LÓPEZ PARADA, Esperanza (2000) :: Exhibition catalog text: Construir Ciudades
LÓPEZ PARADA, Esperanza (2000). “The human being´s dwellings”. Exhibition catalog text: Construir Ciudades, Galería Raquel Ponce, Madrid
I believe that this is what gives an explanation for my whole existence: while being a child I fall asleep at the threshold of the world[1].
[1] Franz Hessel, Paseos por Berlín (Promenades around Berlin), Madrid, Tecnos, 1997, p. 12
The inhabitant of the modern large city cannot repress a constant feeling of expatriation. Like Franz Hessel, who falls asleep at the entrance of Berlin and believes he is missing something in his behavior towards the streets, the squares and the people. Although he has grown up in the same building as his neighbors, he shares as well the same sensation of dispersion.
As of the Industrial Revolution, the disqualification of an environment formerly full of meaning begins. For instance, when Haussmann, paves and arranges the sidewalks in the avenues of Paris, he changes forever the relationship of every Parisian with his journeys. Because, such an insignificant fact however gives rise to borders, relegates and establishes a different way –now lined and legalized – of strolling around the territory.
From this moment, the modern cities are unable of mixing their immigrants, their travelers and almost even their citizens. This – as Paul Virilio states- supposes a radical reversal of all the previous facts. The inhabitants of a city are not mingled or identified with it, instead they are organized in corpuscles, in small resistance associations to turn the megalopolis into a land of disintegration, division and danger: a kind of general ghettoization phenomenon, the risky juxtaposition of lonely individuals, of wide groups who are clearly unstable[1].
The British Inner-cities, the South African home-lands, the tolerant districts and the marginal neighborhoods, the suburbs, the misery belts – the huts almost form the only universal landscape-, the condomium, gardened areas and privatetopias: in the middle of those resentful enclosed lands which mutually guard each other, the ownership constitutes a concept being ignored which is becoming disintegrated and lost forever. The modern capitals are not only wild and icy spaces. Furthermore, they are generating the peculiar species of native immigrants and do not act anymore as landmarks or horizons.
It has become impossible to establish a link with the province of origin.
* * *
Given the situation, it is a concern of the Art to solve this lack of space. At least this is what Georg Luckàs demanded, to leave us a space, to build us a place and provide us a home.
Provided that, living means to live with others, modern art can only be metropolitan, showing a distinct inclination towards the city. This urban and civic orientation which concerns the creation it is fulfilled in the realistic images of Vermeer, in the oneiric images of Klee, in the geometric images of Malevich, in the absent squares of Chirico, in the morbid floors of Schiele and in the scattered regions of Dubuffet. In all of them we observe a search of space and a meditation about the inhabitability of this world, about its level of dwelling or about the alternative of its acceptance.
The work of Esther Pizarro is included in this trend, not only because it represents a territory -Rome or Los Angeles, the highways or the quartieri, the suburbs or the palace-, but also because it populates and inhabits it. It is built on the chosen country and contributes to its construction and colonization. Her sculptures rise over a point and at the same time they create it; they reproduce streets, avenues, facades and they constitute as well the streets, avenues and facades duplicated; they delineate and shape the territory together; they create the place over which they stand up; they are a building and the portrait of the building. Through a game of complex returns they delineate and generate space simultaneously.
* * *
It is understood that the place is the ancient and inhabitable site, the region of birth, and the real and symbolic area where we move around calmly and with a strong power of conviction. A place is considered a dwelling and not a transit, a station, a porch or a passage.
The place provides a principle of sense to those who live in it. It is also a source of intelligibility to those who observe it. It is not the same thing to live in a building with twenty floors than to live in the city slums of Benares, in the center of Stockholm, Sydney, Soweto, in Fiji or in a dune under the heat of the Kalahari Desert. Our first contact with a country was ethnological in order to discover how to live in it. In this exact sense, each region offers an observable singularity, a surprise or an idiosyncrasy.
The Kabyles build their houses with one side on the sun and the other on the shade. The house digs inside an insurmountable room that must defend the owners from their own conflicts. The Eskimo enter in their icy enclosure naked. The ebrie build mansions with only three invariable rooms. The yaromami live together. Yougo, the lunar Rome, consists in a great capital made of mud moulded by hand with chimneys and tours rising over a region with sharp cliffs. You have to sleep with the head towards the abyss. Under the Australian desert, several feet deep, there is a network of churches, hotels, hospitals, grocery stores, cinemas and leisure centers. Among the Persians there were certain nomadic populations who used to move with themselves the door, the grilled door or the padlock of their first stable residence owned. The Cori have a place to sleep and a place to tell their dreams. They have a place to eat and another one to digest the food, a room for love and another one to give birth to the children born from love and, neither the functions nor the areas are mixed. In some Manchurian region the women stay all their life in the paternal tent and they rarely move to live with their husbands. Timbuktu waits to be drawn, invaded and buried by the sand, which composes it.
A long poem could be written exposing all the ways of living, all the dwellings of the peoples and all the possible rooms. They may be built on the mud, over lagoons and extinguished volcanoes, on atolls, under the coldness o under the darkness of the nights of six months long. Esther Pizarro would be investigating the different manners of building, she would be creating –according to Hessel- a descriptive science of the dwelling. And her works, rising over the floor like villas, palaces or enclosures, acquire then the value of a creation which is not only sculptural but anthropological as well: they present the very expression of living, of populating, the original work of the human being dwelling.
* * *
The Latin word urbs, versus the Greek polis, contains a principle of spatial organization. With such term the organization of cardus and decumanum was being indicated, as well as the chessboard arrangement that Rome was looking for itself.
The peculiar thing is that confusion, revolution and tangle support this first rational will. All the areas that Esther Pizarro reproduces from Rome are holding a dialogue full of antagonisms among themselves: next to Arenula and Pantheon, with all its sacred and psycho-pompous aspect, the heretical and critical confusion of Campo di Fiori, where Giordano Bruno was burnt and where the dissidents among the officers were executed, is arranged.
Thus, the capital par excellence is built based on a parallel sense of strictness and chaos, of guidance and deviation, halfway between the geometric planning and the confusion of the anthill. And those contradictions that compose it are insurmountable provided that they are essential. They unfailingly accompany the magma Rome means and which turns it into the most beautiful and most grotesque city, into the fullest and emptiest city, into the happiest and most tragic city. It is the capital of excess. It offers all the styles, epochs and developments at the same time. There is only one and a hundred in itself. It looks as if confusion had become its most prolific way of distribution and harmony, a very personal manner of rhythm and continuity[2].
Rome besides being a peculiar chess set is above all a labyrinth, which may be due to the fact that the term urbs surpasses its sense and ends up colliding with an etymology very close to orbis: the secret intention of every city is the urbanization of the world: and whoever –like Esther – intends to represent it, even though it refers to only one of its neighborhoods, in fact is finally setting forth the arrangement of the world.
* * *
The foundation of a city always consists in an aesthetic action. The art participates from the first stone risen and not only due to the demarcation rituals, a sort of Etruscan performance when the priest draws in the sand the itinerary of the future ways, the crossing of two main streets, the curvature of the defending walls. Furthermore, according to some story of Plutarch, a population is not straightened up until the artistic management has not taken part in it.
On the eighth year of Numa`s reign, a plague already extended throughout all Italy, menaces Rome. Then the gods send from heaven a protective shield, a magnificent silver and gold work, which should immunize the terrified inhabitants just with its presence. Numa in order to avoid that anyone steals the antidote, plans to make up to eleven copies, eleven identical shields to prevent any thief to guess which one is the original and take it away. Just Mamurio is capable of such immoderation: to perfectly imitate the divine work. His exact copies are something more than just falsifications of the heavenly pattern. The result is that the repetitions are so exact that they end up voiding the original when they thought they were protecting it. That meticulous loyalty to the sign sent by the gods, that strict imitation of each line without any variation at all, nevertheless eliminates the singularity of the unique prototype, it makes it become something standard and cultural, it regulates it[3].
There begins an eternal relationship between the city, the repetition and the artistic work. This one becomes the effort to gather the reflections scattered of a large city. Furthermore, since Mamurio, who equalizes the copies with the originals, the work of elevating the portrait of a city is not different from elevating the city itself.
And the operation encloses even more problems, as it reproduces that set of copies in which every location seems to be composed of. The reiteration could be considered, as the essence of the urban aspect and thus the work of Esther Pizarro seems even primitive and originating. She repeats the constituent action of a city, which is the repetition. What it’s being generated in her work, it is also generating the reason of the work itself. For this reason there is so much coherence and strictness in the whole process. That it is why her pieces are so highly needed.
* * *
What the cities show is the beauty of diversity, the pleasure of the crowds Baudelaire experienced, handed over to him like a narcotic. It is taught how to taste the duplication of the number and the passion of what it is being repeated, the cyclical rhythm of the steps, of the transit, of the vehicles, the endless dissemination of the icons. A long vanished story begins to be reconstructed thanks to the warnings of the signs and advertisements. A network of details is extended throughout the day and it continues during the adulterated night with the street-lamps and the lights.
However, the appreciation of this new aesthetics of the transition and repetition is recent. Saint-Beuve still regarded the crowd as unbearable; its presence is still avoided by Victor Hugo. We have to wait for the avant-garde, for Pound, for Apollinaire, in order to feel all the strange beauty of the masses, those faces without names climbing from the exit of the subway like the rosy buds on a black branch.
We also have to wait for the appearance of the new urban taster, the flâneur of Benjamin, the stroller of the pavement, who drags his anxiety for the multitude and for urban curiosities around the streets.
In a city someone sells newspapers, somebody attaches signs, someone leaves his or her signature on a wall. A man alone in the opposite sidewalk sketches a greeting, which is believed to be destined to each and everyone in front. A woman guides a blind. A child follows his mother’s hasty track with unequal jumps. We find each other in the soothing anonymity of the stops, of the transportation, of the streetlights. We see each other, we discover each other and immediately after we let ourselves go, we get lost. The epiphany that the large and numerous cities propose may only be solved in this manner, with the immediateness of the things fleeing as soon as they are found.
Georg Simmel pointed out the urban importance of the eyes compared to the ears. Every possible relationship is limited to a long silent look, inexpressive and exchanged during the lethargies in the bus or train stations network. The individuals, forced by that rarefied silence, become rarefied as well: they become the carriers of a mystery, of a plot, of a preceding enigma, they are potential parents, conspirators, and brothers in faith or assassins.
The city then boils with all the possible events: the city is the setting where anything may happen to me. My experience in this territory consists in a journey towards another journey, towards that quiet and incomprehensible neighbor who acts with the same muteness I do. And going to the streets means to undertake a search or a hunting. The air becomes tense as if an accident was going to happen.
Chance is the nature of the city, the round of directions and separations. In order to be able to describe it you have to be aware of the unpredictable behavior the accidental events imply.
* * *
The stroller travels around the streets as if they were a decoration, an extension, and a show. He walks also on them as if they were veins or arteries. He is between two dialectics: the city opens up like a landscape and it closes up in front of him like a room; and he is the one who passes from one to the other, he is who better begins the journey from the square to the chamber, from the crowded sidewalk to his home in the dark.
The work of Esther Pizarro doesn’t either avoid that problematic relationship between the public and private space: it is an essential commitment up to the point that the way of solving it, defines an aesthetic, a nation, an epoch and a human being.
The most authentic idea of her proposal is the continuity she perceives between these two scopes, as she doesn’t think they are opposed or confronted. The outside view is used inside her works. Her building-sculptures repeat inside how they are externally. You look inside and observe the framework of arteries and ways extending themselves into what it could be called the interior of the houses, mansions, the squares and the refuges. The only thing that varies is the material; it can be softer or warmer, with the sweetness of wax and the touch of the honeycomb or of the nest where the larva matures and the egg waits for birth.
As for the rest, there is only one relief, one street that passes through us outside and inside, until it forces us to think on an intimate city planning, is like a building of our nature. The urban aspect wouldn’t be a way of living. It would be the pattern of any personal experience, the founding structure of everything, from the cell to the tribe, as if the soul would be organized according to the mundane topography which distributes this land; as if the promenades we take were already inside us; as if there were also poplar coves, avenues and districts in our own spirit.
* * *
This extensive and urban work is built like a metaphor of space and of its limits too. The limit and the horizon are two concepts obviously incorporated to this work, in the same way it obliges us to contemplate it.
A land in miniature, having a little bit of a model and a little bit of future utopia, being seen unfailingly from above with the general view of the panoramic and the extremely delicate details of the miniatures, through a doublet of myopia and far sightedness, a microscopic and telescopic vision which turn us into gods who observe inside and outside. Or it make us become emperors, like the ones of the Tsin dynasty, who used to climb a mountain to see their possessions, the capital with its districts, the palace, the avenues, the entire region in a grain of sand.
The ceremony created a link between the sovereignty and the look. The kings carried it out because they stood, according to their experience, in the center and in the surroundings. They looked at the nucleus and at the frontier of the city in an impossible way. They had their possessions and they had them from far away; they were owners of the omnipresence and of the power of those who look from above, from side to side, aside, with a thorough eye left behind, the eye of a master or of a cartographer.
Because in fact, a map functions in this manner too, with a certain precision and an unavoidable distance, with introspection and in detail. The cities of Esther seem like three-dimensional maps, the superior one is uncontainable, the street guide is in lead and the imperial city in wax.
* * *
Esther Pizarro in her artist books reproduces on scale the map of the territory she is working with. She trims the edges with an engraving referring to the city: words almost deleted, sometimes illegible, of the language of the city, of the voices that run along it and of the dialogues that participate in its configuration.
Besides the plan drawn, the city is described by the legend of the place; by the tales told or by the demands the citizens address to each other, by the linguistic and tenacious rumor of the streets disorder. That it is to say that the initial urban distribution concerns the language more than the time. I come and stay, you go away, you leave forever, I come back they are statements with a locative dimension. Thus, the language functions as the most natural demarcation and as the best action of order.
* * *
There is nothing more sophisticated than drawing a map, or there isn’t anything more slender than the topographical description of a region. The map has been considered the new paradigm of modern art: the syncretic machine, inherent, exceptional, which interdicts what it is abstract and what it is figurative and initiates an agreement between the ordering look and the wandering eye, between the chaos of the alleys and its graphic and serial reproduction in the plan[4].
A map is a sign, a trace, something that appeals to the place represented, which surprisingly refers to the space with whom declares itself in debt. It is also an icon- Peirce would say-, which is described through a resemblance that is not completely patent or ideal. A Roman plant may remind or not its squares, its avenues, the banks and bridges of the Tiber.
This incorrect analogy becomes essential so the appeal may happen and in order to summon the place. We only call for what we do not have, for what it’s not here, we draw the coast of a territory where we don’t live anymore. If we were on the place, really located in it with all our weight, we wouldn’t need to represent it.
A map or a city of Esther stands up there, where its reason of origin is not there anymore: it rambles between presence and absence as any other trace does, like the smoke that explains there was a fire and like the burnt skeleton of a house which talks about a extinguished life and dwell.
Once again this locative and topographic art suggest its loss more than the space, it underlines an exile. And a city does not differ at all from a nomadic camp, with its provisional tents, risen in this uncultivated land.
* * *
Every city is a place of memories; it contains an arsenal of coded memories and it may be walked as a great mnemonic book. After each step we are assaulted by the images of what it was[5]. The past, the things lost are some of the other components of the cities where Esther Pizarro appears too.
Any large city, even the most recent one, is old from the beginning, because it refers to another archetypal one, which acts as a model. The multitudes of this world – Jünger says- are districts of a heavenly Jerusalem. So in this manner, every city is utopian and absolute, it keeps in some of its corners and squares the sign of its Platonic belonging, it has a rounded detail hidden among its details, it shows in one of its points its ideal manner[6].
The task of Esther would then look like cartography of the high, a task nearly theological. Her work participates in the Arcadian splendor. At times, it turns to be a pure figure, rescued from the urban rush and from the different aspects of history. There is something untemporal and exiled in her buildings, an abandonment of many days, an ancient and classical perfection, the quietism of a silent city in the desert, of an impenetrable refuge or of a region imagined in the clear visions of the saints: therefore, something mystical and majestic, an space for the eyes and for the distance of the eyes.
The names, the exact asymmetry of the composition, the slightly distant profile of the set, the slim lines, the natural and noble materials, the tidy and at the same time irregular arrangement, the awkward relief inside, the absence of doors, the threshold that invites, the measured and premeditated compositions like a projection from Renaissance, a correct Sforzinda or a Pythagorean calculation, turn the buildings of Esther Pizarro into reflections here, in this land, of her predecessors in heaven. Thus, in addition to founding and thinking about a place, they draw a place in the air.
[1] Paul Virilio, “Mañana el fuego” (Tomorrow the fire), Un paisaje de acontecimientos (A landscape of events), Paidós, 1997, pp. 157-158.
[2] Vid. Pier Paolo Pasolini, "Il fronte della città", Storie della città di Dio.(“The front of the city of God”) Racconti e cronache romane, (Roman narratives and chronicles) 1950-1966, Torino, Einaudi, 1995, pp. 119-120.
[3] Mario Perniola, "L'arte mamuriale", Transiti, come si va dallo stesso allo stesso, Bolognia, Cappelli, 1985, p.150.
[4] Christine Buci-Glucksmann, L'œil cartographique de l'art, Paris, Galilée, 1996. (The cartographic eye of Art)
[5] Marc Augé, Los no lugares. Espacios del anonimato, una antropología de la sobremodernidad, (The no places. Spaces of anonymity, an anthropology of the excess of modernity) Barcelona, Gedisa, 1998, p. 32.
[6] Ernst Jünger, Sertissages, à propos de l'Apocalypse (Apropos of Apocalypse), Paris, Fata Morgana, 1998, p.30
