On Dances and Advances
Bea Espejo
A dance move is a unit consisting of a number of various steps within an overall choreography. Normally they are simple steps that are intuited more than perceived individually. And embedded within them are intermediary half-steps with no set rules that are often improvised, thus allowing the dancer to express themself freely. So, this is where everything turns much more sophisticated and crepuscular. Dance thus becomes an intangible asset, affording several timeframes at once and a growing plethora of steps, whimsies and correlations, as also happens with desire when it enters the twilight zone, the moment when a double always appears. Here in the halls at CAAC, dance move becomes a choral choreography, an inner dialogue and a reappearing dateless time. And also an exercise in intuitive anthropology that meticulously rakes through repertoires of the infinitesimal. A sensitive material of the memory that gets closer to us and affects us. An attitude of awe towards the world. In particular, a mise en scène of Fuentesal Arenillas’s recent work.
Trying to define the place from which sculpture speaks is the premise of this exhibition, showcasing some of the works they have made over the last ten years, with an emphasis on their latest production. The point of departure is always the same: to explore interrelationships and states of being, working with the figure of the double and the practice of sculpture following the play it gives rise to and the play it comes from. A very manual and very mental practice, in which their object-based constructions are installed in other circuits of material, cultural and popular production. One that nobody sees because they are always there. Life exists beneath things.
And this text is something similar. On one hand, it is another move within this dance which is completely curated: giving life to a landscape, an atmosphere, a smell. Like all essays, here too there are leaps, shifts and turns. Fragments of reflections, associations, inscriptions, hurried descriptions … At times, the text looks forward, expanding the focus and opening the writing to all those things that operate like a compilation. Other times, the writing turns inwards looking for the most secluded nooks and crannies, the place of origin that gave rise to everything. Ideas will crop up from other artists whose reading of art is barely removed from theirs. Though if there is one thing that this text does, it is to loiter around the ideas that Pablo and Julia pose in the form of correspondence, like someone writing about their travels once back home.
One particular book is always open on my desk: Exploding Galaxies, written by Guy Bret about the artist David Medalla. An idea with regard to his work Cloud Canyons: “I was looking for materials that, in sculpture, would be analogous to the smallest biological unit, the cell; materials that would be capable of multiplication.”
And a reply: Las nubes copian las cosas que ven (Clouds Copy the Things They See, 2023) that refers to a stroll, to the union of two elements related with new bodies and in contact with each other after the action of the movement, and that lets them expand like the foam in David Medalla’s Cloud Canyons.
Julia Fuentesal and Pablo Arenillas speak in measured tones, like the gusts of cold and hot air alternatively entering a car. Theirs is a language that is continuously being armed and disarmed. They understand it as a state of formal and material suspension that also leads them to drawing, video and collage. They construct through phrasing, shifting from one thing to another and generating movement around what they say. An alteration always makes an appearance, something that happens and instantly vanishes. The same thing takes place in their works: gaps of discontinuity with the monotonous always occur. Like good annotators of space, they are completely at home in strangeness, looking around them at issues of lightness, weight, tension, balance, friction, resistance or the unexpected. In their works there is always a reflection between the physical and the mental, what is seen and what is thought, the spoken and the formal. Hence their attachment to apparently familiar objects that, being so close, can take them so far. Their idea is to take language to the physical dimension through the medium of material, to make lyricism from fabric and wood. Inquiring into the distilled, into the rhythm of the mix. For the material to weigh as much as the word that names it, to swop the symbolic meaning of things and to tauten metaphors.
Geography of hidden nooks and crannies, as I said above: there where imaginary thinking is given free rein. The journey without end.
As a child, Mario Merz played under the desk of his father, an engineer responsible for the construction of lifts used in mountains. The desk consisted of a board on two shaky trestles. His whole creative universe lay beneath that simple board of wood. Mario Merz is of course an artist but also an architect of hideaways.
Apart from the essay in this text, there are three more, this time on three screens in the halls at La Cartuja. In them one can see some mussels that look like butterflies in a vague landscape. At times, we can identify the detail of some of their works. Other times, the background seems to be a window, a wall, a suspended time. Hands entwined eager to find meaning together, a hyphen joining one or more words, the kinship of emotion. The sound of castanets or the crashing of the sea against the rocks. Fuentesal Arenillas think about the shell of the mussel that clings onto rocks, but also that lets go in order to advance with the tide, that breathes and gapes, that coincides and synchronizes with others like butterflies. The artists regulate the concealed bodies, revealing only the movement of their hands to give life to an object and turn it into the sculpture of their desires.
I look up the word ‘metamorfosis’ in Julio Casares’s Diccionario ideológico de la lengua española: a noun that, like its English equivalent ‘metamorphosis’, means a transformation or change in form of one thing into another. The change of forms undergone by insects and other animals before arriving at their perfect state. In butterflies, the change from egg to caterpillar, from caterpillar to chrysalis, and from chrysalis to butterfly.
The life of wood. Let’s dwell a moment here, on the efficacy of objects that exceed meanings. On the La Tía Norica puppet company from Cádiz. On the popular memory preserved by oral tradition, passed down from one generation to the next, which can be traced back to the eighteenth century. Those stories that are activated and mutated at the same time, in a kind of impromptu dance, where a little synonym is capable of adding a twist to the narration. A doll’s theatre in which both sexes are mixed up and which performs banned works unsuitable for the good manners of contemporary customs. On one side, there are the hands and, on the other, the voice. Another dance move that has a lot to do with this exhibition.
And also this: How does language become an ally of objects without muting them? Can a breath of words be an impulse to animate beyond their overwhelming descriptive propension? Can the affective load of objects unleash the repressed speech of bodies, attract vanished memories and transmute into social vehicles of silenced oralities?
I think about hands: that fusion of polarities, left and right sides, what once was and what is now. Shake hands with yourself, extend a hand to the other, invite them to communicate. The circle of children always singing is a constant self-welcoming. Holding hands when dancing is to offer the self, to oneself and to the other, the pleasure of solitude broken for a moment in the dialogue of two bodies which, in principle, should always complement each other, the full and the empty, the open window, an invitation to lean out. The hands that possess the magic of order, of giving, of the caress, of taking away, of cleaning and dirtying, of the mechanical gesture, of the blind feeling about, of the knowledge of creation. Hands that are millions of years old. Hand-eyes, hands with the power of smell, hands with the wisdom of patience. Hands that unfold inside out, a glove of the form itself, in the making, in the destroying.
I think of the voice, in The Thousand and One Stories of Pericón de Cádiz. Page xi. Transcribing speech into writing with no periods or commas or spaces nor nothing. A few lines that are just people and singing and fleeting realities. “He told his friend Félix look Félix how funny!” The orality of flamenco. Experience that comes and goes with the thread of a narration more concerned with knowing how to float over a time and space than in fixing itself in the specificities of dates and places. The imprecision of speech. The clumsiness. The clumsiness in which language takes you so far.
“My body exists against the fabric of its clothing, the vapours of the air it breathes, the brightness of lights or the brushings of shadows.” I read it in Jean-Luc Nancy.
Voices and hands hover over the sculpture of Fuentesal Arenillas: a play of mutations, a process of change. Their works speak of their interest in manipulating everyday objects with the goal of giving them a new use, albeit a symbolic one. A succession of bodies and objects that are crossed with each other in a grand metamorphosis. Real spaces that duplicate reality, turning it on its head and even contradicting it. A sculpture conceived like a body, as a receptacle to be inhabited, a body conceived like architecture, as a place of singular experience, open, with the desire to find meaning in our routine gestures.
1915, Marinetti. First, he created a synthetic play called Feet, featuring the legs and feet of chairs, armchairs, a couch and a sewing machine. The bodies of actors turned into objects. Without any narrative connection between them, the seven scenes were linked by actions between extremities and objects. Afterwards he created another play, They Are Coming, with chairs as the main actors.
“They are still in the same place, like a dream. But with more people,” whisper Pablo and Julia moving the phrase all over the place.
The identity of this exhibition harbours all these ideas: to address art practice as a game without set rules. To communicate without words. To play with signs in order to give them a mobile, nomadic, unstable quality. To produce narratives that always take place in a to-and-fro, assembling and disassembling, in an endless moving house. To reflect on the nature of the gesture in everyday life, staging simple actions or behaviours with which the beholder can readily identify. Their actions are minimal, full of collaged thinking and deliberately delicate and ephemeral. The goal of that dance? To dig deeper into the links between one and the other, between everything and the rest, turning on its head the relationship between the intimate and the social, between values and functions.
The intimate and the social, and Pepe Espaliú in Háblame, cuerpo (Speak to me, body): “I propose an act of resistance which links aspects such as the phonetic transformation of my vocal flow, the notion of circularity, and the idea of erasure through insistence; placing my body in collision with language and with a certain desire for oscillation between geographies and identities.”
Sculpture from the south, they call it: that orality that echoes like seagulls following in the wake of boats or the pealing of bells in whitewashed villages. Cicadas singing at night or the good morning from a neighbour as she waters her ferns. Empty flowerpots waiting in the courtyard. The silence of saints and processions, always more alive while at rest. The listening threading together a story. That elastic place of corralas located neither inside nor outside. Or like when you live with your front door open. The place that defines sculpture for Fuentesal Arenillas.
Perrate in the lyrics of one of his songs: “His hat was the breeze.”
There are two series of works called Correveidile (Telltale) and Oye lo que traigo (Listen what I brought). The first came about two summers ago, starting out from the structure of hats remembered by the artists. They first drew them from memory and then made them with folds and flaps, sewing and pasting. Inside them they treasure what they love the most so as not to forget it, like we do with photos or clippings in the sun visor of a car, on the frame of a bunkbed or underneath a glass tabletop.
What to remember, how to remember, why remember?
Hats are minor architectures, just like clouds, cracks and outlines. Small rebellious and necessarily ephemeral architectures that slip through the cracks of everyday convention and elude outdated ideas of the formal. In the hands of Julia and Pablo, material gives way to the immaterial and forms tend to dissipate. The three dimensions can become two, and two can become one: a single point. The aesthetic subtlety is patent, as is the calculated invitation to trace the intricate relationships, wrapped in time, that explain the existence of their sculptures.
In the aforementioned dictionary I also look up ‘danza’: again a noun, but apart from its counterpart of ‘dance’ in English, the Spanish word can signify a dance troupe; and also a thorny issue or intrigue; a scuffle or squabble; a shimmy, jump, leap, twist, celebration, rhythm, exhibition.
Although they don’t move themselves, all the works in this exhibition make a series of successive movements readable, movements that afford glimpses of different steps involved in the process of production. They are interested in conserving these traces. And also the efficacy of objects that exceed the human purposes, designs or meanings that these objects express or enable. The rhythm of the music that strips the ambience bare of all real sonority, that abstracts the moment by devouring it, that ties together two beings with invisible bonds.
Although as I said, they don’t move. Or maybe they do. Apart from the title of the exhibition itself, La danza mudanza is also the name of five sculptures installed at CAAC on a large wooden floor with another one installed with the artwork Correveidile. They are made with plaster bandages, a material that allows the sculptures to freeze the movement of soft joints and supports, something that interests the artists in relation to the body, a care in maintaining a static posture over a prolonged time. A result that, as the artists underscore, involves an action of care. The plasticity of the bandages is reminiscent in ways of the cross-stitching in the fabric of a tablecloth while the white colour simplifies the form. The volumes droop under their own weight around a wood axis running through the composition like a backbone, and end up slumped against small points of support that mean that the overall structure of the sculpture sways almost imperceptibly when someone enters or leaves the room.
That piece of wood that breathes. The puppet making someone laugh and Mario Merz imagining a whole world under a wooden board. And these very same hands that are writing this text, though much smaller, selling wooden clothes pegs as if they were sardines. Come and get them! Straight off the boat! Counting on my toes over and over again, forwards and backwards.
The hands and voices and spaces that nestle the manifold manifestations of folkloric thinking are sundry and often secondary. Houses with shared courtyards, the space in between home and street, the porter’s booth and roof terraces. Delimited places for puppets, created for satire and protest. Hideaways where the voice of the people and of popular celebrations can be raised. Fuentesal Arenillas’s interest in these spaces lies in their shelter-like form, a place from where to make oneself heard in a reality that has constructed sanctums for accepted thinking and set aside reservations on the outskirts for the unintegrated. For many years Doña Rosario Núñez was the voice behind the curtains of the Tía Norica puppet show in Cádiz. It was said that the puppets had special facial features, trying to clarify what was not catalogable in the conventional departmentalization of conceptual aesthetics. This led them to conceive sculpture as the implementation of a magical representation, whose figure survives when protracted in time. Threads and voices. Feet and hands.
Bauhaus, Triadic Ballet, 1923. The combination of pantomime, music, dance and costumes. Dancers dressed like dolls. Three dances and three acts. The stage setting for mathematical dances, the dance of spaces, the dance of gestures, the dance of boards, the dance of glass, the dance of forms, the dance of metal or the dance of rings, experimenting with material, plastic and actors transformed into a kind of marionette-object.
Pablo and Julia’s sculptures are at home with oddity, peering in close quarters at things like lightness, weight, tension, balance, friction, resistance or the unexpected. Works redolent of gaps of discontinuity with monotony. The speak of the stage as a pocket. Inside which, they explain, the hands come into contact with little bits of wood that play with the desire to discover forms. Palm, skin, fingers and three dancing wedges of wood. The hands that see what they touch and the prints they leave are readings of time. This idea of understanding sculpture so close to the smell of cooking rising from downstairs, the repetitive kneading of dough in bakeries or the sawdust leftover after planing wood in a carpentry workshop. Ever smaller mental spaces which are neither representation nor narration, but the action of processes. An almost volumeless yet vast and compact geography.
Georges Perec suggested that we make an inventory of what we carry around with us in our pockets: that we ask ourselves about their provenance, their uses and what will become of them. He also asked us to question our utensils however apparently trivial they might seem: a fork, a teaspoon, a brick, concrete, glass. They are, he says, the proper ways to go about getting a grasp of a territory.
Viñas (Vines, 2023) are loom-pieces stretched like the skin on a drum, which contain forms of their gloves, forms that come from the patterns for the thumb or from compositions of the other fingers. These forms recall parts of the body, like the mouth or the tongue, or the structural functioning of a joint like the knee or elbow. Secluded and intimate spaces.
Lygia Clark also worked with gloves and with little plastic or fabric bags full of air, water, sand or polystyrene; rubber tubes, rolls of cardboard rolls, sheets, stockings, shells, honey and many other unexpected objects scattered around a room of a house she called “the consulting room”. A meeting of objects talking to each other.
Fuentesal Arenillas make free and easy use of compound words whenever they write, putting in place an ‘other’ language: a lived-told practice, drawing-volume, body-memory, magic-other, workshop-accessory, game-puppet, quasi-casual, eye-patio, house-door, idea-notion. And sometimes they go a bit further: here-who-narrates. It all starts with a gesture they have in their head, which in the beginning takes the form of an image but which cannot be explained other than with that gesture. Something that has to do with moving material in one way or another, a relationship with what they are doing and which becomes part of the process. Mario Montalbetti’s idea of disappearance, Lucy Lippard’s literal metaphor or the muteness of Eva Hesse’s works.
Eva Hesse: “Ordered yet disordered.”
Pablo recalls how, when he was seventeen years old, he started working in his grandfather’s sawmill in Cádiz. One of his jobs was to cut and assemble boxes, roughly around the size of a shoebox, which were used for moving the bones of the dead. These boxes were made with remnants from chipboard or recycling the old tops of workbenches. Many of them still had the notes, calculations, measurements, numbers and drawings made by the carpenters. The boxes were put together quickly between two: one cut and the other nailed the bits together all week long without rest. On the lids or sides of many of them you could still see those drawings which were randomly joined together. Some of those drawings brought to mind grotesque faces, carnival masks or boats sailing over big waves. Years later, Pablo discovered that all of them contained another type of corpse: an exquisite one.
The drawers of old wardrobes and dressers sometimes had false backs which were used to hide sensitive documents or papers with political affiliations you would not want to be found during an unannounced search. Our grandparents’ secret hiding place. The same false bottom used to be made inside these funereal boxes and were used for inserting a photo or a letter to accompany the deceased in their new eternity.
I am brought to mind of Gabriel Orozco and his empty shoebox.
The origin of Imaginaria (2020-21) can be found in the thin sheets of wood with which Fuentesal Arenillas usually cover the studio floor. This led to the 70 lined boards we see in this portable installation, which contain accidental silhouettes which are the outcome of social gatherings in their studio. Without renouncing materials, they leave the canvas supports on view, as well as the hooks and brackets that speak so much of their craft.
Thoughts running through the mind of a sculpture: steps that make the wood creak, hands that run through the fields and travel without having to move. A manual thought from which Pablo and Julia start out, from which they work the sculpture. The pale pink colour peeking through gloves, flaps and folds. Wrapping vines, cosseting roots. Mobile dreams using tabletops. When they are all used up, they cut them up and store them. Carrying torsos, hoods, hats, boxes and moulds around with them like the costumes for a travelling troupe. Palpable real objects with an everyday use, organs in their primary function that portray their day-to-day relationships. Living like the minute-hand of a clock consuming sculpture: kneading it, eating it, playing with it, transporting it, dressing it, storing it and constantly recycling it. Actions, materials, tools and exercises that cling on tightly in their heads, skins and organs, that are never completely whole, but are always in the making with the purpose of effecting a continuous welcome.
Fuentesal Arenillas use wooden boxes to transport or contain their scenarios or personal belongings. They are part of the everyday chronicles of the studio and are like little huts that they deploy with tools in parallel with the development and materialization of the work. There are inner cuttings and carved moulds from all their heads. When moving around this set of boxes, a scene in two acts appears: one inside the boxes and the other outside, like those magic tricks that introduce a body into a box and then cut it in two, giving rise to pieces of the same thing but disjointed.
One of the great fields of observation in the theatre of objects is unconscious material, what our minds do not register or perceive even though it is always there. Domestic rituals, the daily choreographies we enact with things, spatial arrangements, the unusable objects we cannot let go of in our habitat without even being aware they exist. What is beneath the outer appearance of things, what is the fate of what we discard, what we use up, throw away or what disappears from the horizon of our life.
Years ago, in small villages when people did their shopping they would ask for “the something” when they had finished buying what they wanted. “Give me the something” they would say. And the shopkeeper would give them “something”. A tomato, a walnut, a piece of bread. A something.
Paper, the image, the writing that contains an action. Letters: compose them, write them, send them, receive them, read them, store them. A pop-up space like a booth. The pages of notebooks full of references: artworks, artists, readings. The revelry of composition. The open dialogue that is rounded off with singing and listening.
And then we have La mesa es el suelo de las manos V (The table is the floor of the hands V, 2020). In it, Fuentesal Arenillas try to relocate us in the working space where materials are contingent upon one another until they become one single thing. As they tell us, they combine crafts to allow for material improvisation and to reflect on the concept and idea as gazes opposing a standard device: the table.
What remains in all the people involved, like myself, in the intensely lived territories once this experience is over? What happens afterwards with the knowledge gleaned during the fieldwork? How do people feel when they open up their lives socially? What is left to them, what changes them, what stays the same? What do we learn mutually when intertwining our memories and how does that potential learning reverberate in others when sharing it?
Feeling the knot of the thread when sewing, of the string when tying, of chewing gum between your teeth, of the base of the frame, the beginning of another numerical scale that has nothing to do with numbers but with steps. A step which is rhythm, the pause in music, the space between the bouncing ball and the floor, or the foot that kicks it, the flickering neon, the landscape that rolls by the train window, the prayer beyond understanding, the sum of the parts, the bending of knees, the column of rising smoke, the happy frolicking of children, the compass of exercise, the drumming of the dance.
The various works called Aparejos (Riggings, 2022-2023) are made with remnants of wood from other pieces and folds of cardboard lined with sailcloth, all girded together by thin strips of wood, velcro, staples and stitches. They are separated from the wall by a finger’s width, allowing space for a hand to be placed behind so as to grasp them.
“Words are not happy just to say what they say; through their clash, their dispersion and their encounter, they imitate and give shape to the ‘double’ of the adventure,” Foucault tells us.
1983. Christian Carrignon presents his Théâtre de Cuisine in Marseille. There are corks, a coffee grinder, a sugar bowl, a bottle of water and a tea caddy. Each element adopts connotations opposed to its smallness, as if they were architectural landmarks in a city where other objects are also characters.
Fuentesal Arenillas speak of orality and folklore. Of fiestas and festive pilgrimages. Of singing ballads, telling stories. In the spilling of the word, of sculpture, the power of the metaphor always returns to make us freer. Sculpture is no longer a ‘transcendental’ or symbolic object and has become something more fragile and mundane, but also more conscious of the space it occupies. Works that do not strive to reflect abstract concepts or forms but just the opposite: they speak to us of a way of being in the world. The hat, the head. The body as theme and as paradigm, as discourse, but also as material and as vanishing point.
Footnotes to this text. A foot that becomes head. A text which are notes. A pin head. Everything handled with kid gloves. Stitching, backstitching, delustring, bias, tucking, selvage, dart, pattern, border, sleeve-hole, cuff. The waywardness of sewing and of writing.
“Time does not flow but, rather, percolates.” Or so says Michel Serres.
Following the thread of hideaways: the corner is a kind of box, half walls, half door. A dialectics of inside and outside. It constructs an imaginary chamber around our body which we believe is hidden when we take refuge in a corner. Shadows are now walls, a piece of furniture is a barrier, a curtain a ceiling.
Minor architectures operate like verbs, or nouns. A worldly-wise grammar that functions like an always unfinished repertoire of narrations and images that encourage the addition of stories, practices and spaces. It is a vital stance of encounter with the world. Inhabiting the minor means accepting instability and uncertainty and, above all, not being afraid of failure. Those intermediary half-steps that build the momentum for the bigger dance steps. They are deliberately fragmented texts, divested of ornament and even grammar. They are phrases that function in blocks, where the presence of the writer is often concealed. They are exhibitions full of strata, segments, connectors and vanishing points. Routes that respond to the latent yet powerful desire to disrupt power structures. Stories, like this one, that are convinced that power triumphs when it is stretched, in that volatile and indeterminate state of the landscape that ranges from the closed system to the open space.
VIVIR CON EL SOMBRERO POR TECHO Y UN TABLERO COMO SUELO
Introducción
“Muchas de las mejores obras que se realizan en la actualidad parecen deslizarse entre diferentes medios” escribía el artista, músico, escritor, crítico y editor Dick Higgins en un texto de 1965 publicado en el primer Boletín de Otra Cosa. En este corto pero sustancial ensayo, Higgins presenta una aproximación histórica a las prácticas “intermediales”. O más bien lo que subraya es que la separación entre los distintos medios artísticos fue una contingencia acaecida en el Renacimiento y sostenida, particularmente en occidente, por fuerzas sociales desigualitarias. Con optimismo de artista, Higgins creía ver que los signos de cansancio de dichas fuerzas se multiplicaban por todas partes en su tiempo. La negativa de los artistas de su generación a verse confinados en una disciplina estanca era tan notoria que Higgins sintió la necesidad de recoger la palabra “intermedia”, con la que se había topado en un texto del filósofo y poeta romántico Coleridge, y de traerla a un mundo que empezaba a conceptualizarse como “aldea global”. Empezó entonces a predicar con el ejemplo, y en adelante no dejaría de experimentar y agitar el término “intermedia”, desplazando continuamente lo que éste nombraba en su propia práctica.
En “Statement on Intermedia”, publicado poco después en la revista Dé/collage, Higgins señala: “éste es el acercamiento intermedial, aquel que enfatiza la dialéctica entre los medios. Un compositor es un hombre muerto a menos que componga para todos los medios y para su mundo.” Además, resalta que la cuestión no consiste en mezclar medios, sino en encontrar la forma más inmediata posible de emplearlos al servicio de nuestras preocupaciones presentes. Como se ve, para Higgins se trata fundamentalmente de una cuestión de uso, pues si lo que llamamos artes no es necesariamente utilitario para sostener un determinado estándar de vida, sí se demuestra necesario para afrontar una buena supervivencia, sensible a todo lo vivo. En este sentido, lo intermedial intenta poner en relación pragmática planos de realidad que, de un modo u otro, han sido separados categóricamente.
De hecho, el uso del término ha permanecido activo y, más recientemente, el crítico cubano José Esteban Muñoz se ha referido a la “intermedialidad queer” como importante para poder trazar un “plano de ubicaciones de la utopía”. Explica: “el uso de lo intermedial que yo sugiero es interdisciplinario en relación con los protocolos artísticos así como en relación con las taxonomías de la raza, el género y el sexo”. En su texto sobre la intermedialidad, Muñoz recupera la preciosa elaboración del concepto que la crítica de danza lesbiana Jill Johnston había hecho en los años 70:
“Ningún final para lo que puede tener un final en la gran reintegración: lo intermedial de la ciudad cósmica; lo intermedial de la genealogía de un gran sueño prolífico; lo intermedial del lenguaje como el balbuceo de infantes felices; lo intermedial de hordas de artistas (toda la gente) que crean castillos de arena y otras fatuidades adentro de su cabeza y fuera de ella, o sin hacer absolutamente nada. Lo intermedial es el mundo antes y después de cortarlo en pedacitos y guardarlo en un cajón con la etiqueta MÍO, TUYO, SUYO.”
Incluso en este rápido repaso por su historia resulta sencillo comprender los efectos redistributivos que estxs autorxs percibieron en el concepto “intermedia”, y el potencial conversador –transcultural, transhistórico, trans…– que habilitaba en un mundo ya inevitablemente globalizado. Un mundo que a día de hoy se muestra además “polarizado”, en el que los medios que nos conectan son los mismos que nos enfrentan.
Lo intermedial, en cambio, deshace la rivalidad entre distinciones del tipo “viejo y nuevo” – tan utilitaria para la historia del arte como para cualquier otro discurso ideológico de orden “progresista” – porque no se realiza sino en el uso concreto de los medios para/dentro de una actualidad que es siempre situada e inacabada. Más allá de fetichismos con una palabra concreta, quisiera rescatar aquí una tentativa que le reconoce una usabilidad no utilitaria a lo que llamamos arte a la vez que resalta que el uso de los medios disponibles no al servicio de tradiciones ya reificadas, sino de problemas vitales con los que tales medios y usos se implican.
Valga todo lo anterior como una (quizá) intempestiva entrada al arte de Fuentesal Arenillas, y como adhesión a un plan para intentar salir de (precisamente) la tentación reificadora que pudiera subsistir en la lectura de sus trabajos como soluciones a problemas específicos de la escultura. Por eso, quisiera en primera instancia preguntarme (que nos preguntemos) si nombrar sus obras como “esculturas” alcanza realmente a nombrarlas, si no sería más preciso e invitante aludir, dependiendo del caso concreto, a “esculturas-dibujo”, “esculturas-arquitectura”, “recortes filosóficos” o “carpintería poética”, por enumerar solo algunas de las infinitas denominaciones posibles.
Empujado por ese mismo deseo de precisión abierta, quisiera también evitar la tentación apologética de los textos que suelen reducir la existencia de las obras al resultado de las intenciones y acciones conscientes y deliberadas de sus autores. Como ente autor, Fuentesal Arenillas (algo más y distinto a la simple suma Julia Fuentesal + Pablo Arenillas) conforma ya un inter que nos deja pensar en otros encadenamientos inter puestos en juego a la hora de obrar. Me siento cerca de Vinciane Despret cuando en su libro ¿Qué dirían los animales si les hiciéramos las preguntas correctas? se detiene en la “O de Obras” para preguntar “¿los pájaros hacen arte?” Embarcarse en esta cuestión con otrxs autorxs permite a Despret objetar tanto el supuesto carácter pasivo de la obra en relación a su autor como el sobreasumido papel del autor como núcleo emanador en relación a la obra. Cito en extenso:
“… el problema de[l antropólogo Alfred] Gell es el siguiente: si se considera como arte lo que es recibido y aceptado como tal por el mundo institucionalizado del arte, ¿cómo considerar las producciones de otras sociedades que nosotros consideramos como producciones artísticas, aunque esas mismas sociedades no les otorgan dicho valor a esos objetos? […] La antropología es el estudio de las relaciones sociales; entonces hay que considerar el estudio de la producción de los objetos en esas relaciones […] los objetos mismos deben ser considerados como agentes sociales, dotados de las característica que les dotamos a los agentes sociales. Por lo tanto, Gell va a intentar sacar la cuestión de la intencionalidad del marco estrecho en el cual la ha encerrado nuestra concepción y va a abrir la noción de agente – por ende, de “ser dotado de intencionalidad” – a otros seres además de los humanos.[…] El concepto de agentividad (que el traductor francés de su libro El arte y sus agentes traducirá por “intencionalidad”) ya no se postula entonces como una manera de clasificar los seres (aquellos que serían ontológicamente agentes, que estarían dotados de intencionalidad, y los que serían ontológicamente pacientes, y estarían desprovistos de ella). La agentividad (o la intencionalidad) es relacional, variable y se inscribe siempre en un contexto. No solamente la obra puede fascinar, capturar, embrujar, atrapar a su destinatario; sino que la agentividad contenida en la materia misma de la obra por hacer es lo que controla al artista, que desde entonces ocupa la posición de paciente.”
De momento, digamos tan solo que las obras que aparecerán en este texto tienen su vida más allá de Fuentesal Arenillas, el ente artista que, sin embargo, resulta vital para darles forma. Las líneas que siguen son un intento de ensayo-relato a partir de recuerdos personales iniciados con un regalo que Julia y Pablo me hicieron hace unos años…
I El cuerpo y la casa
Es difícil no quedarse mirándolo, porque se da todo a ver: la superficie, las costuras, los pliegues, los pellizcos y los cortes, el encaje como desencajado de las piezas que forman la corona, el rosa pálido tan crudo y tan sensual, más carnoso en el forro, por “abajo”, aunque cueste llamar “abajo” a una superficie destinada a sentarse encima de la cabeza. Y ese coqueto bordado en forma de comisura* que, casi del mismo color que la loneta, se expresa por pura textura. Digo“sensual” porque da ganas. Da ganas de tocarlo y ponérselo. Al principio lo coges con mucha precaución, como cuando se toma a los bebés pequeños, con miedo a que se descomponga una hechura tan expuesta. Mostrarse vulnerable es una vieja táctica para reclamar cuidado, y una forma paradójica para alguien que es un sombrero. Con el tiempo he comprobado que le cae bien a todo el mundo, por fuera y por dentro, llamando “fuera” a cómo os ven los demás y “dentro” a cómo lo sientes cuando lo llevas puesto.
Recuerdo la primera vez que anduvimos juntos por la calle. Fue un trayecto de casa al trabajo, por la mañana. Hacía ya mucho sol y, en esa circunstancia, un sombrero parecía buena compañía. Recuerdo sentir el ala abriendo y cerrándose, la sensación de caminar como una monja con cornette que en cualquier momento va a echar el vuelo: una cierta ligereza que alegraba el paseo por General Ricardos, probablemente la avenida con menos gracia de todo Madrid. Y, a la vez que la copa y el ala se guardaban para sí el sol directo, la también llamada falda amortiguaba con su caída el ruido y la vista del tráfico implacable que circula a esas horas los días de diario. Recuerdo a Simone Weil escribiendo sobre los sentidos: “… la felicidad está más allá del ámbito del consuelo y del dolor. Se percibe con otro sentido, igual que la percepción de los objetos en el extremo de un bastón o de un instrumento es distinta del tacto propiamente dicho. Ese otro sentido se forma por el desplazamiento de la atención mediante un aprendizaje en el que participan el alma entera y el cuerpo.” Si se piensa bien, cada cosa con/a-través-de la que vemos el mundo puede reorganizar nuestra atención y regalarnos, así, un sentido nuevo que es inseparable de ella.
Pronto fuimos encontrando más momentos de experiencia conjunta. En otra ocasión, Muna lo combinó por fuera con un collar rosa expropiado al Primark y el vestido nuevo marca pimes que Ale me había apañado cosiendo los ribetes bajos de dos camisetas con pelotillas. De esta guisa, y al son del parloteo con Punka, fue protagonista de una sesión de fotos tomadas por Muna al sol de la azotea, nuestro espacio aireado sobre el techo común de la calle Matilde Hernández, número 36.
En virtud de alguna lógica circulatoria, una de aquellas fotos bajó a reunirse con el archivo de materiales del estudio de Julia y Pablo, y ellxs fueron a ponerla por abajo de otro sombrero. Cobijada y argamasada con más materiales, conforma ahora el techo de una pieza de la serie Correveidile: ¿es ésta un toldo bajo el que descansar o una imagen-conjunto que nos transporta? Es difícil dar una respuesta sencilla. Las suyas son criaturas-arquitectura que pueden moverse y hacer lugar a la vez.
Eso pensé la primera ocasión en que vi sus criaturas-mueble fuera del estudio. Instaladas en la galería, esas presencias eran capaces – como diría Muna – de hacer casa. Será por la combinación del dm con la loneta y la pintura plástica, por su escala humana o por sus cajoncitos de madera de pino que te abren en la cabeza un rincón misterioso que parece poder guardar más de lo que muestra. Fuentesal Arenillas hablaba de dibujar con la madera y, siendo tan abstractas sus formas, asombra ver su concreción palpable y su como resistencia a ser tomadas por cosa. Plantadas sobre aquel suelo de microcemento, parasitaban la galería y la convertían en otra cosa.
II El trabajo y la pausa
“Estamos trabajando con lo que no se ve pero está ahí y está sucediendo. Por ejemplo, sabes lo que sucede sobre tu mesa de trabajo pero… ¿Qué ocurre debajo de ella?”, se preguntaba Fuentesal Arenillas hace unos años. Me conmueve ahora recordar la obra Imaginaria hablando de tú a tú a la Avenida de América desde el hall de la Sala de Arte Joven en la exposición Cubierta brillante margen delgado (del 2 de junio al 25 de julio de 2021). Imaginaria (2020-2021, loneta cruda, tablex, puntillas, grapas, madera de sapeli. 70 piezas que varían en sus dimensiones y apoyan en perchas o escuadras de sapeli) recopila las huellas que las tertulias con lxs amigxs habían ido dejando sobre el suelo de táblex del estudio-casa, les da cuerpo con bastidores y las arropa en loneta blanca. Pero lo que más emocionaba ver era el delicado entramado de apoyos, la finura con que descansaban los paneles mientras se medían suavemente contra el muro, su arreglo preciso y tranquilo.
En física se conoce como “mecánica” al estudio del movimiento y el reposo de los cuerpos, y al de su evolución en el tiempo por la acción de las fuerzas sobre ellos. El nombre proviene del latín mechanica, esto es, el arte de construir máquinas. La mecánica clásica define el trabajo como ese desplazamiento ejercido por las fuerzas que se aplican sobre los cuerpos. Por eso, cuando la energía cinética de un cuerpo permanece detenida por la acción conjunta de las fuerzas que actúan en él se dice que el trabajo es nulo, porque la fuerza y el desplazamiento actúan en sentido perpendicular y se compensan mutuamente. El trabajo nulo, una detención, no consiste pues en ausencia de esfuerzo, sino que es un estado que se alcanza y que, en este caso, implica lo que la obra hace hacer al ente artista Fuentesal Arenillas.
Leemos en Wikipedia: “Se puede considerar que la mecánica teórica se inicia con Arquímedes (287-212 a.C) de Siracusa, Sicilia, al que debemos, entre otros importantes ingenios y aparatos, el tornillo sin fin o la rosca, dispositivo con el que de forma eficaz se conseguía salvar desniveles permitiendo así elevar agua, grano etc.” Al ver y pensar las criaturas-arquitectura de Fuentesal Arenillas me detengo en los sencillos, anónimos, ancestrales ingenios de sostén y amarre que aparecen y reaparecen en ellas: tacos, calces, perchas, cuñas, puntales, travesaños, postes o escuadras, pero también clavos o grapas. Pienso en todos los trabajos de recopilación, composición, reensamblaje y apuntalado que mantienen en vibrante contacto y reposo existencias que quizá no lo hubieran estado de otro modo; o no por necesidad. Como si estar juntas y en el trabajo nulo no obedeciera sino a una suerte de libertad. Como si la respiraran. Percibo que es de ahí de donde se puede extraer la energía para seguir trabajando, la fuerza para mover(se): una clase de amor.
III El teatro y la calle
Caminando por Plaza chica en la exposición de Avenida de América, yo había sentido que la calle era un tablero de juegos. Plaza chica (2021, suelo de tableros de táblex, madera de pino viejo, sapeli, parafina en bloque, loneta, cartón, puntillas, grapas,…) es una pieza que toma el espacio y en la que es necesario pasar el rato. Como en La danza mudanza que puede verse en el CAAC de Sevilla, el suelo de táblex del estudio ocupa el lugar de exposición y lo transforma. Inevitablemente, uno piensa en una tarima escénica, una superficie que absorbe nuestra atención para presentarle ilusiones. Pero apenas hay ilusionismo en esta obra; hay cualidades, texturas, personajes y ocurrencias que se pliegan, se doblan o se despliegan. No tanto ilusionismo como descubrimientos sensibles que apelan a los ojos, a las manos, a las piernas y a sus acciones coordinadas (desplazarse para ver, agacharse a tocar…).
La obra se me antoja una demostración espacial de la continuidad entre el teatro y la vida, de los juegos que deshacen las separaciones categóricas. Y esto como si tal cosa, con apenas unos recortes, unos pespuntes, una colgadura, con los materiales a mano, al alcance de cualquiera. Porque no hay diferencia ontológica entre lo que queda dentro y fuera: a este lado la ficción, al otro la realidad. La diferencia, en todo caso, es más bien de orden convencional y técnico: todo consiste en permitir verle las costuras al juego.
De vuelta a la calle, Ale entonó: «¡Cubier-ta brillante/ mar-gen delgado!». Todo Matilde Hernández 36 lo secundó, coreando en la acera. Era una consigna espontánea que alineaba en nosotrxs el entusiasmo que la visita a la exposición nos había producido y fue, durante un rato, cante que nos ocupaba. Mi memoria lo convoca ahora y el entusiasmo se vuelve a hacer hueco.
IV El silencio y la algarabía
Azules, blancos, rosas o maderas, los colores de estas criaturas tienen normalmente una naturaleza cruda y zurbaranesca que propongo llamar silenciosa. Un apego a la monocromía, nunca absoluto, que hace silencio y permite, así, ver.
En particular, y por ejemplo, la serie Viña está compuesta por un conjunto de piezas formadas por retales de loneta cosidos y luego tensados sobre unos bastidores de la misma madera de iroko que se usa para fabricar instrumentos musicales. “Como pieles de tambor”, describe Bea Espejo. Son instrumentos callados, criaturas-costura que muestran dibujos en relieve sutilísimo, hechos de recortes rosas pespunteados en rosa sobre el rosa de la loneta tensada: unos dedos de guante, una lengua, una espátula… Hay en estas superficies una insistencia en ser poca cosa (casi nada). No como un déficit de ser, sino como su cualidad particular, y como belleza.
¡Cuánto en común y, a la vez, qué contraste con las destartaladas criaturas-orquesta de Ponerse un cojín de sombrero! Acerca de ellas, Fuentesal Arenillas ha dicho: “Se compone una escena desde un lugar común para nosotros, que son los patios y las corralas andaluzas. De ventana a ventana se escuchan ecos, historias, recetas y alegrías, y reverbera el sonido a través de esas paredes y de la ropa tendida, casi como una garganta colectiva.”
A mí me viene a la cabeza el ruidoso hueco del patio común en Matilde Hernández: los ensayos de las batucadas, los rumores sobre el casero, las cenas en la terraza aderezadas con cantes, con cuchicheos acerca de la última familia improvisada por cierto vecino o los desnudos integrales de otro. También se pueden oír las noticias sobre el barrio, incluyendo las nuevas aperturas y cierres de negocios o el relato puntual de los sucesos más recientes una o dos calles más allá, no por corrientes menos maravillosos.