Sometimes I desire something I don’t have, something I don’t need. I feel like I am in the wrong place, I give importance to the superficial and jump to conclusions. The process isn’t finished yet, and it’s difficult to take stock from here, but we are in the right place, valuing what we’ve achieved. Since we first saw the building, we tried to expand the exhibition space and integrate the exterior staircase into the project. Both spaces, the room and the staircase, are transitional spaces with clear connotations and boundaries, and the works have interacted with them in different ways. Imanol, Pama, and Santiago had met very little before the installation. Pama lives far away, Imanol lives here in Barakaldo, and Santiago lives nearby.
These days in October, Santiago and I are working in the same space. In the past few days, while I was thinking about how to approach the writing—doing everything except writing—Santiago was trying to get as far away from the canvas as possible to see what he was doing. Now he needs his phone to cover the distance and compress the scale. The camera becomes his distant gaze. Santiago has titled the piece Sa Bouche II (dialogue), and it is part of an earlier series about the figure of Gore Vidal, who was not just any mouth. For the piece, Santiago uses two pieces of paragliding fabric as the base on which he sews two large mouths, and the strokes are fragments of the same textile material.
Santiago’s and Pama’s works are conceived to interact with the wind, which in this part of the building is usually particularly strong in winter. Pama’s piece is also part of an earlier series, a series of aeolian harps that began in Patagonia. A taut string stretched between the walls of the cylinder captures the vibrations caused by the wind and reproduces them through a speaker. The copy is born from touch, and the distance between the origin and its reproduction dissolves in the act of listening.
I have heard Imanol talk about his project several times, and there was always something more to say. Part of it is the paradox of working with an archive, which is characterized by its constant expansion, and part of it is the difficulty of dealing with recent history. The work Stranger than Paradise is an investigation of Barakaldo’s post-industrial context, and for the occasion Imanol has designed a display based on domestic furniture, in which he presents different materials and documents. Some of these objects are meant to circulate, to be picked up and taken away.
I can say that my work in this exhibition also translates into an exercise of empathy and distance, as in the joke The drunk and the lamppost, which goes like this:
A man sees another on his knees under a streetlamp at night, searching for something.
“What have you lost?”
“My house keys.”
The first man joins the search. After a while without finding anything, he asks:
“Are you sure you lost them here?”
“No,” the drunk answers. “I lost them in that dark alley.”
“Then why on earth are you looking for them here?!”
“Because there’s more light here.”