They Endured

Tiago de Abreu Pinto
Galerija Gregor Podnar, 2020

Who are they?

Prior to their stories, it is important to point out the context of the aforementioned person. His craft, let me put it this way, takes place along a flow of ideas that leaves traces of other works on the way, a continuous network of digressions that would make any person, conscious of his process, with the feeling of already being in the middle of a story that started some time ago. If only we could see what is happening here. Let’s be clear about it. Its beginning could be explained with the aid of this work: iron ribbons hanging from a narrow piece of metal. Leads us immediately to the physicality of a flag. Its schematic missing parts lay there as the remaining fragments of a country. We do our jobs and we rebuild it only using our imagination. The latter, is a crucial element in this project: the imagination is ingrained in the very language of his works. In his realm, the incompleteness theorem is shown in iron: a thick iron base, a missing rectangle space, which hangs like a flag on the mast of a sailing vessel resisting, enduring the elements as its iron ingrained nature. 

In the light of a new piece we remain still: columns surround us. In the context of these pillars, the clever eyes won’t see only a hook that emerges from it. The hook is there for this same reason: semicircle, or open circle, shape is full of tension. Its configuration goes far: a crosier, a fishhook, a hanging hook, a sickle, a billhook, a shepherd’s crook, a hook of moon or a serpent’s tail ending in a hook. The secrecy-shrouded landscape opens up before them: the multiperspectivally tensions embrace the boundaries of history. A concrete idea is sought, but to believe one will find it under a simple and straightforward manner is to swallow the bait. Even a hook on the wall, with a drawn circle holding a hook with a piece of the cut wall, serves as binoculars: ways of seeing, of addressing different focus, distance and closeness: magnification: this (alongside cartography) was the first strike capacity of explication that coerced the previously invisible world to become pictorial . And, when we think that its symbolic potential would vanish, we see ourselves before the ultimate tension assembled by the hook: the view from the widow. A video that unfolds around the hook that held Alexander Calder’s work.  

Would the specificity of this project encircle the entire exhibition? This would only be feasible if the grid of rubbers stained with graphite dust wouldn’t allude to the undoubtedly fact that through these lines we would talk about opposites; on the fact that even to erase history would be to do history. The non-realization of the project (encapsulated in the symbolic potential of the eraser) would allow an increasing explicitidiness of stances pro resistance, pro endurance. Across the board, its margins, its lines, we always encounter world-openness: starting from the basic domestic situation (…) the expansion process proceeds from the village to the city, to the empire and onwards to the finite universe until it loses itself in the uninhabitable boundless space.   

The questions imposed in this context have the strength of drawing forth a response: a sort of metallic thread that holds together two unmated substances: a thread that attracts a cut in the pillars that surround us. But, who are they? They are the ones who endure. People, matters, events, doesn’t matter whom or what. Suspended of time, space, causality. In the present time, on its temporal bandwidth, or at the width of your present, your now, we sometimes forget about what we are doing here, at this place. Or, why we should endure the manifestations that only consider the instant. That let the future or the past vanish. Who are they, you ask? They are, and they will be. They endured the weight of movement, the abandonment, the post-war or the post-celebration. They have answered and questioned triggered by the crisis that surrounded them. But, to question is to endure, it is to see that this obscure point that allows us to see, this sun situated eternally below the horizon, this blind spot that the gaze is unaware of, islet of absence in the heart of vision – that is the aim of the quest and the setting, the stake, of the plot . And that was all .

  1.  BORGES, Jorge Luis. The Basilisk in The Book of Imaginary Beings. P. 29 (Paraphrased)
  2.  SLOTERDIJK, Peter. Spheres. Volume 3: Foams. Plural Spherology. Translated by Wieland Hoban. South Pasadena: Semiotext(e), 2016. P. 75-76. 
  3.  SLOTERDIJK, Peter. Spheres. Volume 3: Foams. Plural Spherology. Translated by Wieland Hoban. South Pasadena: Semiotext(e), 2016. P. 16. 
  4.  PYNCHON, Thomas. Gravity’s Rainbow. New York: Penguin classics deluxe edition, 2006. P. 517.
  5.  BLANCHOT, Maurice.On an Art Without Future in The Book to Come.Translated by Charlotte Mandell. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003.P. 160
  6.  FAULKNER, William. The Sound and the Fury. London: Vintage Classics, 1995.