BOOK

“The first back page of this notebook is the last page of Giorgio Agamben’s first book: The Man Without Content, written in 1970. This book has a particularity: each time you read it, it seems different, it means different things, it has different words. When I was a child, I believed that each time you would close a book, words would change; and I used to convince myself that that was the reason why each time you read a book it is a different book. In my work I have always been busy with the relation with the spectator and I have been, for a long while, positioning myself from the point of view of the viewer, a viewer that is actually me: how do we look? how do we perceive? what is the minimum the body has to relate to the discourse in order to create new spaces? how can we see a multiple reality in one single object? what do we hear when we just watch? How can I be multiple things at the same time? Since my last piece, BLOB, this relation has changed. The relation I am finding now is a relationship of trust in order to let the piece establish a certain relation to the spectator, a relation that escapes from me and my intention. During the process of BLOB I have read the Agamben’s book. A lot of things have happened since it was written, but nowadays we are facing very similar problems from a completely new perspective. What is the relation between the artist and the spectator? What is the role of the spectator in a piece of art? What is the relation between the piece of art and the artist? Where is the pleasure, the desire? What is the role of an artist in society? What degree of indifference we play with? What is a political movement? Are we loosing art by making it so auto referential? Are we ready to abandon metalinguistics? What is the purpose of this whole affair? All those questions conform the relations between artists, spectators, institutions, society. For this invitation, this Carte Blanche, I want to place the starting point of a new project on the February 27th, 2016 and to invite several guests to update the Agamben’s book... Using this actualisation as hinge between BLOB and a new project that starts here, in BUDA, Kortrijk, now, with you... this encounter could possibly end with everybody watching a nightfall in a Californian forest.”

María Jerez