O What and why did you come to Oaxaca? L I came to work and to meet me again O From what perspective or from where? L It had been a long time since I had any constancy in my artistic process and this time of residence has served me to take up again some aspects of my personality that had been a little forgotten. O About your personality or your artistic research, what is the difference between an artist and his artistic production? L I think there is no difference, I mean, I think the work is a result, a residue, a trace of the artist's journey in reality. Don't you think? O Yes, but it's very different to live the ordinary than to live art, what difference is there then, between the waste, you also leave the trail when you go to the bathroom, for example, do you think there is a difference of intentionality? L Yes, let's say that when you have the awareness that you are working within the artistic context there is. It seems to me then that going to the toilet can be an artistic action, although it's a condition that any human being has. So, there is a difference with an artist designating it as art, as the results I consider are traces and results of me moving in reality. Don't you think that's right?
O Of course, that's the integration of art and life, it's part of what I understand from what you say, that some traces of your personality were outside your radius of action-intention-consciousness. Let's talk a little about how your artistic process is before Oaxaca and after Oaxaca, and then we'll talk about what you did, in the residency, do you think? L Yes. Well, actually my training and my career as an artist has been very complicated, in the sense that there has been no temporal continuity. There have always been moments when I haven't made art, or I've done something else that prevents me from making art, or I've taken a direction that has taken me away from art, in short, there have been many such moments in my life. This has meant that my process has been quite lengthy. My first exhibition was in 1993 and since then I consider that I have a professional activity within art. This was interrupted from 2005, after having been 7 years in Europe, of academic training doing a postgraduate in Visual Arts in Barcelona and Berlin, I had to return to Mexico to work in the field of agriculture, in the family business, for personal reasons and that kept me 5 years away from a manifest artistic activity. However, I believe that during those 5 years there was a process of sedimentation, as far as the ideas generated in Europe are concerned, and some projects even became concrete unconsciously, or as you say, pre-consciously.
O I believe that the point of personality, person, art, life, decisions, ways of working, ways of meeting-committing yourself to your artistic development or to the artistic development and in that same measure is part of the same artistic object or artistic sense, since all these terms and all these functions of an artist BEING are linked. What did you process in this residency, what development of work did you do in 5 years, that manifested itself in the intentionality of the past 3 months? L Well, I think that one of the points that perhaps is the key part of this residence, beyond let's say the production of work, since from the beginning I did not propose this residence as a residence of production, but as a residence of reflection; is the integration. I am an engineer and an artist, I have studied philosophy, I have done theatre and for the last 5 years I have been working in agriculture. I always contemplated these aspects of my life as separate entities, as dislocated segments, so visualizing myself as a whole and integrating these aspects into my artistic work, was the key to this time, within a process of artistic resignification and resignification of my person and I recognize now, after these 3 months of residency, a great field of exploration and research for my artistic work. O Well, in that artistic sense, I'd like to comment on your development... as for your other residencies. You were in a 7 year residency in Europe, in Barcelona and in Berlin where you had the opportunity to work under the guidance of well known artists like Rebecca Horn as...help me with the names of your other teachers. L Katherina Sieverding and Lothar Baumgarten...and in Barcelona Ignasi Aballí and Tom Car...some artists who were very important for my development. O What I am also going to do is to finish accommodating this sense of residences and how this residence is the door to unite your residences in Europe. What is the meaning of the production of reflection, the production of meaning, how does it become part of a work and an artistic process? At the moment that you acquire this articulation of the elements recognized in Europe, being here begins to make sense and they mean something else and at the same time how this melting pot happens when you observe the production of 7 years in Europe and in Mexico or more, since 93? So what things became node centers? On the one hand, that what you produced in Europe, as an example, a piece of drawing, was a document and a type of piece at the moment you made it, and now when you return to it and analyze it and reflect on it from today, you find another process and you resignify it and the sense of process emerges very clearly, your work as such. Within this residence of reflection the two great aspects from my perspective that we worked on were resignification and process, right? And from there a torrent of things came out, so how about talking a little bit about this, about the diagram of this reflection-work. L Yes, there are many things that you mentioned, I agree with you that one of the great discoveries of this residence, or rather of the great awareness, was the processual part of my work and how it is that I have a very marked interest in the process and how to understand it and take advantage of it and condense it into a work, and see everything that this implies, from the entries, to the residues and then be very attentive to how it can be formalized forcefully in a piece. For example, just 6 months ago I exhibited in Zacatecas, and at that time my understanding of the work was very different. That exhibition, in fact, was just the beginning of an artistic activity around a pictorial reflection and its process, Painting, which I have always considered as one of the central axes of my work. Now I have also added this sense of process to the pieces and the discourse changes. All this is the product of a reflection on my creative process and an analysis of my previous work. I have diagrammed all these processes during my residence and here I present some of these diagrams. It is a work in progress and I am interested in accentuating the lapse, the intermediate, the march. I am interested in communicating my creative processes and to this extent this document could also mean a multiple, which when distributed among the people who come to see the objects produced in these 3 months, one can understand the multiplicity of intentions of these objects, which are even ideas from 10 years ago that were left unfinished or truncated or at the time I did not reach the most adequate formalization and that now have reached a concurrence and a much clearer meaning. This is something that I also understood in this residence that each person within his work has his own rhythm, just as each person in his life has his natural beat. O His biorhythm would say Felipe Ehrenberg
L If the biorhythm, in that sense I consider that my formalization times are very long and I have to understand that rhythm and sense of my work. O Long in what way? L Long in the sense that I work basically from intuition and I have another part as very logical and structured, which tries to reach a conclusion quickly, then manage to understand that time that takes to turn around, without rushing and without trying to reach, that is, without the logical and rational being absorbing that information and transforming it; allowing that space to transcend naturally, until reaching a much more real understanding, not so mental. O Organic. L If more organic, I think that takes and takes longer than rational, inevitably and that's what interests me really, to investigate the space between chaos and randomness and allow other unprogrammed aspects to enter; I think I have to be patient and not rush the processes. In this time I realized that some things can be solved very quickly, but there are also many things that take years and I'm still rethinking them, right? In this sense, maybe some of the concepts I thought about in this residency, I will formalize them in 10 years. O Probably, or 3, or 5. L Or whatever. O It is here where you are proposing very essential things of the phenomenon of your artistic activity and of the human being in that measure, on one hand the reason, the thought that doesn't have a material time, then the thought and the pragmatic makes it seem that we can finish some matter like that (click), but it turns out that our corporeality and the matter because it has a process of manifestation, it is so simple, as to see a plant grow, don't you think? At the moment of seeing a plant grow you realize how long it takes, or a child, an embryo that becomes a baby and so on and so forth. This is exactly the meaning of life, time, right? So to that extent we can talk about process art, or processual art, or art of processes, as is your case, where they sediment or leave traces as you talk about them, how ideas fall and materialise, like balls, like forms and make certain objects, or certain materials, but really it's the development of consciousness through time and with an artistic intention that you carry through intuition, isn't it? According to what you're proposing, because you're leading this evolution and that's why we're talking about personality from the beginning, there are artists whose personality is not operative for this sense of art-process and that's why they're fully objective and don't work on processes. In this way in the diagram, the present is THE PROCESS, the base and of this great sense of your life that is the agriculture and the biological that implies a development of the matter in the space and this is time, then we would put as a conceptual reflective entity and of closing of this experience of 3 months of which your work is contained in an act in an investigation of processes in where time, space, randomness, matter, chance, chaos because they are taking formal direction and that is like very ample no? circumscribed in the painting and in the tridimension, because I believe that those are the other aspects of the diagram and of the residence, already in a very specific formal way. The experience with you in these three months intensifies me, since I am interested in working on the whole. That's how I actually name my curatorship, as holistic works, and that's why I think we've made such a good synchrony, because of this understanding from life and from the process and that manifests things and it's like that with the eye that I look, I look at life with these conditions.
L That is why I am interested in leaving the manifesto of this residence, a document that speaks of a reflection diagram that amplifies a process of time and space. Furthermore, as we have already mentioned, I now see the opportunity to start working on more social aspects, not just from a conceptual point of view, but really to work socially. It is here, in Oaxaca, where this new research, for me, on how to integrate agriculture and art makes sense, and I believe that the phrase ART IS AGRICULTURE, condenses and at the same time gives potential to my future work. O Well, that is what will create a space for a permanent residence at La Curtiduría, which will be the first time that this happens in the three years that we have been living, that there will be a permanent artist's workshop, which will be agricultural, and that we hope that by mid-year they will be ready to eat art. L Yes, a Biospace within The Tannery, and more than a permanent residence, I propose it as a space for reflection around this Art-Agriculture binomial, but also open to dialogue on what I consider the great themes of humanity such as Water, Ecology and the Environment.
CONVERSATION BETWEEN LUIS CARRERA-MAUL AND OLGA MARGARITA DÁVILA
olgaMargarita dávila
Oaxaca, Mexico
2010