On the walls, a trace

A group of people is understood to mean an assembly of individuals who coordinate their efforts to achieve a specific goal. A team, for its part, is an assembly of people who, sharing a common goal, must organise themselves in order to fulfil a single aim. Although expressed this way it may appear to be the same, in reality it is not. In fact, while the group bases its potential on the relationships of interdependency established by its members, the team only achieves its objective by joining forces and sharing resources. Or, expressed another way, while the team can achieve its objective without the need for the fusion of its members (remember a team is the sum of its individualities), a group (whose function depends on the degree of fusion of its individuals) will not achieve anything unless its members form an alliance.  

Forming part of a team is not the same as belonging to a group. You can leave a team easily; abandoning a group is much more complicated. It affects you deeply. 

When before the work of some artists, no explanation is necessary for your mind to fire and imagine in accordance with what it is perceiving. Whether a group or a team, whether stationary or in movement, whether it says something to you or not… Irrespective of what it does. This can lead to the possibility of being carried away and observing what is happening. For example, in an artwork. Calmly. Without haste. Regardless of any prejudice. 

Being carried away by an artwork to observe, without prejudice, what is happening in it does not mean that it is better, worse or equal to any other: it means that the possibility to halt whatever is happening, unaware of the clock ticking away, usually offers you the opportunity to speculate on what you desire, however strange it may be. And to ask yourself. For example: what does an artist think when they produce an artwork? 

The work of an artist may captivate for many reasons. However, when it does so to show people that, by doing things we do not understand, they challenge, intrigue, distract or disturb us, or take us for fools, it won’t be long before we start to ask ourselves things like: what are they doing?, why?, how do they do it?, have they been there?, were they there?, who organised them?, how did it begin?, what was it like in the beginning?, is it easy to do what they do?, is it difficult?, maybe they don’t have anything else to do?, is this how they spend their lives?, how much time did they spend on it?, is it as joyful, sad or light as it seems?, is what they are doing necessary or trivial?, why don’t I understand a thing?, should I understand something?, what for?, why?, do I need to know that they are doing? 

Being before an artwork that questions and, instead of concluding, becomes impossible to understand, means our curiosity has been aroused and is knocking on our door. At this point, we should open it and deal with the consequences.

I think that my hands would not have stopped at the end of the paragraph -two paragraphs above, in other words, the one with the questions-; I would have reached the end of this text asking Maider López about what intrigued me in her Playa or Ataskoa, two of her works from 2005 in which, handing red towels to bathers on a beach or creating a monumental traffic jam in the middle of a remote hill, I managed to place myself in the skin of one of the people that appears in them to enjoy a morning breaking unwritten rules and, above all, the opportunity to enjoy a breath of fresh air and unpredictability against the inflexibility of highly monotonous lives like ours.

Although I imagine what Maider López would think by proposing to a group of students[1] “cover the limits and contours of nature and architectural structures, touching them with your hands from one side to the other”[2], I think that in reality what she was seeking is what she has been doing since the beginning of her artistic career: wanting to see things another way. And, in passing, make us understand that we can all do this. From another perspective. On the basis of other parameters. With two, four, eight, sixteen or many more people. Lending our imagination a hand.

By approaching nature based on fragments delimited by hands or by acting in the same way to focus the attention on any of the constituent elements of architecture, Maider López refers us to touch, one of our most overlooked senses, despite existing on the limit of our corporal perimeter, and consequently speaks of the distance that separates us from the exterior. Fusing a series of bodies to mark a tree trunk, the corner of a house, the imperceptible profile of a rock or the jambs of a window from the exterior, the touch that Maider López refers us to is the sense of being able to achieve a common goal.

Contours is the title of a series of artworks by Maider López which, questioning the relationship between our bodies and architecture and filling the air with questions, can only be responded to by a group of people -any group of people- negotiating the fusion of their bodies, twisting them in the manner of classic statues, in a suitable way, however they please or however they decide amongst them. Among all the members of the same group, I mean. However, under no circumstances with irrefutable answers. Only some of their possibilities. Or several from among all of them.

After undertaking this work outside, the artist decide to focus her attention on the inside, in order to listen to the soul of an exhibition hall through the CollaJove Xiquets de Tarragona and their ability to assemble their bodies in order to achieve a common objective. A different type of objective, a different type of corporal choreography.

Trained to raise human towers capable of touching the sky through the combined efforts of its members, those of the Colla Jove de los Xiquets who answered the call of Maider López were invited to act in a different way to the one they were accustomed to. In other words: work inside a closed space, organise themselves in a room without any audience present, coordinate themselves not to raise more than one storey, couple themselves without the music of the gralla woodwind instrument that enlivens their gestures and to do whatever they considered appropriate on the instructions of an artist who was asking them to apprehend the space in a different way, based on this route map: “Touch the space. Inhabit the exhibition hall from other heights, postures and relationships. Cover the hall space with our hands. Construct architecture with our bodies, based on how we organise ourselves as a group”. In other words, to construct. However, not a human tower, but the volume of an indoor space with the aid of bodies and our capacity to organise ourselves.

What you are seeing or will see once you so desire is the trace of an action that took place in a venue that is normally open to the public, which happened during a day that none of us knows, a day when there was nobody in the hall and on which the group who performed it had to content themselves with delimiting the space and not touching the sky from the highest point of a human tower.  They performed in an empty space, without anybody, without air, without noise. 

Leaving a trace of what they did on these walls.

Frederic Montornés

June 2024