The end of one void is the start of another. Fermín Jiménez Landa
Exhibition: The end of one void is the start of another. Fermín Jiménez Landa
Oteiza Museum: 24th June- 31st October 2021
Hazitegia 4
Publication : The end of one void is the start of another. Huts baten amaiera beste baten hasiera da. Fermín Jiménez Landa. Design: Fermín Jiménez Landa and Franziska. 156 pages. Retail price: 20 euros.
A production of the Jorge Oteiza Museum Foundation with the Huarte Contemporary Art Centre, in collaboration with the Caja Navarra Foundation Innova Cultural programme and la Caixa Foundation and Aislanat
The end of one void is the start of another is an exhibition and publishing project produced by Fermín Jiménez Landa for the Oteiza Museum that takes as its starting point the desire of the artist to explore the void generated between Oteiza’s sculptures, so that he can expand the spatial meaning of his work. Based on the process of symbolising the space formed between the elements that make up a sculpture, this project takes the understanding of the void as a working material to an extreme. To achieve this, Jiménez Landa doesn’t dwell on the spatial quality activated by Oteiza on the inside of his works, but has focused his attention on what is generated between the sculptor’s different pieces.
True to the way that he peripherally approaches the major discourses of art, by subtly gliding between form and meaning, Jiménez Landa has related the void, the central element in Oteiza’s sculptural language, to elements that are more common in his work such as walking, cartography, provoking situations and narrative, linking the common root of the term vacío (void) (vacuus) to concepts that stem from this like unoccupied, vacation and vagabond (in Spanish). This paradigm has led him to draw up poetically active spaces measuring 50 centimetres x 2 metres, but also 50- centimetre x 7,000 kilometre shapes, measuring the world with the invisible pattern generated by the spaces between Oteiza’s works to create nodes in an unusual terrain.
All this has led him to display the documentation about his, sometimes failed, attempts to take a look around these empty spaces, by gaining access to private homes in cities like Rome or Paris and places in the middle of nowhere, dining with strangers or going into strong-rooms, more interested in what occupied these empty spaces than in the places themselves. Along with this documentation we find some pieces that result from meticulously measuring the void between several of the sculptures installed in the Museum. This void has been filled with housing insulation, in a mirror-like interplay of solids and voids that ends up forming this experiential itinerary that moves along the lesser-known margins of Oteiza’s creative outer limits.
All these elements make up this unique exhibition tour, which is rounded off by the digital intervention, 556ms, carried out by the artist Jaime de los Ríos that has been conceived as an extension online of the project. This piece, that can only be seen on the Oteiza Museum website, creates a journey that formalises the time between a series of sculptures by Jorge Oteiza located in various international collections, starting out from the Museum collection itself. By addressing the material nature of the Internet and the capacity of information to travel along cables, routers and satellites a closed route has been generated between the spaces in which the virtual content is hosted that we access from our browsers, the servers where the web page of 5 institutions is located. The result is the outline of a kind of quantum geometry, given that the route always depends on the efficiency and accessibility allowed for security and commercial reasons. This is therefore a polygon that frames the various locations with a total distance of 62,967km, covered in just 556ms. In this regard, it is worth stressing the dynamic characteristics of the figure, which only exists while the information is being sent, at such a speed that, on a human scale, its entire form emerges at the same time, and also constantly varies.
This Project also includes a publication with the same name designed by the artist himself and Franziska and forms part of the Hazitegia programme, developed jointly by the Jorge Oteiza Museum Foundation and the Huarte Contemporary Art Centre, with the aim of creating new scenarios for reflection about Jorge Oteiza’s work through contemporary creation in collaboration with the Innova Cultural programme of the Caja Navarra Foundation and La Caixa Foundation.
