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Jafre Bienale
Spain, August 2003
Published by Atlantica N 37
By William Jeffett
Sometimes small is better than big, and this summer, rather
than Venice, the Jafre Bienale was the place to be. Increasingly
the format of the official and international bienale is proving
an archaic and conservative format. A product of the nineteenth
century, a bienale provides for each nation a platform to present
its cultural wares in a competitive forum. When we consider
their importance within the economic dimension of the art market,
it is clear how those artists to be found in Venice are already
established. So the question is: How can such a format be
reinvented according to an alternative model, neither determined
by the economic power of the galleries and collectors nor by the
political power of the major nation states. Of course, the
Bienale of Havana is one model with its concentration on post-
colonial nation states, however even this exception is
increasingly becoming yet another replication of the existing
model.
The Jafre Bienale offers one paradigm which is small and
relies on relationships with the artists and depends on using
resources which are effectively at hand. In this way it avoids
undue political and economic influence. It is the brainchild of
organisers Carolina Grau and Mario Flecha, the latter also editor
of Untitled in London. Jafre played host over a two-day period
to a remarkable gathering of artists and artworld professionals
from very far afield. The location of Jafre, north of Barcelona
in the Ampurdán and not far from the French border facilitated
undoubtedly helped. Still it was refreshing to visit such an
event in a rural village rather than an urban environment. The
main works and videos were presented in and around Mario Flecha's
house. This is not the first time Flecha has intervened in the
village's context with contemporary installation. However, this
year, for the first Bienale, the project was undertaken with
greater ambition and the blessing of the Jafre town hall which
opened its doors for one of the events. There the renowned
Paris-based Argentinean composer Daniel Teruggi presented an
electro-acoustic concert of a recent piece specially written in
homage to the Ampurdán landscape.
An offering and blessing by Antonio Zaya opened the Bienale.
Staged near the village by the river, this Regla de Ocha, or
Santería, ceremony is one of the forms of Afro-Cuban religion
derived from the Yoruba people in Africa. The ceremony involved
burning incense, and offering up oranges to the river, actions
which engaged the entire group in attendance.
Mexico-based Francis Alÿs, contributed the discrete work
Hombre negro sentado debajo de un vaso de agua (2003). As the
title suggests this consists of a small figure sitting under an
upturned glass full of water which is set on top of a piece of
paper, the pressure of the water preventing it from escaping.
This quiet and humorous work was typical of the tone of the
Bienale, which consisted of gentle interventions and a series of
video projections.
Jordi Mitja's Frase al rojo vivo (2003) consisted of a set
of words in iron spelling the following phrase, 'everybody knows
that to do something useful is useful, but to do something which
is not useful is useful too'. The idea was that the iron letters
would be heated until they were red hot, as a suggestion of
transformation, though this aspect of the work remained
technically impossible in the setting, resulting in the work
taking on a conceptual dimension.
Mireya Masó is concerned with the problem of
dematerialisation in the particular sense of how nature is
constructed as artifice. Her sound installation Surplus (2002),
subtly introduced the noises of airplanes and peacocks into the
rural setting of Jafre and was presented in the street as an
intervention.
The Argentinean Jorge Macchi's La muerte del super ocho
(1998) single channel video presented a loop of images relating
to the numbers you see at the beginning and end of a film. The
video brings us full circle from the narrative conventions of
film to the continuous and repeating presentation of images. In
this way Macchi recovers the tradition of structuralist film of
the 1960s and 1970s for the contemporary context of video.
Equally engaging was Olivia Flecha's Nail (2003) which presented
a static image of a nail in a white wall. Her concern is with
real time. As we watch nothing happens, and then finally the
nail fall from the wall and the loop recommences. Again there is
a structural recovery of strategies associated with films by Yoko
Ono and Andy Warhol.
Salla Tykkä's video Power (1999) is a document of a
performance where a woman is situated in the boxing ring and
engaged in a physical combat with a man. The content is auto-
biographical and we are told on the soundtrack accompanying the
black and white images: 'I want to do a video about my mother and
the only thing I can think about is my father'. This is
powerfully symbolic of Freudian Oedipal conflict with the father
and the mother, and further represents the shifting position of
women's status in our contemporary society.
Jaume Pitarch's video Invading Forces Under Fire of Bombcorn
(2002) is equally powerful in its reference to recent political
events in the world. The images presents toy soldiers in a
microwave with popcorn in such a way that when the popcorn 'pops'
it metaphorically explodes like a bomb, killing one of the
soldiers. Though not referring to one military situation, the
work immediately brings to mind situations like Bosnia, Somalia,
Afghanistan and Iraq. Again it playfully brings to mind
precedents of art protesting war as in Miralda's use of toy
soldiers in his installations of the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Santiago Sierra's video Persona pagada (2002) documents an
action where a person was paid £5 to say the following phrase,
'Mi participación en este proyecto puede generar 72.000 dólores
en beneficios. A mi me pagaron £5'. This was an action
performed in Birmingham at the time of his retrospective
exhibition at the IKON Gallery, curated by Katya García-Antón.
Here, as in much of his recent work, Sierra challenges received
wisdom regarding social exclusion and exploitation, implicating
the viewer and by extension the art world in the remunerated
exchange. In Sierra's work post-minimal strategies meet the
current sociological and demographic situation in morally
ambiguous and social complex ways. Sierra does not denounce
exploitation; at the same time he makes it visible as a social
reality.
Jordi Colomer's video Le dortoir (2002) is less obviously
social in its presentation of a series of reconstructed rooms in
a state of chaos following a party. This is more aleatory work
which suggests the disruptions of rational systems of
architectural space. Departing from one of the chapters from
Georges Perec's novel La vie, mode d'emploi (1978), Colomer
presents a series of sleeping actors inhabiting rooms in what
appears as high rise dwelling. In fact these spaces are
simulacra built out of cardboard, and therefore they playfully
undermine our received wisdom regarding the functions of
architecture. This is Le Cobusier's modular gone awry.
Carles Congost's nearly absurd videos, such as Tonight's the
Night (2003), suggest a sense of crisis, playing on the idea of
celebrity. Paul Harrison and John Wood's Luton (2001) presents
the equally absurd situation of two men sitting on chairs with
rollers inside a luton van in such a way that as the van moves
the chairs roll around in the space. Portuguese Rui Toscano's
One Hundred Over the Rainbow (2000), presenting a plane flying
so gradually across the sky that it is nearly static, suggests
the suspension of the rational ordering of technology.
A sense of our surreal and problematic relation to nature
informs Bigas Luna's black and white video Collar de Moscas
(2002). The sound is a woman's voice which explains how a friend
of hers discovered how to pass a needle through a fly without
killing it. As we listen we see the woman sew several together
and then puts it on as a necklace. We see the legs and wings of
the flies moving, and she tells us how moving necklace feels
wonderful.
The quality and presentation of the work in the Jafre
Bienale points to how a shift in scale as regards our thinking
about contemporary art is an advantage. The apparatus of the
museums, like the bienales and the large commercial galleries,
is an obstacle to a fluid approach to the presentation and
reception of recent art. Carolina Grau and Mario Flecha work in
a manner more like the artists treating display as collaboration.
Operating with very modest financial means they have staged a
truly impressive bienale. Further this bienale was both ultra-
local and thoroughly international, giving it a sense of place.
Many of the artists were from Catalonia, while others were
international (Mexico, Finland, Portugal, Argentina). Some were
based in Girona or have houses in the Ampurdán. 'The more local
the more universal' as one artist once said. It is precisely
this sort of intelligent and considered way of thinking which
should remain a point of focus for the art world. And likely it
will judging by the enthusiastic reception of its first
presentation.
William Jeffett is Curator of Exhibitions at the Salvador Dalí
Museum, St Petersburg, Florida.