DC -- Embassy of Spain -- Spain Arts & Culture -- Lawn Exhibit: Transformando lo físico:
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Description of Pictures: Transformando lo físico
“Transformando lo Físico” invites 12 Spanish creators to come up with 12 different artistic proposals for the façade of our building that will be shown monthly in the garden, allowing a dialog between the building and its representation.
The security measures derived from the pandemic have forced us to rethink spaces, experiences and relationships, not only between people but also between people and space. Access to culture and the artistic experience itself now require new scenarios and approaches.
Although virtual reality is not a new phenomenon, in the current context its prominence is inevitable. We have transferred many of our physical and everyday experiences to the screen, and access to knowledge and culture has also been relocated to the virtual environment.
How can you describe a building without ever having seen it, without having walked through its doors?
Transforming the Physical Environment has asked twelve Spanish creators to define our building without visiting it first, at least not in the traditional sense. To do this, the artists will work on the intervention of a photograph of the façade of the building which will be placed in the garden.
The sensitive experience will be replaced by research and the possibility of generating intuitive knowledge, interpreting the architecture with values that go beyond form and extend to narrative or historical approaches or the relationship/interference with the environment.
Spectators will complete this project through active contemplation, where the layout of the piece shall allow the image and the façade to be observed simultaneously while also encouraging the viewer to look for differences and games between what can be seen in situ and the reading made by the artist. The piece is not a fixed composition, but a dialog between the real thing and its representation.
The selected artists are looking for radically different gazes and working environments: (Hybrid) approaches from the visual arts, design, drawing, architecture or mediation. However, a certain common ingredient can be seen in all of them: a playful and curious spirit that places the attention on processes and relates to everyday materials; a sensitive, warm and affectionate approach; one that is kind, even domestic. Whether it is in a more evident or more veiled way, all of them show an interest in space, understood from the architectural or the narrative point of view, from the traditional limits of representation, or from the relationship with the city and the environment.
HEY Studio, Iñaki Chávarri, E1000, Luis Úrculo, Tamara Arroyo, José Ramón Ais, Colectivo JÁ!, José Quintanar, Yolanda Mosquera, Javier Jaén, Susana Blasco and María Jérez have come up with twelve different answers to the same question, constructing a multi-faceted and multi-linear narrative of our building, in which the distinctive profile of its walls is completed with the forms that have shaped its history and its uses.
—Ana Bustelo, curator
Selected artists
Each month Transformando Lo Físico will present an artistic proposal by the following artists:
* Hey Studio – April 2021
* Iñaki Chávarri – May 2021
* E1000 – June 2021
* Luis Úrculo – July 2021
* Tamara Arroyo – August 2021
* José Ramón Ais – September 2021
* Colectivo ¡JA! – October 2021
* José Quintanar – November 2021
* Yolanda Mosquera – December 2021
* Javier Jaén – January 2022
* Susana Blasco – February 2022
* María Jerez – March 2022
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TRANSF_220216_01.JPG: Javier Jaén
10 / 12
From what I’ve been told, the construction of my house started nine months before I moved in. The first few months were very strange.
I had trouble understanding how my taps and switches worked. I discovered that opening my windows wide made the world less confusing and that, if I shouted, some friendly neighbours would bring me food and take out the rubbish. My rooms grew inexplicably large and my front door filled up with white stones. I learned to move the walls clumsily about and discovered other neighbourhoods with many little houses of every shape and size. For a time I made an effort to make my house look like all the others, and then I painted and redecorated it a million times until I had it how I wanted. The neighbours still dropped in regularly, but they no longer seemed so nice to me. Plants turned up unexpectedly in the corners and after the first dampness, the rooms stopped growing on me.
One afternoon I saw through the upstairs windows a house that shook the floor below. The sight of it made me dream of terraced houses. We moved our houses to the same street, but since it was always raining there, each house went back to its own postcode. When I managed to repair the leaks, I visited other towns, cities and even a country with houses unlike any I had seen before. My rooms became filled with pictures, books, vases, records and fridge magnets. I got back on good terms with the neighbours, and they taught me how to look after the plants, how to work the boiler and how to make the most of the cooker. I’m not sure exactly how it happened: I met another house and before I knew it I found myself in a bright terraced house with a little house in the garden. Finally, the clothes in the wardrobe, the blanket on the sofa, the bread on the table and the double bed. Home, sweet, salty, bitter, sour home.
One night, my beloved neighbours moved to another neighbourhood and no matter how much I shouted, they never brought me food again. Now it fell to me to take out the rubbish. The leaks came back and a plumber helped me to live with them. The little house in the garden proved a lot of work, it grew non-stop, it was never still, it opened the windows and painted itself with colours. One day it even sprouted wings from the walls, learned to fly and left us all with the door wide open. The tiles started to fall off, the first cracks appeared, and I had to run periodic checks on the electrical system. I struggled to keep the light off all night, and although the empty letterbox ached, I enjoyed the silence in the dining room. Every now and then a plug would need fixing, a new noise might appear, or a pipe would get clogged. When I drew the blinds, a drawer of memories opened, and I missed the neighbours. I remembered how much I enjoyed spending time with other houses and set about doing something about it. I threw the house out the window, changed the curtains, and went on the road again. I now loved nature and watching the birds perch on my roof. Sometimes that was enough. The light came back into the living room, and the little house in the garden suddenly showed up asking how to change a light bulb.
About Javier Jaén
Javier Jaén (Barcelona, 1983) studied Graphic Design and Fine Arts in Barcelona, New York and Budapest. His professional activities focus on editorial illustration, book covers, advertising, cultural communication and self initiated projects.
He has worked for The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, Time, National Geographic, Greenpeace, Penguin Random House, Vueling Airlines, UNESCO, Camper, Netflix, Louis Vuitton, Harvard, MIT, Microsoft or Pedro Almodóvar among others.
He has taught at Istituto Europeo di Design (IDEP) and frequently runs workshops and lectures worldwide. His work has been recognized by AGI Membership (2015), Society of Illustrators (Illustrators 55, 56, 60), American Illustration (AI33, AI34, AI38, AI39), Print Magazine (New Visual Artist 2013), Junceda Award (2013), Gràffica Award (2010), Laus (Grand Laus 2016, Gold 2017, Silver 2018) D&AD Pencil (2017), The Society of Publication Designers (Gold medal 2018). He has participated in exhibitions in New York, London, El Salvador, Seoul, Rome or Ciudad de México.
He also have two sports awards and a lifetime achievement honor as a comedian, but he didn’t win them, he only designed the trophies. Don’t let him fool you. He published a retrospective of his work exactly 30 years after his first tooth fell out. These two events are probably not connected at all. He has still not written a child, planted a book, or given birth to a tree. Everything is waiting to be done.
TRANSF_220216_13.JPG: Transformando lo Fisico
Transformando lo fisico has asked twelve Spanish creators to define our building without visiting it first! To do this, the artists are working on the intervention of a photograph of the building's facade that will be placed in the garden. Whether it is in a more evident or more veiled way, all of them show an interest in space, understood from the architectural or the narrative point of view, from the traditional limits of representation, or from the relationship with the city and the environment. Spectators will complete this project through active contemplation, as the piece is not a fixed composition, but a dialog between the building and its representation.
TRANSF_220320_05.JPG: María Jerez
12 / 12
Sticking my head through the capitals of your columns
For months I have looked at the image of the building of the Office of Culture of the Embassy of Spain. After looking at it for a long time, I wondered how you can touch an image, how you can come into physical contact with it.
The impossibility of going to Washington to tour the building, step on it, smell it, perceive its temperature and its small garden at the entrance, led me to create a way of meeting to get in touch with it that consisted of dismembering that image into the different elements that compose it.
I couldn’t touch the building, but I could touch pieces of the image if they become a body: extracting the spherical shape of one of its bushes with the texture of its tiles; giving my nails the color of their grass; touch a stone the same color as the railing of your balustrade; caressing a baluster; reaching into a gutter; letting part of the curve of her arches physically interfere with my gaze; imagine a hole produced by the deterioration of its facade and stamp an image of it on a cloth; stick your head out of a plastic capital similar to the top capitals of the building’s columns; covering myself with a sky-colored cloth, the sky that flies over the image of the building; or holding a tree trunk full of lichens which could be the lichens that spread over the trees in your garden.
Contact with the elements of the image gave rise to a choreography of constant encounters with alterity, where new relationships can arise. A dance, danced live, by my body and the body of all the elements. This dance, in turn, has been captured in this image.
About María Jerez
María Jerez’s work uses choreography, cinema, and visual arts to explore the way in which art’s relation to the spectator is a space where modes of representation can be put into crisis.
Moving beyond her early interest in theatrical and cinematographic conventions —and the audience’s implicit understanding of those conventions— she now seeks to question the entire relationship by opening spaces of potentiality through encounters with what we find strange and alien. Her most recent work insists on the performativity of the encounter as a space of transformation. In this process of transformation the “other” is lodged in oneself, establishing diffuse edges between the known and the unknown.
Her work tries to escape from logocentric and anthropocentric logics, where human knowledge itself becomes something vulnerable to other enigmatic and complex ecosystems.
She combines the production of her artistic work with educational, curatorial and editorial projects.
TRANSF_220320_08.JPG: Transformando lo Fisico
Transformando lo fisico has asked twelve Spanish creators to define our building without visiting it first! To do this, the artists are working on the intervention of a photograph of the building's facade that will be placed in the garden. Whether it is in a more evident or more veiled way, all of them show an interest in space, understood from the architectural or the narrative point of view, from the traditional limits of representation, or from the relationship with the city and the environment. Spectators will complete this project through active contemplation, as the piece is not a fixed composition, but a dialog between the building and its representation.
TRANSF_220422_02.JPG: María Jerez
12 / 12
Sticking my head through the capitals of your columns
For months I have looked at the image of the building of the Office of Culture of the Embassy of Spain. After looking at it for a long time, I wondered how you can touch an image, how you can come into physical contact with it.
The impossibility of going to Washington to tour the building, step on it, smell it, perceive its temperature and its small garden at the entrance, led me to create a way of meeting to get in touch with it that consisted of dismembering that image into the different elements that compose it.
I couldn’t touch the building, but I could touch pieces of the image if they become a body: extracting the spherical shape of one of its bushes with the texture of its tiles; giving my nails the color of their grass; touch a stone the same color as the railing of your balustrade; caressing a baluster; reaching into a gutter; letting part of the curve of her arches physically interfere with my gaze; imagine a hole produced by the deterioration of its facade and stamp an image of it on a cloth; stick your head out of a plastic capital similar to the top capitals of the building’s columns; covering myself with a sky-colored cloth, the sky that flies over the image of the building; or holding a tree trunk full of lichens which could be the lichens that spread over the trees in your garden.
Contact with the elements of the image gave rise to a choreography of constant encounters with alterity, where new relationships can arise. A dance, danced live, by my body and the body of all the elements. This dance, in turn, has been captured in this image.
About María Jerez
María Jerez’s work uses choreography, cinema, and visual arts to explore the way in which art’s relation to the spectator is a space where modes of representation can be put into crisis.
Moving beyond her early interest in theatrical and cinematographic conventions —and the audience’s implicit understanding of those conventions— she now seeks to question the entire relationship by opening spaces of potentiality through encounters with what we find strange and alien. Her most recent work insists on the performativity of the encounter as a space of transformation. In this process of transformation the “other” is lodged in oneself, establishing diffuse edges between the known and the unknown.
Her work tries to escape from logocentric and anthropocentric logics, where human knowledge itself becomes something vulnerable to other enigmatic and complex ecosystems.
She combines the production of her artistic work with educational, curatorial and editorial projects.
TRANSF_220422_14.JPG: Transformando lo Fisico
Transformando lo fisico has asked twelve Spanish creators to define our building without visiting it first! To do this, the artists are working on the intervention of a photograph of the building's facade that will be placed in the garden. Whether it is in a more evident or more veiled way, all of them show an interest in space, understood from the architectural or the narrative point of view, from the traditional limits of representation, or from the relationship with the city and the environment. Spectators will complete this project through active contemplation, as the piece is not a fixed composition, but a dialog between the building and its representation.
TRANSF_220505_02.JPG: Transformando lo Fisico
Transformando lo fisico has asked twelve Spanish creators to define our building without visiting it first! To do this, the artists are working on the intervention of a photograph of the building's facade that will be placed in the garden. Whether it is in a more evident or more veiled way, all of them show an interest in space, understood from the architectural or the narrative point of view, from the traditional limits of representation, or from the relationship with the city and the environment. Spectators will complete this project through active contemplation, as the piece is not a fixed composition, but a dialog between the building and its representation.
TRANSF_220505_10.JPG: María Jerez
12 / 12
Sticking my head through the capitals of your columns
For months I have looked at the image of the building of the Office of Culture of the Embassy of Spain. After looking at it for a long time, I wondered how you can touch an image, how you can come into physical contact with it.
The impossibility of going to Washington to tour the building, step on it, smell it, perceive its temperature and its small garden at the entrance, led me to create a way of meeting to get in touch with it that consisted of dismembering that image into the different elements that compose it.
I couldn’t touch the building, but I could touch pieces of the image if they become a body: extracting the spherical shape of one of its bushes with the texture of its tiles; giving my nails the color of their grass; touch a stone the same color as the railing of your balustrade; caressing a baluster; reaching into a gutter; letting part of the curve of her arches physically interfere with my gaze; imagine a hole produced by the deterioration of its facade and stamp an image of it on a cloth; stick your head out of a plastic capital similar to the top capitals of the building’s columns; covering myself with a sky-colored cloth, the sky that flies over the image of the building; or holding a tree trunk full of lichens which could be the lichens that spread over the trees in your garden.
Contact with the elements of the image gave rise to a choreography of constant encounters with alterity, where new relationships can arise. A dance, danced live, by my body and the body of all the elements. This dance, in turn, has been captured in this image.
About María Jerez
María Jerez’s work uses choreography, cinema, and visual arts to explore the way in which art’s relation to the spectator is a space where modes of representation can be put into crisis.
Moving beyond her early interest in theatrical and cinematographic conventions —and the audience’s implicit understanding of those conventions— she now seeks to question the entire relationship by opening spaces of potentiality through encounters with what we find strange and alien. Her most recent work insists on the performativity of the encounter as a space of transformation. In this process of transformation the “other” is lodged in oneself, establishing diffuse edges between the known and the unknown.
Her work tries to escape from logocentric and anthropocentric logics, where human knowledge itself becomes something vulnerable to other enigmatic and complex ecosystems.
She combines the production of her artistic work with educational, curatorial and editorial projects.
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