Noé Ortega

Objects are like Rasputin:
you often have to kill them for them to die (1)

– Christian Dotremont

Sometimes, objects around us appear in such a way that one has the impression that, for a moment, they have come to life. In Jan Švankmajer’s short film, The flat (1968), a man finds himself locked up in an apartment in which the objects therein behave autonomously, to his astonishment and perpetual confusion. In this situation, the inanimate rebels frustrate the main character’s attempts to put any of them to use: the legs of a chair become shortened, several holes appear in a spoon, the bed disintegrates when the man tries to sleep... What this constitutes is a revolt of material objects that results in the discovery of the unknown dimensions of the mundane.

Shopping cart threw itself downstairs
(found by Noé Ortega in Santander, Spain, July 2007)

However, now that objects are confined almost permanently within a prison cell of utility, generally unconnected to any type of liberating act, then their desperation proliferates. In the city it is not unusual to find the corpses of functionality: all those objects which, (...) Leer más

And remember that your poor memory
let the golden fish flow between its numbed fingers.
René Daumal

Accepting the definition of memory as the persistence of the past, it can be stated that the city itself is memory. Therein, memory and its material base coincide. The physical structure of the city absorbs everything that takes place within it, and in this way, it is dynamically configured. Consequently, it seems evident that a profound experience of the city requires a strong immersion in its memory, with the final aim of discovering the mesh of roots by which it is nourished and continues to grow and develop.

In this context, I decided to carry out a poetic, emotional and psycho-geographical exploration of my childhood environment. One day, in February 2007, I was strolling in the park where I used to play as a child. After being astonished at the cracks in the ground caused by tree-roots, I ended up in a small, semi-circular square with a sculpture of a cow in the middle. This place constitutes one of the epicentres of my childhood. On the wall at the right side of the square, I suddenly saw a relief I had (...) Leer más

The wind is a great waterfall, a fall through which the air rushes down. What is it that opens itself in the space for the air to precipitate? What is the nature of the accumulation that comes to unleash that frenzied whip?

The violence of the air always appears to be triggered under the sign of a strong decompensation. All its devastating power, all the material turmoil and the dislocation of elements that it produces has as its ultimate goal the restoration of something that had been removed from the place.

The corpses of the wind are the same as the fire's.

The heat takes up everything. The light sweats. The shadow sweats. The palm sweats. All the bodies sweat. Moisture invades everything: nails, lime, bricks, sexes, iron. The moisture leads to sleep. And the people lie down on the sidewalks and sleep. A man and a woman in that corner. Four feet protrude from another one, but it is eight of them. Some more in another street. A quarter to four, then at five, and at another hour without name, Fourier has a siesta on the streets (...) Leer más

Introduction

Sometimes we tend to use the expression ”from the outside of language”. Through it we intend to mean something like what will follow. There is a commonly accepted standard of verbal communication in everyday life that is supposedly determined by a logical discourse. In the ”logic” goes, unequivocally it seems, a use of language spoken pragmatically, usefully, identifiably. Presumably, if the spoken language does not have these characteristics, that is, if it doesn't retain certain established linguistic rules, we would be illegible, we would not understand each others. It is a fact that this amounts to maintain, inevitably, rigid forms of communication that are held on the basis that they have to mean something, that they have to make sense, that they have to be comprehensible, that is, we need to have a rational communicative behavior, or else we would turn illogical, we would fall into nonsense, we would become absurd and irrational. And it is precisely what it is about: for who could continue preventing us from losing ourselves orally, from initiating talks through which (this is language, a means, rather than a tool) humanity could restitute to itself relationships sponsored by the satisfaction of its (...) Leer más