AFFECTIVE OPERATIONS (Gallery text)

I take a piece of paper and a pencil without the tip with a worn out line and I start recklessly writing a bunch of words that echo at the back of a bus. That procession of random sounds composes —without knowing— a choral symphony of lost voices. I think anonymity makes me strong and the operation is repeated once and over again. Language is verbal; the image is visual. Dialogues get me closer to the intimacy of each of the speakers. And there it is everything: the most primitive of their desires like flags risen in an act of will. Finding the originary is usually the most genuine objective of this visit to Earth, and nonetheless is so many times delayed.

Affection, interest, speech, change, the nomad, the root, the gesture, loyalty, signs, the intersection, language, solitude, strangeness, enhancement, shelter, cadence, the body, spatial awareness, and the affected appear in this exhibition mysteriously conjugated to achieve a weird alchemy of scattered intentions in an inhabited and noisy place, close to a past that has vanished from our hands. In this old truck workshop, the exhibited pieces act with their own original nature, exempt from all form of solemnity, appears with overwhelming force the will of the artist and the primary character of its production.

“Affective Operations” is an excuse to join all that seems to be dispersed, loose and wandering in a complex and interprovincial Argentinian scene. The artists that compose this exhibition propose a domestic close up to the intimacy of their acts and decisions and to observe as voyeurs their production processes. The whim as a noun bonds natural and procesual bridges that join together a speech of old times, a way of doing and a truthful romance with matter. The idea of game, of doing just for the sake of doing, of coming back to the roots and deconstruct stereotypes constructed in castles of cards evidences the own affections of the processes of production and their historical time. Having taken away every remainder of asepsis and formality, what’s exhibited returns to its most honest place and from where sometimes it can’t get away: desire.

Outside, in the open sky, everything is to be done and nonetheless something coats, as a political-affective gesture, the hope of an empathic tomorrow. Those fleeting voices materialize as speech and I feel that anonymity gets lost and diluted in the embrace of the poetic containment of finding each other to create transversal links. The wind blows and there is a shelter. I am certain to have found it.

Joaquín Barrera



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