LARRAGUIBEL-GAVIOLA
Air immanence
Text by Roberto Larraguibel
The philosopher Michel Foucault stated: we live in a civilization that has acquired complex knowledge along with sophisticated power structures. The question to be answer is: what has made of us such knowledge and power? In which way crucial experiences such as suffering, madness, death, crime, desire, individuality are connected, whether we notice it or not in the intimate sphere, such knowledge and power? Convinced that he would find no answers to these questions, he believed he should never give up on them.
Power, he states, is not a simplistic grid in which some hold it while others suffer from it but power involve us all and, whether it may be true that there are dense and attenuated zones throughout the said grid, nobody is alien to it; that is to say, the exercise of power matters to everyone. It is also possible that such grid could be tighten in a point as to cause the whole structure to tremble. Focault thought that modernity is an attempt to build a disciplinary society technologically controlled to create identity. Thus, power is not a mere repressive force but a realization possibility.
The work Immanence of Air:
An external volume, constructively precarious, ephemeral, vulnerable and exposed, in representation of the public affair whose will, aspiration and idiosyncratic diversity is blown trough pipes up to the Institution (the MNBA), which by regulations blocks the expeditious traffic of such said ‘public breath’, having to cross thick walls and gates to rise up its message to the building’s interior. That blown air or breathing pulse has to climb up stairs (rise a claim) to reach the patrimonial institutional building.
Provide air to (ventilate) the Institutions is a slogan and critical aspiration that calls for renewal, amendment or change of action coming from the public and private powers whose de-tuned behaviors cause voices of claim a progressive citizen or consumer saturation. There arises the concept of resonance, which would play as an element of linkage and a synthesis of a harmonious coupling between the ‘street’ and its institutions.
Air Immanence enhances the openness, multicultural, multi aspirational character of the public demand, not only because it is permitted but also is promoted the free expressing of writing on the inside and outside walls of the said volume as if it were an independent and insubordinate space representing the sum of opinions that converge in the hypothetical injection of immanent air that trespasses the organizational barriers of its aforementioned spirit, to be considered, perhaps included in the conversations both public policy and instances of opinion generation, trend setting, utility products and mass consumed goods.
Symmetrically and in a dynamic process that takes place during the work stance should it fund hope and expectation regarding a supposedly public longing through obtaining certain attention or replica from the institutional depths represented in marks and symbols drawn by the artists intervening the civilian request in a real dialog (action executed week after week).
The sounds and 'beats' of breathing emitted by Air immanence want also represent both harmonic passages as well as the cacophony of miss-coordination with machine-officials hanging from the ceilings of the MNBA: the Mecanogangsters.