Permanent Conference
La Capilla, Murcia
Víctor Manuel Arráez
October - November 2019
Permanent Conference is an exhibition project curated by Esmeralda Gómez Galera that showcases the recent work of Víctor Manuel Arráez and has been specifically conceived for the space of La Capilla. Sound fills the room with a constant percussion, evoking the pages of a small green book placed at the center of the space. The exhibition proposes, on one hand, a critical rereading of the figure of Joseph Beuys, and on the other, a reflection on orality and the written word.
The Green Book (2018) is an artist's book that stems from the viewing of the documentary Transformer (1979), whose protagonist is Beuys. With a certain randomness, throughout the documentary, specific key words spoken by Beuys appear as delayed, fragmentary, and incomplete subtitles. These fragments are extracted in a process of patient archaeology in front of the screen light, and then arranged on the pages of a green book along with the exact minute at which they appeared in the video. The result is an expansive book, containing words that cannot narrate a coherent story but serve as an enigmatic access point to Joseph Beuys and his ideas about artistic practice. The book triggers suggestive associations of images, like an ever-changing poem that takes shape in its various readings:
Objects in the environment
All animals
Can be healed
Existence of a tree
People
Must change a bit
To hear more
The reading triggers a new transcription exercise in the Meditations (2019) project, an action materialized in the sound it generates and the images of its ephemeral residues. Chalk rhythmically slides across the green surface of a chalkboard, leaving behind a set of marks-signs that, due to their accumulation, become unreadable. A landscape covered in dust that we cannot traverse, something as distant and inaccessible as the very idea of a permanent conference...
Individuals
Substitute for ears
Now speaking
Very slow
The changing
Ecology
Must appear
One day