Title of the exhibition: Our Blood& Guts
Artist: Iván Gómez
Place: Arteleku
Dates: from19 th October to 7 th November (from 09:00 to 20:00)
Inauguration: 19th Octubre, at 19:30.
18h: Lecture by Pablo Marte: THE CONTRACT OF THE MIRROR
Whether we like it or not, everything has its time; everything has its summons to death. These are the echoes from whose resonances civilisations and cultures were forged. This exhibition journeys through different times: geological time, the time of a constructive intelligence... and also the time of ruin, a tomorrow or a yesterday, where that intelligence is already past. It was and now only its remains are left behind. The absolute time of memory. Time for mourning and time for forgetting. Time for cruelty, for forgiveness and for shame.
The imprecise time, useless or not, of desires, of waiting, of the interval. A time in turn for contradictions, for error, for pain, for tying up ends, for clear impossibility.
Nevertheless, in Our Blood and Guts, time is above all a landscape, a stage, on which the blueprint of a mnemonic architecture is drawn like a design. For the piece is based on the premise that a family member has disappeared suddenly without trace and can only legally be declared dead after a certain length of time has elapsed. For his family and friends, that time is, to some extent, a non-time. It makes mourning impossible, and at the same time it forces on them a very particular re-writing of memory. It is a text which is, for the moment, improvised and intermittent. Despite the impositions of routine, it must renounce its claim to be viewed with the finality of the finished story, to be raised as a consolidated edifice.
Within this territory Iván Gómez places objects and pictures around certain figures: arising out of the discovery of a cloud at the base of a lunar crater called Theaetetus (which he relates to Plato's dialogue of the same name on the mark and persistence of knowledge in experience and memory) Our Blood and Guts examines the nebulous and opaque nature of these processes, of which night and fog are –as in the terrible Nazi decree on extermination and forced deportation– the practises of a post-human civilization, the purely formal aspect of the law taken to the nth degree, as in Kafka's Trial, to which the exhibition also alludes.
A pernicious indifference, vague as a ghost wandering among the shelves and showcases of the great museums of modernity. Whether it is the cross-section of Plutonian rocks, the quaternary geology, the Ming vases, the canoe from the Onawo people of Tierra del Fuego, a collection of Charles III coins or an eighteenth century stuffed lion, each object’s time adjusted to its reference in the appropriate file, what is left, irreversibly silent and silenced, is that which was their time, which oscillates in frequencies of existence that cataloguing and archiving cannot retain. That indifference prowls, like the ghost, in a non-time, yet it always has the features of a trace, of a memory. Its nature therefore appears to be the indiscernibility between archive and memory; when, for example, one sees the stuffed animals in the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin, one is forced to classify them in a given time, under the aegis of which, provided certain stories prevail over others, people will come who can do so with the authority of the ordered register and the exhaustive inspection, and the solvency afforded to them by the hegemonic nature of their cultural construction, which brooks no opposition. Will-o'-the-wisps. Even the seams in any of those stuffed animals know that the time in which they float indifferently is only that of a representation confronting a disturbing eternity, of which they will never form part: it neither waits for them nor corresponds to them.
Pablo Marte.
THE CONTRACT OF THE MIRROR
A lecture by Pablo Marte
“Please. Live my youth again in another way. In short, be my son and avenge me.”Yukio Mishima. Forbidden Colours
(..) When Donald Sutherland’s character in Body Snatchers says, with cold, dispassionate determination, that there is no possible solution for the human race, he is also levelling an accusation. That gesture showed me my whole childhood, and it was also related to another image, the face of Victor with which L'Enfant Sauvage ends, the strange gaze of Victor coming up the stairs, following his return home. An absolute incomprehension separates the two gazes. But at the same time it relates them. For the child's gaze is also accusing. It seems to be saying: “Why do you force me to belong to this world?” As a single response, the scream that emerges from that face stripped of its humanity, rancourously, with the blind firmness of unresolved resentments dwelt upon over many years in dark compartments of the character (...)
“ Someone must have made a false accusation against Josef K., for he was arrested one morning without having done anything wrong.” - Franz Kafka, The Trial
“K. in bed. Covered with a white sheet” - Peter Weiss, The New Trial
