An exhibition is also a song.
In "Pyramid Song", the artist, curator, and cultural manager Javier Arbizu (Navarra, 1984) reveals that which inhabits the interstices of logic and time. Taking the architecture of the two rooms of the exhibition space as a starting point, the artist has conceived a site-specific installation with the superimposition of a new floor over the existing one. Throughout this, he configures a particular cartography based on displacements of the horizontal plane; on formworks that function as triggers of correspondences; and on gestures that reveal new possibilities of meaning to understand a movement in the present.
In creating this new layer, we find the desire to represent what does not yet exist in act, but in potential; in other words, to give form to the logic of intuition. Arbizu explores the ideas of mutability, connection, and duplicity through operations of semantic juxtaposition and tension between materials. The recycled wooden planks with which he has constructed the floor do not conceal the accumulation of events that the surface has undergone over time; on the contrary, the accidents are accentuated by sculptural gestures that are born of a negotiation between intuition and reason. We have, for example, the raising of the boards, which become a yellow parallelepiped; the creation of topographical depressions, which imply their reading; or the arrangement of metallic wedges.
Among all these elements, the sinuous metal-covered cracks that appear on the surface are highlighted. These fissures are communicating vessels between the objects in the installation that refer to the psychoduct seen as a connecting element between life and death (1); a structure that can represent the logic of the immaterial and an example of how needs that allude to the intangible can be formed. This, together with the arrangement Arbizu has chosen for the elements, manages to create a spatial arrangement that results in a topology where notions of distance and proximity determine the visitor's interaction with the exhibition. It is a haptic game in which the body in movement activates the pieces.
The rope vibrates, and the knot unravels.
The sculptures on the walls show the transformation of recognizable, everyday elements, now represented with a certain strangeness. They were created from alloys with different proportions of bismuth, tin, and zinc through processes such as assembly, casting, soldering, and disintegration. The locks do not protect any doors, the taps do not turn to get water and the keys do not open any boxes. It is as if they were autonomous bodies where the impossibility of action is an end in itself. The same happens with the broken and immobile feet, which suggest the past presence of another body.
Within all this, there is a semantic rupture, an erosion of the image that gives way to a sensitive openness capable of transmitting personal alchemy and recognizing the agency of matter. Javier Arbizu listens to and dialogues with it, observing its intrinsic violence, and its contained vitality.
“All the things I used to see (...)
All my past and future (...)
There was nothing to fear and nothing to doubt.”
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(1) The function of the psychoduct was to allow the descent to the underworld or Xibalba. The funerary structure was part of the tomb of Pakal the Great, Maya King of Bàak during the 7th century A.D., and was found in 1952 by archaeologist Alberto Ruz in what is known today as Palenque, Chiapas, Mexico.
