Aracena, 1964. He operates as an artist since 1985. He participates in unia arteypensamiento and in the PRPC (Platform of Cultural Political Reflection, for its Spanish acronym).
He was a participant artist in Documenta14 Athens/Kassel. He worked on two large systems, the Archivo F.X. and the Máquina P.H. between 1999 and 2019.
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SACCO. El Saco de Roma, la crisis de representación y los flamencos. (The Spanish Sack of Rome, the representation crisis, and the flamencos)
I believe that it is important to understand this project starting from one of the sentences that open its working memory, it is from the Roman born Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio and was published in 1994: “Rodrigo, the beauty of the ruins you sing to me about is not in the ever odious memory of an empire, but in the joy of seeing the revival, on the corpse of the beast itself, and blooming of the yellow hedge mustard.” We understand that, yes, it has to do with understanding how it grows, its orientation, learning the yellow from the “yellow and humble hedge mustard”. If the project began with the historic burden from the Spanish Sack of Rome of 1527, when the troops of Charles the Fifth sacked the city for nine months, soon the project would entail the mythic meaning “Sack”, which is a meaning applied, in hindsight, to the assaults of the Gallic, Goths, Normans and Saracens when they attacked the city of Rome, and with insight, it is read as a connection to understand the different sackings of the French (especially that seizure destined to the founding of the Louvre at the beginning of the 9th century), also under the Nazi occupation and, why not, the international capital or of the Mafia Capitale on the brink this very 2019.
The mustard hedge is explored, moreover, from a particular point of view. Gramsci opened, precisely, that look, that point of view of what we call subaltern. In 1527 we find it in the Andalusian La Lozana by Francisco Delicado, in the concomitance between the anonymous Lazarillo de Tormes and the Diálogo de las cosas ocurridas en Roma (Dialogue of what happened in Rome) by Alfonso de Valdés, also in the Hecatommithi of Giraldi Cinzio, in La zingana of Artemio or in the legal studies of Benedetto Fassanelli in Vite al bando or of Claudio Ferri in L’archivio dei notari di Luca, it’s that sometimes, police files are a source to know what the people say, what is going on below.
We can understand that from there, from that perspective, we can see what flamenco is doing here (subaltern, lumpen, transients, gypsies, Rome) that it is a media (-a way- , also, in Spanish it has multiple meanings) – I like the polysemy in Spanish of the word media, between “nylon or stockings” for the leg and “media” as in a means of communication - ; un medio-sin-fin (an endless means), wow, we could even quote Giorgio Agamben; a way of making, let’s put it like that; a production camp.
Let us think about what this project has in so far as structure in my concerns about representation, image, iconoclasm. Rome has many meanings for that. Already in 2009, the second newsletter of the Archivo F.X. dealt with that Roman way of work. As the flamencos tell me, more than being in Rome, it’s about being in Roman. Or Romanó (a gypsy language), a play on words which comes to mind. The differences in meaning between occidental art and the art of other parts of the world has to do, undoubtedly, with the importance of incarnation, not only do gods become men, women, animals, and plants, as in the Greco-Roman tradition, but the theological and liturgical importance of Christianity about how images work, is quite substantial. That is why, those failures of representation have an importance in Rome that go beyond a historic anecdote. The fallacious categories of the Academy (*), of art history of - “baroque” or “mannerism” are modern inventions, from the time of avant-garde, and not coincidently – they let us understand the anachronistic power of everything that can be done in art, and that it, at least, operates at two different times at once. That is one of the qualities of our language, a basic means of making that story so dear to us, for example, in Walter Benjamin (**).
(*)Undoubtedly, the texts of Aby Warburg on bestiality and divination, his analysis on the protestant pasquines (lampoons) (Durero) in which the Pope was represented as a monstruous beast and was who announced the famous sacking of 1527, enabled a definite entry to some animals in my long investigation on what a representation entailed. I had already been working for some years with animals, with animotes as Derrida said, trying to add up the cultural meaning and the emblematic meaning of the animals represented in his visual point of view, his way of being in the world, his ethology, and his ecology. Trying to give them a point of view, there is nothing. It’s impressive the number of questions and new matters that this operation brings us. In effect, everything is exclamation marks, questioning…
(**) José Bergamín had already observed in the flamenco song something animal, our being in the most zoological world. Juan El Camas, ironically, spoke to us one day of chickens, donkeys, and dogs as the end goal of our declassing, what natural intelligence, that of Camas! There we are, celebrating with a pajata romana what we are, the culture and the barbarity of what we are constituted by.
Matteo Binci (***) asked me about these days in Rome, if there was an epistemological cut or continuity in my work. His exact words were: I tuoi lavori, sull’iconoclastia nell’Archivio F.X. e con il flamenco nella Macchina P.H., sembrano unire gli interessi nelle pratiche che svolgi in queste tue opere romane. Pensi che ci sia un “evento” in queste pratiche, nel senso che Alan Badiou conferisce alla parola? Sembra anche che non ci sia più quella tua ossessione di distinguere tra i diversi modi di fare. Dopotutto, il Sacco di Roma, come qualsiasi altro saccheggio, non cessa di essere “evento”. Pensi che sia lì, in questa presentazione della rappresentazione tra l’apparizione e la scomparsa dell’immagine, in questa intersezione che stabilisci tra una lettura dall’alto - la conoscenza accademica(****) - e dal basso - la conoscenza subalterna(*****) -, proprio lì, in questo gesto, che risiede il massimo potere di una rappresentazione, di un’immagine?
(***)Regarding Matteo’s question, there is an implicit response, a crucifixion. Isidoro Valcárcel Medina says it like this, almost like a greguería (a short sentence similar to an aphorism), “in every cross there is the possibility of a crucifixion”. But yes, the potential of the cross is just that. “Life (on the way) is full of crosses”, says the popular adage and, in effect, my life, as anyone’s, is full of crosses, with all the polysemy. There are few occasions to show it, but these nine months in Rome, perhaps are an opportunity for just that, to show this, the double meaning of the word teach.
(****)In this sense, it is true that certain artistic practices, owing to their complexity, have the problem of coinciding with the world on the scale of 1:1 and that they may be barely recognizable, as in the fantasy tale of the cartographer Borges. In the times in which political art is a type of Costumbrismo, coming from a clean conscience and a good education and all, it would hardly be meaningful to show that the poiesis, la esthesis, or however we want to call our way of doing things, have a place on the outskirts of the polis, literally, outside of politics. This is relatively important when we know that anyway, the circular of these forms and ways of doing things is always political, in the bosom of the city, and there, everything is a conditioning of some sort, material, social, economic, and finally, political. Anyways, knowing that double condition is important, to know it and to somehow bring it into reality. I have always admired that double condition in flamenco, on one side, marginal art, eccentric and on the other, central, hegemonic in the understanding of identity, even a topical in the community in which I live in Spain, Andalusia. To be capable of that array, surely says something about my interest for those flamencas and flamencos.
(*****) That is why in Rome, the work with Ludovica Manzetti, with Matteo Binci or with Massimo Marzone was very important. Also, the invitations to Helsinki that Erik Beltrán with Gerald Rauning extended, to Oporto on behalf of André Sousa and Ana Laranja or to Bergen, in Norway, on behalf of Iris Drewssler and Hans Christ, helped me think Rome in a different way. Or with José Jiménez Bobote, with Stephan Volksinger, with Raúl Rodríguez Refree, with Teresa Lanceta, with Isaki Lacuesta, with Filiep Tack, all of them by now, somewhat Roman.