life in the folds

 

 

I believe we are at a time when it is crucial to discuss freedom of thought if we want to live in a society in which different points of view can mingle and substantiate our understanding of equality and justice. From an artistic point of view, I’ve researched the way in which writing is encrypted by inventing a form of abstract typography as a strategy to preserve contents that would be silenced if they were in legible form. For the Mexican Pavilion at the Biennale Arte 2017 I encoded the alphabet as a formal language, starting off with abstraction until I got to a level of figuration where communication can occur openly.

Life in the Folds is based on the title of a book by Henri Michaux. This title evokes an image that is about being between things: between the pages of a book or a newspaper, between countries and cultures, between opposed ideologies, between oneself and the other. This “being between” has been the focus of my artistic exploration: masks, whether taken literally or as visual language, placed like a membrane between conflicting contexts.

The installation consists of formally interrelated pieces that merge in a film. For the work, I used seventy-four flat, irregular shapes —cardboard cutouts— with which I made an alphabet that mutated into musical instruments, used to tell the story of a family of immigrants who were lynched: a story based on hundreds of cases that have taken place in Mexico over the last few decades.

In this piece, images of migration and lynching are metaphors of a generalized crisis that we need to discuss. On the one hand, migration is the consequence of current economic policies that have decimated entire communities or even regions. On the other, the murders that have taken place over the last decades, the recent executions carried out by citizens and private militias evince conditions of self-governance, where people administer justice subjectively, though in principle this is something the State should administer objectively.

Placing these metaphors in a national structure —paradoxically situated on a global platform— allows us to ask urgent questions that concern us on both a local and a global level. In view of the new nationalist movements’ opposition to globalization, at a time when most of a nation’s territory already has owners, what type of nationalism are we talking about?

- Carlos Amorales
March 29, 2017

 

 

The exhibition

 

Carlos Amorales has been interested in how images and words give form to reality and determine us. Thus, since de mid nineties, he has done a series of projects in which he questions the link between art and society in relation to language and subjectivity, forms of power, and institutional practices.

In continuity with previous research, Life in the folds of Amorales introduces a formal language that unfolds in a variety of media within the installation. The artist developed a series of compositions that transit from abstraction to an ilegible text, and this, to a phonetic language and to three-dimensional forms that emit music, to converge cinematographically in the story of the lynching of a migrant family.

The lynching is an extra-legal collective act in which the folk takes justice in their own hands. In today’s context, a lynching transcends the local specificity to manifest globally through the mediatic space. In Life in the folds, the image of the lynching turns into a metaphor of the global politic situation, where the weakening of the State has led to a society in which justice becomes popular execution. The Law, as the extra-lega justice, operate in the very roots of language, likewise they undermine the notion of truth and common good, exercised by justice. In this sense, the lynching is an archetype of irrational violence that works from other forms of language oblivious to the law, as rumor, gossip and lie. 

The installation takes borrowed its name from the eponymous novel of Henri Michaux, in which he treats diverse poetic means to deal with suffering in the immediate postwar period. The exhibition is originated from the series of paintings Geometric splendor, project accomplished in 2015, and that originated the abstract forms that are the seed of Life in the folds. It opens with a set of poems written in an encrypted alphabet created by the artist with abstract three-dimensional shapes. The texts displayed on seven tables, that formally refer us to paper sheets, imply a transition from the typographic to the phonetic. Each letter is a ceramic wind musical instrument, also known as ocarina that, when played, releases a specific sound for each letter. This coded language can be interpreted verbally, but can also be played as music. Around a thousand ocarinas establish a relation with an graphic musical score of 92 pages mounted on the walls of the pavilion. All these elements come together in the film The cursed village, which narrates the story of a migrant family that is lynched as they arrive to a foreign town. Where a puppeteer controls the characters of the story and a music ensemble playing the ocarinas, interprets the soundtrack, dialogues, and soundscape of the film.

Performative practice has been a constant aspect in the work of Carlos Amorales. In Life in the folds, the artist presents a performance that activates the elements of the installation. The work conjugates simultaneously theater, music and poetry. The ensemble Liminar will interpret the score for ocarinas and will showcase live music for the film. Simultaneously, two actors will give away a newspaper created by the artist and written with the encrypted alphabet, which contains critical essays on relevant Mexican current politics.

In Life in the folds a universe opens between image, figuration, speech, phoneme music and narrative. Formally consequent, the work risks ethic and esthetic categories understood as opposites: law before poetry, clarity before darkness, synthesis before narration, and figuration before abstraction. In this way, the work arises from the tension between the very concrete and the very abstract, it is here where a series of poetic images related to the places where we find life, appear; not in the middle of the pages but in the folds, in the cracks, and in the breaches, in the smallest things.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ocarinas, Life in the folds, 2017
High temperature enameled ceramics
Variable dimensions