With Crisálida we wanted to explore the relationship between nature and man, and the everlasting (Western) question of man’s nature. Crisálida works elastically with recognisable images of humanity to explore and expand the contours of those images. Before our eyes, we see humanity in a process of dissolution; embodying not its nature, but nature herself, in its catastrophic condition, blurring its outline, becoming landscape.
Before us there lies the basin of a dry river, naked and arid, with the surviving remains of that which has been thrown, dragged, deposited, hidden throughout its history. From the river and its splendour there only remains lees, a remembrance, barely a negative of something forgotten that is about to disappear. ¿What could we save from this desert? ¿What may save itself from such desertization?
The Jewish poet Paul Celan insisted on the dialogical nature of the poem (and, by extension, of art) by affirming that the poem is always coming, always under way. «Towards what?» —he asks. «Towards some open place, something that can be inhabited – maybe towards an accessible You».
The question that haunts us from the beginning is: what happens when this You is not accessible but it is desiccated and dry. It has forgotten his essential capacity for listening and shelter.
The question that goes after us is how this dry You –perhaps a collective You– could manage to prepare his world in order to shelter not only the known, our exhausted present, but the unknown that is coming, for which there aren’t yet names nor images.
It is not easy nor painless to look to our pathetic and forgotten humanity but we must assume our chosen desert, take it beyond all calculations, beyond every image, and above all, beyond any apocalyptic simplism. The human being has been given the right to rebirth, the right of being able to overcome his downfall, to give life to his rottenness and surpass his own condemnation.
In Crisálida we find an imperative: forgetting ourselves, forgetting our world, in order to create a flashing prompt space. Before the gaze of the witnessing audience, create an heterotopic (inner and outer) space to reelaborate how we live our bodies, to remember the only invariable trait in our our existence: the capacity to generate new living forms despite that culturally, rationally, they seem doomed to the most calculable failure.
You thought the fall - I am just its echo
Oriol López
