What can a process do? A passage from ritual to rituality
In this exposition I try to build new relationships between different creative processes arising from nature, life, and art. This is done by setting up visual, textual, and affective analogies through superimpositions of layers of images, sound, and text based on the book Un Atletismo Afectivo (An Affective Athleticism) (publication on paper, 116 pp, 2016) and the audiovisual work Trenza (Braid) (HD video, 55', 2017).
These two works were developed around a particular space, the fields of Aixerrota in Algorta (Bizkaia, Basque Country). The book is an attempt to translate my habitual experience of running through this space into art, while the film mainly focuses on observing and experiencing how the landscape was turned into a space for a festive event. Three separate narrative strands, each referring to a particular process, intertwine. The first of these is filmings of young people's actions as they prepare the space for the International Paella competition. A second strand consists of fragments of a voice-over by David Attenborough from the documentary Bowerbirds: The art of seduction (2000), which shows male bowerbirds building the bowers where they will court the female bird. The third strand includes sequences from my own work, which outline emerging processes of artistic creation and research.
The aim of this exposition is to share the singularity of processes in which the need to bond or to attach (Juan Luis Moraza, 2009) instigates a conscientious preparation of space that will allow an event to succeed. It also highlights the way in which some of these processes may interrupt the normal course of things and the self-absorption born from habit by opening up from the individual towards the collective, by confronting the tension resulting from an indeterminate end result, and by re-enacting aesthetic experience through the production of an audiovisual and sculptural landscape. The underlying question of the work relates to the potential of new arrangements of materials to open up new creative processes.
