It took long to decide in favor of my own website. The reason? Because we trust others to remember what we did. It is too much to ask though and it seems only useful to compose a site with the listing of all exhibitions and texts I have done. This not only helps to know what have I done so far, but it also serves as an archive since exhibition catalogues are difficult to get and websites where information is hosted also vanish.
It also helps me to understand the materials and questions I have been invested in. And, indeed, the other say learning by doing is true. In the making of exhibitions I learned that an experience of freedom is fundamental to me. In today’s language this feeling of freedom probably will correspond to the feeling of safety. The exhibition not only as a place to show, but to enact the values we care most for, the values of life cared for and protected. But also testing and exploring is a central issue in all the projects. Testing the world through experience and trusting the artists with an insight on how to create a nearness between the human and the non-human that would show us possibilities of making the social anew we never considered before. Exhibitions, in that sense, constitute unique probing spaces. Works do relate to us, but they also very strongly relate to themselves and other works. In doing so, streams of energies flood the place obliging to see the world under different conditions and premises. Being in an exhibition is, in other words, like walking on a future cloud. It may seem rudimentary, standardized, even boring and yet it allows for a physical superposition of materials and thinking logics that is effective and has a deep impact in our senses and memory. In perceiving in certain ways our thinking changes without us being necessarily aware of it. It is important to stress the extreme importance of this unawareness. We are constantly situated, controlled, and reminded of our behavior to fit into systems that only if we adapt will reciprocate. This produces two effects that we are seeing growing: a backlash of conservatism (not only ultra conservatives but just accommodative conservatism) and mental health disorders.
Progressive and more free-style unruly impulses are becoming more and more rare in our societies. Things are there for a reason and the reasons are groundless.
I trust exhibitions to give birth to energies able to ameliorate social polarization. I also trust exhibitions with the force that may activate a renewed sense of citizenship and social and community-based solidarity and empathy. But it is true that I also think the exhibition should be very attentive to forms of social communication that have been historically excluded as references and models in contemporary practices: the festival, the folklore-related ways of telling and showing, the cabaret… I also thought that I would move away or even denied the efficacy of the institutionally created spaces. However, with the years I came to think that those —a little bit obsolete — spaces are perfect to shelter us in this particular exercise of encountering each other in the public realm. They have been designed to host and cheer the public and this we should protect and reactivate under the different historical conditions we live in. But even with all their problems they are still valid. Valid are as well other spaces that also represent the common good and coexistence such as the Ocean and nature at large.
I also discover through the process of listing and rereading some of the texts today many things: that it is really difficult to write; that it is really difficult to write with clarity; that it is fundamental to me to write with nearness, with love in the fingers; that writing is endangered but that we will find other ways of telling; that artists books and catalogues are really important and that is difficult to find libraries to read them and that having everything digitally accessible would be wonderful as well as having ideas as how to distribute this material among younger artists and scholars; that writing really helps to think and reflect and thinking and reflecting is an act of generosity and not only an intellectual exercise; that many writings happen in languages and contexts where access is even more difficult and therefore true exchange and dialogue is still, today, very difficult…
All in all, I am happy that I put together this with the incredible help of Esther Hunziker, artist and teacher at our Institute, and that I can only promise to update it regularly.
Chus