Caffe Interactions

Today I woke up with anxious thoughts so I went to train at Turia river here in Valencia, where I live.

Although it is no longer a river but a long park, that’s what they call it (and I like it)-. At Turia, you can find different types of trees grouped along its length, which is just over 8 kilometers. My favorite part is where some trees that in Argentina are called «Palo Borracho», can be found.  They are like giants with big, pot-bellied trunks as you can see in the picture above. Whenever I go for a run after crossing one of the many bridges that span the gardens, I enter the clump of «Palo Borracho» trees and imagine entering a land inhabited by these giants who have deep voices and speak lethargically , as if they were wise, idle, patient and even slightly lazy old magicians. I run through this section with a feeling of being protected, amazed and also with a (real) smile, because there is also something about all this mythical and magical ideation that amuses me. In my imagination they are wise, slow and funny giants.

Today, on the other hand, I came to train strength, balance, play a bit with yoga postures and contemporary dance sequences – which I still can’t quite perform-  and to stretch (mostly)… so I was observing and surrounding myself with these characters for more than two hours. They are trees that very clearly illustrate the respectful relationship we owe to nature. The firm, rooted and curvilinear base, which makes you want to hug them, and then they develop little cone-thorns that appear as the tree gains height, remind us of the importance of letting go after the hug and leaving them in peace. Beyond this interpretation, today I was taking a picture of them, in the middle of a pause between sit-ups, and I saw them as if they were a set of nature’s great bowling pins. The alternating arrangement, the stable base, the curve that is pronounced as soon as one looks up from the root and the trunk that then becomes more refined towards the heights. I suddenly visualized a bowling alley played by other giants, now absent, who left the lane ready for the night game. That secret life that the garden-river takes on when we, the daytime intruders, retire to sleep. So I smiled again at this picture between the real and the imaginary and thought of a quote I once used for one of my artworks, which I took from my mother’s biology book, which goes something like: <(…) In its purest expression, cultural evolution in humans is achieved by imitation>. At the time, I appropriated the quote and I added the word manipulation to the idea of imitation, surrendering to the thought that we haven’t really invented anything new, but that what we do is to observe and replicate forms and actions that are around us. Then creativity has more to do with the context where we insert each replica or mimesis that we carry out, rather than with creating in its most formal definition.

Purity is not a concept that has ever appealed to me in any sense. In any case, I would venture to say that much of the emotions or feelings such as guilt, anguish and frustration could be traced to that concept. A very cause-effect type of line that might always lead to frustration, if one considers any goal associated with a conceivable kind of «purity». Allow me to say that if any of this resonates with Catholic upbringing, it is clearly no coincidence. Purity is often associated with adjectives like tidy, untouched, virgin, chaste and, if we dig into definitions, also has to do with the quality of «maidenliness». Neither the depth nor the surface of the notion of doneness resists for me today any kind of analysis or defense, and, moreover, no instance of the natural evolution of the universe can be likened to the condition of purity. 

According to physics, order and the possibility for a certain system to remain “untouched” require a certain amount of work. This work means an energy cost and no natural system in the universe will spend energy on an activity that’s not directly related to surviving. Purity, in its permanence, operates then as an attribute that demands work and a waste of energy that goes against universal entropy itself. (Excuse me if I have a certain weakness for grandiloquence 🙂 )

Nicolas Bourriaud is a French critic, theorist and curator who, in one of his books called Post-production, talks about how since the 90s (that controversial yet beloved decade in so many semi-collective unconsciousness) the amount of artworks created on the basis of other pre-existing cultural objects increased -and continues to increase-. He considers this increase as part of the inevitable proliferation of chaos in the information age. The so-called appropriationism, introduced at the time, is no longer a novelty in a culture where memes are the first synthesis of the events and news that surround us on a daily basis. I have always felt that just as memes bring humor to everyday life, appropriationism brought some relief to the worry or anguish generated by the demand for originality in expressing ourselves, from dressing up to creating anything we are about to.

A couple of months ago a friend lent me a book that I fell in love with and then recommended, whose author has me fascinated by the way in which she walks me through the most diverse and apparently unconnected subjects. From descriptions of nature that allow me to visit the mentioned places and walk them with her, to stories that belong to her own experience that I can feel myself; she always manages to leave space for everything to come together and make sense, without going into the obvious explanation. The book in question is Rebecca Solnit’s “A Field Guide to Getting Lost». Without going into a detailed description of the theme or themes of the book, I bring it up because the way in which she combines stories and facts that are independent of each other to make them converge, reminds me of Bourriaud’s appropriation concept together with the (beautiful) impossibility of purity. The way how all the themes in the book are presented and re-presented also reminds me to Boris Groys’s thesis, that says that <although not everybody produces works of art, in the contemporary world, we are all a work of art>*, meaning it’s all about how we introduce what we want to show… And so could be the case then of the group of Palos Borrachos giant bowling pins in the Turia gardens today.

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At the end of the day the source of my morning anxiety, which had to do with making it to the end of the month or not, using savings vs. the list of what I want them for, fulfilling other lists on the daily agenda and making sure they also consider real and achievable times… ALL that source of anxiety was silenced and even crushed by the pot-bellied giants and this mix of fun and nature’s wonders. Moreover, unknowingly, the cascade of images evoked served as a link to remember authors and stuff from the theoretical world of art and to vindicate imitation as a possible form of originality, in our daily lives. 

… If I managed to create even a tiny fraction of that chain of links, it means I am learning from Solnit.

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<Good day, good afternoon, good evening>.