Boiler Room. SLURP, GLUG. Esther Gatón – Luis Adelantado Valencia

Text/Dossier

 
 
Boiler Room. SLURP, GLUG. Esther Gatón

 
 
Chilla, se retuerce. Se hace más y más grande, 2019. Rusty iron, handicraft putty, car body filler, artificial oxidant, epoxy resin, transparent blue pigment and paint of the following colors: Aztec gold, Tennesee blue, gold rosé, champagne, pearl, graphite, violeta and red. 47 x 87 x 75 cm
SLURP, GLUG, 2019. Chicken wire, plaster, hessian, resin, pigments, rusty iron, handicraft putty, car body filler, artificial oxidant, epoxy resin, transparent blue pigment and paint of the following colors: Aztec gold, Tennesee blue, gold rosé, champagne, pearl, graphite, violeta and red, Variable dimensions
SLURP, GLUG, 2019. Chicken wire, plaster, hessian, resin, pigments, rusty iron, handicraft putty, car body filler, artificial oxidant, epoxy resin, transparent blue pigment and paint of the following colors: Aztec gold, Tennesee blue, gold rosé, champagne, pearl, graphite, violeta and red, Variable dimensions
SLURP, GLUG, 2019. Chicken wire, plaster, hessian, resin, pigments, rusty iron, handicraft putty, car body filler, artificial oxidant, epoxy resin, transparent blue pigment and paint of the following colors: Aztec gold, Tennesee blue, gold rosé, champagne, pearl, graphite, violeta and red, Variable dimensions
Un volcán explota y vuelve a convertirse en montaña, 2019. Chicken wire, plaster, hessian, resin and pigments. 16 x 45 x 17 cm
Chilla, se retuerce. Se hace más y más grande, 2019. Rusty iron, handicraft putty, car body filler, artificial oxidant, epoxy resin, transparent blue pigment and paint of the following colors: Aztec gold, Tennesee blue, gold rosé, champagne, pearl, graphite, violeta and red. 87 x 113 x 92 cm
Chilla, se retuerce. Se hace más y más grande, 2019. Rusty iron, handicraft putty, car body filler, artificial oxidant, epoxy resin, transparent blue pigment and paint of the following colors: Aztec gold, Tennesee blue, gold rosé, champagne, pearl, graphite, violeta and red. 45 x 170 x 135 cm
SLURP, GLUG, 2019. Chicken wire, plaster, hessian, resin, pigments, rusty iron, handicraft putty, car body filler, artificial oxidant, epoxy resin, transparent blue pigment and paint of the following colors: Aztec gold, Tennesee blue, gold rosé, champagne, pearl, graphite, violeta and red, Variable dimensions


 
 

Texto

 
 

Sonia Fernández Pan


Crunch crunch crunch


Not so long ago, while impatiently biting into a whole olive, I noticed a strange noise while I was chewing it. The strange thing wasn’t so much the noise in itself, I remember hearing similar noises coming from my mouth over the years, but rather the feeling I was chewing something that just a few seconds ago had been a part of me. Although that wasn’t what was entirely strange either. I was able to recognise the familiarity of that sound, but I also recognised the texture of what I was chewing. I also found suddenly interrupting my chewing movement familiar, only to start again more slowly in order to discover if I was really chewing a piece of one of my molars mixed in with the olive. That was what made me think about transformation of matter in my own body. That tiny fragment of my tooth was no longer a part of my teeth - it had become detached from my body. In a rather perverse way, it was still a part of me. Bataille’s idea that a kiss is the beginning of cannibalism started to fall apart, just like my tooth. Eating parts of yourself seemed to me a much more literal primitive form of anthropophagy, even if involuntary. Insignificant situations such as chewing bits of broken teeth, biting your nails and cuticles, licking blood leaking out from cuts. Making your epidermis deeper, taking up an idea from another poet, this time Valéry, by mixing the inside and outside of our bodies with apparently trivial, secondary gestures. Chewing is one of the many ways of erasing the memory of things.
Tras tras tras
It is said that our cells are constantly regenerating, so quickly in fact that we could say that after a few days our body is not made up of the same matter. And even so, we are still the same. Although the discovery of cell regeneration is fairly recent, the same philosophical dilemma about the identity of things arose many centuries ago in Ancient Greece. Legend has it that there was a boat whose parts were gradually replaced as they became damaged or worn. After a few years the entire boat had been replaced piece by piece, but it still looked the same. It was a different boat, and at the same time it was still the same boat. Its matter had changed, but not its shape. When chewing however, it is the shape of food that changes tangibly, but not its matter. Is the taste of strawberries really the flavour of strawberries? Is the colour of metal really the colour of metal? Appearances are not deceptive. They are simply appearances. Depth inhabits surfaces.
Clang clang ñiii ñiii clang clang
We tend to understand things as the result of a process rather than a process as such. Our inability to perceive the changes that take place in those processes does not mean that they do not take place. Things are material processes that take place over time and space. Although we often use the terms indistinctly, objects are not things. If anything, they are the different positions that they acquire during the processes. There is something uncomfortable about things, perhaps it is the way they resist being defined by language. One thing can be too many things all at the same time. A metal bar is not just a metal bar. Stones were not always stones. A volcano erupts and becomes a mountain again. A large piece of glass breaks during transport after being exhibited for the first time in public at Brooklyn Museum in 1926. In Venus Smiles by J.G. Ballard, a public sculpture starts showing rather unusual behaviour on the day it is unveiled. The metal it is made from emits a shrill sound and the public look on in amazement, and horror too, to see this unexpected awakening of matter. As the days go by, the sculpture starts moving: it shouts, twists and grows, doubling in size. Unable to control its growth, it is stripped apart and sold off as scrap metal. Some months later though, the beams of some buildings start vibrating and giving off sounds. The recycled metal from the sculpture was reused in buildings meaning that it continues to grow, having alloyed will other matter. What was previously specific matter giving shape to a sculpture became an entity with expanding life, impossible to pinpoint its exact location because of its continuous dissemination. That sculpture was a possible position in the life of matter. But Venus Smiles is no different from Mona Lisa, from the marble that gives off the coloured hues in the Parthenon, or rusting metal.
Shhh shhhh shhh
If things could speak, what language would they speak? But why insist on them having a language? How can they communicate with us in a way we can understand? Are not onomatopoeias enough? Are they not an attempt by things to create a language? Our desire to give things a voice that presumably do not have one is so strong that there is even an onomatopoeia for silence. Perhaps onomatopoeias are the only words capable of resisting discourse. They take us closer to the materiality of things, and closer even to our own bodies. They give voice to the heartbeat, to kisses, applause, the splashing of water, breaking objects, explosions, bubbles. The same way some words also take us closer to the materiality of things, transporting us through their sonority. Viscosity is a viscous word. It oozes out between the teeth. Could matter have its own etymology? However, language is not the way things communicate with us, even though there are bacteria that have been able to learn English. Like the ocean on Solaris, they have different forms of contact. And what if Mars were coated in béchamel sauce. What would it say to us? Slurp, glug, glug, slurp?
Tris tras tris tras… glugú glugú glugú
When referring to art, Alexander Kluge mentioned two types of characters: the tamer and the gardener. Unlike the tamer, the gardener is aware that

“something is growing by itself”. But the frontier between care and domination

is not only a slippery slope, but anything that grows by itself never does so alone, but rather in the company of other elements, other lives, other things. Gardens, like cities, are ambiguous places: we are in them, but also outside them. A plant in a plant pot is the convergence of nature and culture. The roots adapt to the space and shape of the plant pot. A lot of plants are indoors, but belong outdoors. Do they feel the difference? As in art, gardens are an aesthetic artefact linked to thought, but also to ways of knowledge that appear with material practice. Techne has its own episteme. The wish to preserve things entails denying the passing of time, and the life that this gives rise to, transforms and discards. What if it were possible to have an exhibition that allowed light from outside, rain, night, wind, dust, bangs and breakage, movement of things, iridescence or disorientation of meaning? And what if all these elements were contained in it, attached to the surface of things? Could it not therefore be an exhibition of a biological system that could grow “by itself”? An exhibition as a third landscape, a residual, transitory space, outside planning, power and submission. An exhibition of items vulnerable to themselves, removed from the deliberate action of human beings. An exhibition as a process of actions that are external to it. An externality that is evident in the internality.
*This text brings together ideas by Esther Gatón, Mikel Escobales Castro, Gilles Clèment, Stanislaw Lem and Fernándo Domínguez Rubio. It also contains comments on former work by Esther such as Bechamel from Mars or “lub-dub-lub-dub-lub-dub…”.”.