A boca de incendio (susurro y delirio)

"A boca de incendio" invokes the fury of our times, but also the warmth of the tongue that heralds hope; it navigates through memories and ruins from which life resurfaces. The artworks function as the unsettling power (of a mouth) that seeks to contain the world's ardor. The visual thought here is whisper and delirium: it is—in a simultaneous image—that almost inaudible manifesto (beautiful and confusing) and, at the same time, the disturbing hallucination (urgent and scandalous). The exhibition urges us to "open our eyes" (like a command), to be present before aesthetics that strip us of indifference to realities that demand a more conscious existence. What does it mean to inhabit this world together? We are all the deaths we have survived and all the lives yet to be lived.

Érika Martínez Cuervo

A BOCA DE INCENDIO (susurro y delirio)

AT THE MOUTH OF FIRE (whisper and delirium)

A mural that subverts the iconography of another time. T dislocate history (and the sacred).

Carve an existential sentence into the wall (sculpt it).

A perforated wall (the sculptural gesture) that configures the map of the world (the beautiful announcement of ruin, its glimmer).

The revival of a myth about the water sources that gave rise to a city (the fable of ambition).

The fiction of a scenography (a staging) that calls forth the annihilation of a monument.

Invent a visual universe that brings forth the perversions and corrupt acts of human scenarios from the underground.

The embracing gaze of the dispossessed (to traverse the world).

An injured river. The skin of its rocks that contains memory (pain, death, and, again, life).

The domestic (sculptural) strategy that mitigates the disaster.

Unearthing. Digging up the remnants of ancestors and making them material. Swallowing the warmth of the earth (and of pain).

The imposing rocky geological formation. Making geography emerge in another space.

Trace the ruin of the dead (the defeated architecture). Reconstitute the rite.

Bring forth the landscape. Gaze at the void (the uninhabited). The complexity of the immeasurable.

Layers of salt that are membranes: remnants of the wall of the house that is an ancestor. Create matter, emulate a female craft (the grandmother).

Red threads in descent (the removal of the ornament that encloses). The margin. The grid.

To raise one’s thought to the limit. Elevate feeling to “burning oneself” to find the most intimate truth, uncover hidden strength, and articulate oneself with intelligence in the face of the world’s violence and its events rife with injustice. But also to restore its vital sense, the desiring nature of all the bodies that inhabit it, and the glimmer of the stars that guide it. To allow sensitivity (the most subtle and delicate) to translate the absurdities (both beautiful and horrific) of culture, then to invent images to unearth the poetry of all times, penetrate the underground, turn one’s gaze to the stars, and contemplate the void. To enable a choreography of shudders: to let the strident gesture occur, to see again with ignited guts, to make silence to observe the world (to close one’s eyes), to anticipate the fires to come, to walk among the darkness with minimal light, but not to stop moving. To dismantle boundaries and feel the foreign land, the own land. In this exhibition, a collective breath occurs, the force of an aesthetic polyphony.

With various means, mostly installation proposals, the artists create visual statements that question intimate and universal phenomena. The exhibition challenges the tyrannies experienced by humanity, but it also acts as a celebration of life and memory of its historical trajectory. Humans do not surrender; they resist, and nature impresses them with its beautiful, indestructible power, continually offering fundamental knowledge. Maroe-José Mondzain stated in her discussions on the adventure of challenging centers of power: “Our political history shares radical intimacy with the geological history of the subsoil from a center of darkness. The deities of the forge and fire, those of hell and revenge, have their abode underground and are always poised to emerge.” (Mondzain, 2017) to challenge life (its recalcitrant darkness) with the strength that comes from within (from BEING) invokes “the uprising that has given birth to mountains, that has ignited volcanoes.”

A Boca de incendio invokes the fury of our times but also the warmth of the tongue that announces hope; it traverses the memories and ruins from which life emerges. “I feel my soul like burnt soil,” recites one of Jaime Sabines' poems, a feeling of desperation, but in the next verse, he implores: “The sole of my foot, we must continue on the trodden path,” he clings to life because he knows that another time will come that will restore his feeling (from the dust). The artworks act as the unsettling force (of a mouth) that attempts to contain the world's ardor. Visual thought here is whisper and delirium: in a simultaneous image, it is an almost inaudible manifesto (beautiful and confusing) and, in turn, a disturbing hallucination (urgent and scandalous). The exhibition urges us to open our eyes (almost like an adagio), to be present before works that strip us of indifference to realities that demand a more conscious existence. What does it mean to inhabit this world together? We are all the deaths we have survived and all the lives yet to be lived.

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Suppose there is a history of art and culture (in its less traditional sense, in an open and multiple one) that is constantly being written (and re-written) with all its images. In that case, it is because artistic production (and all its materiality) continues to unravel the most complex ideas that traverse all existences. The arts scrutinize, dig with their languages into human occurrences, and speculate to “attempt” to touch the sensitive aspects of being. There is an invisible provocation in that gesture of “making art,” a desire without category that drives creation. There has never been a historical moment when that desire has disappeared; despite relentless judgments, art is a “divine monster” that pulses with presence. All the images born from that desire “may” (perhaps) embody a beautiful revenge. Let us focus on those aesthetics that allow us to access the world's heart rather than those that are so frivolous, which distract and devour (consume!) the spirits.

A Boca de incendio (susurro y delirio) is the first collective exhibition of Espacio Continuo. It is the resonance of a trajectory that has revealed its insistence on executing projects aligned with the exciting experimentation of contemporary art, its visual and challenging games, its demanding setups, the dislocation of linear and univocal narratives, and the scrupulous examination of issues that stir the life of the present.

Érika Martínez Cuervo / Curator

Texto en español