Contemporânea

The introductory text accompanying (Super)Models,1 curated by Eduarda Neves and Mohammad Salemy, opens with the etymology of "model," from the Latin modulus (measure), only to immediately set it against the notion of the "(super)model" as the primordial transgression of any abstraction liable to produce repetition, an alienated multiplication of what cannot be systematically reproduced. That transgression, the curators point out, frequently originates within the model itself, which, in passing from model to (super)model, "begins to produce the world it was conceived to describe."2 It is in this passage or transformation, effected by the prefix "super" (bracketed to hold open the ambiguity that will arise between the terms), with its Nietzschean overtones, that we find another way of saying yes—as creative will—to a world in collapse. Seen this way, (Super)Models proves especially incisive, bringing with it a certain lightness and dance, and setting itself apart from other exhibition contexts that dwell on the death of modernity's grand narratives only to insist on annihilation, or on replacing them with new, equally grand narratives. (At times, prefixes are not enough.)

In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche presents the Übermensch through Zarathustra's words as the one who comes to rouse humankind from the long, soporific rule of traditional religious and metaphysical structures that had long subjugated it to moral designs. The Übermensch appears as an epiphanic revelation of the will to power—not, to be clear, a "power of the human being," but "the human being as power"—which is nothing if not creative (with Nietzsche recovering the creative power of man as celebrated by certain Renaissance philosophers). Having survived the death of God, the human being could then discover the world through its own individuation, insofar as this is not simply about abandonment or rejection but of the annihilation of every model—models that had been unified within the total image-concept of God. Equally crucial is the Übermensch's overcoming of passive nihilism (the will to nothingness), which would otherwise culminate swiftly in extinction. To reaffirm life as creative potency, inscribing it within the Eternal Return, the spirit must undergo metamorphosis. Never the camel, which bears inherited burdens, and never the lion, which reacts violently and smashes its chains: the spirit must become child, lightness, dance. And yet we know this lightness is punctuated by suffering, by pain, by the untimely forces of destruction (proper also to the making of a work of art or of philosophy). Hence the force of the transmutation of values and the higher affirmation that leads to the Eternal Return as the repetition of difference—opposites themselves become interlaced within the chain of events, each with its own potency and intensity, but it is necessarily from that interlacing that the Yes to life emerges.

Whilst Nietzsche essentially operates on an ontological plane, what concerns us here is above all the creative potency of the prefix "super," insofar as the transformation of model into (super)model cannot be read as a superlative, as some sort of refinement of the former's attributes, but rather as the destruction of the very qualities that confine it to a quantifiable fragment of the world. These are thereby displaced elsewhere, contaminating systems that are often opposed to one another (models, it should be remembered, can also be behavioural, measuring and mediating our relation to the world, and, from this angle, can be refracted back onto the ontological plane). This passage, however, is not without ambiguity. A model may begin as a lens, a perspective through which to conceive a world delimited by the very system that sustains and structures the model itself; and it is precisely that perspective, or the system sustaining it, that sends the (super)model off course—through distortion, through transgression, or through repetition, among other mechanisms that allow opposing forces to persist within the (super)model, resisting closure and inscribing themselves instead within an interstitial space of interpellation and openness, of lightness and dance. Hence the categorical fluidity which is reflected in the selection of works, each already carrying within it a foreshadowed or latent confrontation between model and (super)model, guiding the visitor through the multiplicity proper to the present world. This state of the world is neither smoothed over, nor eliminated, nor obscured by fictional narratives; rather, it emerges as a set of creative forces bursting into coexisting, divergent, and above all critically open meanings.

The vast expanse of the Matadero, as well as the placement of the works within it, likewise invites free wandering. The pronounced rhythm of the pillars—the order, the structure, the safety net defined by models—is itself subverted, laying bare the marks of time and the traces of spontaneous appropriation and vandalism. Notably, on one of the pillars, a 16mm film by Adrià Julià is projected, echoing Shakespeare's famous line "The time is out of joint: O cursed spite." In The Spinning of the World, a coin spins endlessly without ever landing on the floor. The motion whereby it rotates follows another, equally continuous one (that of the 16mm film strip), tracing through space an ample, dilated temporality opposed to that of the senseless economic transactions virtually and visually projected there, onto a structural pillar. The two movements feed each other reciprocally, even as a temporality proper to the disjunction that capital introduces into lived experience arises between them. Capital, as both a model and a (super)model, is explored by the same artist in two further works installed near the video: Fables for an Animal Economy, complemented by the performance Fables for an Animal Economy. RAT. CAT. DOVE, and Another Fortuitous Encounter. In the latter, a printer suspended from the exhibition hall's high ceiling prints at random intervals, on both sides of an A4 sheet, the emblematic white dove of 1970s American traveller’s cheques, whose feet had been bound so that it could be photographed and later engraved onto the steel plates used to print the cheques. The resulting image—the illustrator having failed to notice the feet pressed together—is that of an animal locked in struggle against gravity, in an eternal, restless flight. The dove reappears in the fable devised for the installation Fables for an Animal Economy, alongside a cat and a rat, activating an ephemeral architecture built from enlarged, cut-out reproductions of now-obsolete €500 notes. Tracing a spiral that forms a kind of burrow-shelter, it recalls Louise Bourgeois's own words about her works configuring a similar kind of place, at once refuge and captivity. In the performance, voice is given to the three animals, in keeping with the age-old tradition and the symbolism of the bestiary itself, through acts concerning greed, power, and covetousness, among other contemporary mechanisms of capitalist manipulation (one of whose most visible consequences is today’s housing crisis—the house being a primary shelter, no less than the animal's burrow).

Near Another Fortuitous Encounter is Hugo Canoilas and Diogo Tudela's video Three Days or Thirty Thousand Years, which traces the appropriation of lichens, or lichenised fungi, across several rock engravings in the Côa Valley. Here we find none of the contemporary temptation to anthropomorphise non-human beings through a human voice; instead, Tudela devises a sound piece (sound-as-code) using software that sonifies the lichens' growth across the engravings into one of the oldest languages in the world—one that seems far closer to these organisms. The lichens populate the engravings with a kind of sensuous "intelligence," adapting to a topography of grooves with differing properties, with the engravings functioning not as an extension of the human but as an extension of the lichens themselves. This idea is underscored in the film by the need for a pointer to trace the lines of the engravings before a human eye can recognise, comprehend, and mentally reconstruct the drawing-image of a goat, a horse, an aurochs, whereas the lichens require no medium of interpretation whatsoever: they simply follow the matter with which they weave their sensuous life. And yet it was quite possibly that same sensuous impulse of expression through matter which early humans channelled into the making of art. The video alternates between models of observation across different scales, from the microscopic to the vastness of the river-marked valley, and different models of existence, from the sensuous natural world (of rock and lichen) to the conceptual world of the engraved drawing. A transtemporal appropriation of natural models is thereby enacted: the topography; the sensuous qualities of the rock panels, perceived as vertical planes or exploited through subtle relief to lend the engraved drawing three-dimensionality; the reverberation of colours; the gleaming white grooves beside the silvery crystalline waters visible from afar, in addition to the different techniques devised to produce different effects in the line—all disclose an appropriation of natural models for the expressive composition of a sensuous work of art.

Lúcia Prancha's video Imatges d'Obreres, positioned opposite those by Canoilas and Tudela, stages a similar operation. At this point in the exhibition, the passage from model to (super)model is already announced as an operation that transduces our surrounding reality into sensuous form, first through its transformation into code and structure (model)—entailing, from the outset, the formulation of a critical stance towards natural, economic, social, or political models, and so on—which necessarily opens onto another domain: that of expressive, sensuous matter, of lightness, poetry, and dance. Prancha's video fluidly combines anthropological and documentary roots, drawing on diverse archival materials concerning peasant women in Latin America and Catalonia and on episodes from film history, in which their contributions remain invisible, intermeshed with sublime moments woven of dream and great beauty which coincide with the women's moments of rest, where their imagination virtually intersects with that of the viewer. What do those women think about as they lie in the fields? What do they dream of? What are their most powerful desires? We know that it is precisely in such moments that the possibility of revolution takes root.

Yet the idea of model is given yet another meaning here. Looking at the landscape the exhibition itself creates, several volumes punctuate the darkened hall of the Matadero, as though they were maquettes built to an enlarged scale (in design and architecture, "model" can indeed be read as maquette). Indeed, these works embody a kind of exacerbation proper to reality—an augmented reality—where both their referents and any critical distance towards them are abandoned, relocating instead onto the other side of the wall.3(Inevitably, the pieces' architectural composition suggests hypothetical constructions of territories and communities, whilst rejecting fiction as the constitutive principle of another world, since they are already inscribed within reality.) Near the aforementioned Fables for an Animal Economy stands a modular composition of Plexiglas cubes (I AM PONY BOi / Queer and blue sky's, by Attila Richard Lukacs) which, at the same time, harbour the most intimate desires and expose them to the voyeur's gaze; yet here, too, the fragmentation of the body is reasserted, as is, above all, that of the territory of freedom which the body naturally articulates under disparate forces—from those of capital, once again, intriguingly reflected in the fragmented plans shaped by the building's volumetry, echoing the motif of Fables for an Animal Economy, to Shannon Hamann’s little-known book Violent Imagination—amidst traces of amorous encounters, dreams, and subversions of the categories usually associated with domestic space.

At the centre of this landscape lies a constant sunset: a warm, red-orange light diffused through an assembly of flags—the Black Power flag, the Palestinian flag, and the St George's Cross. Stitched together into a single whole that evokes resistance, emancipation, and freedom, and bearing histories of pride and violence over disputes of identity, territory, and belonging, they are suspended from the ceiling to form a kind of covered piazza, a meeting place and site of shared civitas across many ethnicities and tongues. In turn, POor Collective's The Weight of Identity paradoxically marks out a space-time of pause, silence, delight, or pleasure: beneath the collective flag sit several poufs from which visitors can contemplate, quite sublimely, the whole weight of identity, notwithstanding the rippling fluidity of multiplicity.

Throughout the exhibition, relations continually surface between works that, as noted at the outset of this text, follow the widely disparate traces left by the shards the present moment sends our way. It is no longer tenable to adopt a contemplative stance towards the pile of ruins facing the future, nor does it seem sufficient to simply proclaim fragmentation (even the reconfiguration once promised by modernity no longer seems within reach); and as the mechanisms of fiction are exhausted, the affirmation of collapse and the celebration of interstices as affirmative acts of life are finally given to us in a sound composition by Abbas Zahedi. Amid moments of tremor, at once anguishing and liberating, it hovers over the space whilst feeding upon it through a network of speakers and an audio interface responsive to movement, oscillating between corporeal continuity and strident dissonance.

On opening night, Ece Canli presented her performance Fauxsimile, created specifically for the exhibition space of (Super)Models. Positioned symmetrically along a plane delimited by two pillars, two chairs facing one another enact a possible dialogue between an image and its mirror, or a sound and its echo, or a space and its reverberation—"possible" only because of the presence of physical matter against which it strikes and through which it disseminates. Throughout the performance, Canli's voice interacts with mutations generated by the overarching electronic composition, which she manipulates through real-spatiotemporal responses. At times it resembles a long, timid breath; at times it takes on the force of a powerful cry echoing through the space; at times it is languid and intimate; at times fast, breathless. Amid these multiple rhythms—sonically distorted, amplified, dismantled into unrecognisable fragments mastered by an ensemble of synthesisers, effects pedals, sequencers, and other modules devised by the artist herself—echoes, glitches, and expanded reverberations multiply as Canli's voice grows ever more imperceptible beneath the electronic sound waves. Within the space, the artist also enters into dialogue with the audience surrounding her, an ephemeral community that embraces her solitary challenge as she declares her availability, repeating here, here I am, whilst the other chair remains empty. The desire for intense communion unfolds as she moves through the space of the performance in continuous circles, the echoes oscillating between distinct potencies until only a faint memory remains—the last trace, the quietest possible sound suspended in the air… From that singular time celebrated by the performance emerges a technical artifact of ancestral geometry, suspended within the exhibition as a memory and an echo. I imagine it being discovered, inexplicably, a thousand years from now. Time as the last (super)model.

Mayrit Bienal