ARCO 2020

On January 13, 2017, at the age of 48, the writer, music critic and thinker Mark Fisher decided to take his life in a last act of taking to the last consequences that question that he asked us from one of his best-known texts, “Realismo capitalist. no alternative?”.

For Fisher there was none, and for ten years between magazine articles, blog posts or publications in various media he had not been writing more than notes on depression and veiled announcements about his future escape plan from this world, such as his admired Ian Curtis. Here are the young men, with the weight on their shoulders. 1

As Fisher wrote in “The Slow Cancellation of the Future,” that weight on his shoulders had a lot to do with the incompleteness of modernity, with the progressive impulse of the avant-garde to a point of no return, a pocket, a void, a non-place from which we can no longer advance.

Within the framework of this text, marked by the influence of Bifo, Fisher introduces the concept of hauntology that Derrida coined in his book “Specters of Marx.” To besiege does not mean to be present, and the siege must be introduced into the very construction of a concept. According to this concept or play on words with the notion of ontology, Fisher tells us that “everything that exists is possible only on the basis of a series of absences, which precede it, surround it and allow it to possess consistency and intelligibility” .2

Thus, hauntology would be nothing other than the way in which the specters of other times are constructing their own notion of being at this moment, not as a nostalgia, nor as a rereading as it was done in certain postmodern discourses and manifestations in the eighties, but as an investigation into the gaps that the modern project left, the still not of the futures that popular modernism prepared us to wait for but that never materialized.
Desire to be a form is conceived as a project of dialogue between the works of Pablo Capitán del Río and Javier Pividal. In the works of the artists present in this project at the Artnueve gallery, a displacement of times is put into play, a confluence with the specters of what could never be formalized. As Fisher wrote, a desire to be form crystallizes, on which a logic of an uncertain present like ours is built.

The work of Pablo Capitán del Río subverts the idea of science as a motor of progress for, based on his research on different phenomenologies of the natural, to build objects and elements whose appearance eludes a conceptual definition, besieging the form, bordering on that place another that many times does not belong to that of logic, but to that of poetry or pataphysics, seeking the strangeness of the everyday. Napkin folding can serve as a constructivist act.

As if it were a hiatus between the real and the symbolic in which contemporary artistic production is built, Javier Pividal’s work reflects on the visibility of language itself, its transparency and opacity, as well as its temporality, persistence or expiration. from sculptural constructions, images and installations in which the references to different thinkers, poets and filmmakers are plotting a complex lattice full of questions and gaps. Why is lasting better than burning?
Number and language, forms and voids, expectations and projections configure a work territory in which the productions of meaning that determine the panorama of a board inhabited by the ghosts of what could be and was not, a present future are put into play , a past to reactivate.