Wall of Wonders. Intro.
Wall of Wonders is a project that I developed along two parallel lines: partly, as a personal practice/reflection about my work; a process of personal emancipation that culminated in the show Wall of Wonders in La Taller. The other line of work in this format, meanwhile, aims for a common/participatory approach and is conceived not just as an interaction and education support for visitors to museums and the works displayed in them, but also to capture their voice. This project began its development in 2014 in the Artium Museum as a kind of invitation to reflection; visitors were given a voice so the pieces in the collection could be reactivated from another perspective.
In the case of my show in the space of La Taller (see links below) the work answered the personal need to create a documenting format that, like the interactive Wall in the Artium Museum, would act as a support for action on and through Art. What I organized in La Taller over two months was a drift based on a photographic excuse. The gallery, like the rooms in Artium, was inundated with all sorts of reflections, processes and associations that I was building from something quite concrete, like a photo from a book. So it is an exercise that, admittedly in expanded form -and related and documented to a point of exhaustion- is consistent with the same interpretative work format of personal projection that I set in motion at the Artium Museum. The broad account I show below documents this process and its drifts just as it accompanied the exhibition.
Wall of Wonders personal practice/reflexion:
I want to introduce this “Wall of Wonders” show within an idea of process, a space of events that came out of the post-production of the image of a building from the ex-Soviet Union: the Central Bank of Georgia in Tiblisi. More exactly, we’re talking about the photo of the terrace-bridge of this building on the two-page spread occupying pages 158-159 of Soviet Modernism/The Unknown History. This motif acted as an excuse for the work I’m presenting here. In it we shall see the architecture of this building -its presentiment?- operated upon, elastically and sensually, through a sort of obsessive engrossment that held me in its thrall for over two years. In fact, the space provided by La Taller worked for 3 months as a Spring-Board, (a bubbling screen) that activates an immense After Effect in which the native form of the building is cut, and super reproduced, set up once more and assembled in different opacities and relations of sense (texts or videos). A kind of idyll between its historic setting and a new field of personal predilections and detours.
On the “Wall of Wonders” we find no pieces equipped with an artistic script or conceptual Gag. Instead we are facing a series of trails, a document. A “Tutorial” of a process of personal emancipation fuelled by a pretext. We are witness to a state of processing in which the pre-existing image is articulated within a new play of presences. Of senses, more associated with touch than with reflection.
Display Leaflet. (Esteban Torres Ayastuy).
Between 9 October and 23 December Charo Garaigorta will talk of some uses of art, and will do so presenting a phenomenon; a set of 75 pieces that comprised her wall space for a year, which will be transferred in two phases to the space La Taller. http://www.lataller.com/ These pieces, basically colour-assisted photocopies redrawn in Mylar, are based on an architectural apology, and both in the first and in the second phase are taken from the book Soviet Modernism/Unknown History. Although the first phase of the show is inspired by different buildings in the ex-Soviet Union, in the second the work becomes obsessed with an image from the book’s two-page spread (158-159): the terrace-bridge of the building hat serves as the central headquarters of the Bank of Georgia in Tbilisi.
In its day, the imagery of this book with its almost defunct architecture stirred the artist’s mood to drift somehow arousing her excitement as she manipulated it, answering a call to see herself in it for months on end: “in some buildings the traditional Russian-style use of colour made them look as if make-up had been applied(concrete in kitsch drag), tampered with, post-mortem; they were some how an incitement to a double life outside architecture. They were constructions whose function was immersed in ornament. Sometimes these erections just had an individual illusion of significance, of “invention”, running right through them; an invention in
which the architecture became an Echo – the vocation to house was better understood as an illusion of housing Egos (…) I wanted to hold a wake over the buildings, merge and associate them; to thwart their use schedules, their sense, and give them a relation with my urgency and their forms. Working until they end and ME begins”.
As we shall see in the exhibition, these constructions–especially the Bank of Georgia building–will suffer a kind of personal absorption, a Twist that shows us some sort of work on the art (or through the art) of Charo Garaigorta. A point of control over these architectures which become protracted and inwardly engrossed in symmetries is humiliated in catastrophe or neutralized with the obsessive repetition of their motions. In the exhibition we will have the sensation of witnessing how attention wanders from a discourse, or from it being disturbed. The buildings will gradually lose reality, a “belonging to an architectural or historical place”, and settle into another era where they are revered (or required)… where their shapes are re-monumentalized providing accompaniment; even though that only means being revived– as in Charo’s case- as an object of projection, a support for personal emancipation in the face of “life’s brutality”.
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This operation, which took over a year for Charo to complete, is worth being reactivated as such; it deserves to be displayed. We will be particularly drawn toward the edges, the indirect expressions of this work, its power to spark off liberated emotions –out of the author’s control- ; something beyond a package of forms and concepts designed to produce (commercial) intellectual Gags, “ … I make the wall to visualize a thought, a premonition, a presentiment; not to present it as resolved. As Luis Camnitzer says, art is a place where things can be thought that are not thinkable in other places (…) a good artistic problem, a good premonition, a good presentiment, is not exhaustible, a good solution has repercussions. It does not matter whether my initial idea is good, but it does matter if the path I embark on towards “it” can reverberate, link up somewhere else; if I have a place, this is possible.
In this regard La Taller becomes a space for documentation, and we will observe this maintaining a structure that respects the notion of temporality with which Charo’s piece was executed. We will propose an expansive Collage; both in time – the job will take around 3 months- and in the space itself – which will be tattooed in two phases with drawings and texts. In the first phase of “Promise”, 5 final pieces (where the process stopped) will be exhibited at the same time so they can be related with the first sketches or explorations of the theme. In the second phase, “Twist”, the space – elliptical in the first stage- will be completed with the variants of the building that stands as the headquarters of the Bank of Georgia in Tbilisi, enabling the activation of the time circuit. There will also be an audiovisual that permits the articulation of different opinions the artist holds regarding her creative process; we will strive, as Charo says, to communicate well.
