plane.
The piece Yo Merezco [I am worthy] by Romina Rivero was constructed in a community of five women, which gives the work a unique and distinctive power. Paradoxical as it may seem, at this present time, the gesture of taking on a vital act—in this case, the construction of a work of art—collectively, is itself a disruptive act. The system that strangles us today has focused its strategy of the actions on individualism, fraying the bonds that sustain communality. Reversing this dynamic is an urgent necessity if we are to begin tackling the ecosocial crisis that transects us today.
The piece is born through the formulation of a text that acts almost like a mantra, a ritual, which, through the repetition of “I am worthy” at the beginning of each statement, becomes a performative tool of resistance and affirmation of being. In essence, the text alludes to human dignity and the right to lead a fulfilling, whole life, which should be intrinsic to existence, but which ends up being something that we must lay claim to or become aware of its absence.
What is presented in this work is the acoustic record of this text, where the sound wave form materialises in two ways: on the one hand, through a graphic made of gold leaf; on the other, by suturing the fabric of the canvas, which in turn reveals a wound. From it, the energy generated by the sound of the ritual emerges in gold, laying claim to something that should be guaranteed to us as human beings. The suture of the wound passes through those folds where we must open to promote the healing of all that makes human dignity and the enjoyment of a full life impossible.
The vegetation, the flowers, grow vertically supported by the intervals that the suture and the sound graphic generate. A non-human presence bursts forward, calling on us to reflect on all the above, showing that the possibility of a full life must necessarily include the full life of other species. In turn, this vegetation ties in with the notion of feminine care for the ritual, the wound, the scar, which women have practiced and mastered since time immemorial, gathering knowledge of medicinal plants and the way they are used, laying the foundations for modern medicine. According to ecofeminist researcher Carolyn Merchant, the modern scientific method replaced the organic worldview that saw nature, women and the Earth as protective mothers, with another worldview that degraded them to the category of permanent resources.
The piece Cicatrices sin dolor [Scars without pain] has a much more intimate component, a personal cosmos that weaves a lifeline in search of the dignity and wholeness mentioned previously. The two pieces are intertwined in an indispensable symbiotic relationship: it is not a question of opposing individuality and collectivity, but of reconstituting their balance. Healing and care must regain their community dimension without nullifying individual autonomy, recognising that wholeness is only possible through interdependence.
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