a visual dialogue

We invited Curro Rodriguez from Spain and Paula Carmona Araya in Chile from our previous issue to A Visual Dialogue.
They both explore the language of rocks in poetic unison in a conceptual dance linking them across the world as they take performative work to a new and inspired place.

Rocks

August 30 2022
Curro

Do you have any idea how you would like to start our dialogue? I had been thinking about the idea of making an exquisite corpse.

August 30 2022
Paula

I know what you mean by exquisite corpse, since I was a child it has seemed to me a very interesting modality due to its collective practice and automatism. There is a text that I like to quote "The Death of the Author" by Roland Barthes, in which he refers to surrealism and specifically to this technique as a way of going against individualism exalted and manipulated by capitalism. By thinking and doing collectively, or as I would like to add mutually, notions such as the author are destabilized to give way to the importance of readers. Personally, I don't have problems directly with the individual, but with the modern social twist that makes us responsible for conditions that, in my opinion, are imposed. But if something seems to be pertinent to mention in this dialogue, regarding the discussion of Barthes and the possible corpses haha, it is that we have the possibility of making images that are observed together. It is a nice exercise to think that by covering or folding the paper so that the other continues is given across a distance. Although this remoteness is territorial, it also refers to our bodies by location, context, sensitivities, etc.

So how do you take a series of photographs with the pulse of automatism? I have reviewed some of your works and I see relationships around the landscape, the stone, the body and the stone. On the other hand, there is a work that I have wanted to do for a long time, it is directly linked to some of your actions, it is a gesture that we share in the metamorphosis and metaphor of being with the stone. Perhaps the unconscious passes through the previous coincidence of our works that are linked.

August 31 2022
Curro

I understand what you are telling me and it seems to me a challenge to carry out this dialogue from that profile, from that metamorphosis and this distance that forces us to mutate. Bypass ourselves as authors and focus our dialogue on the actions and how they are received by others.
I am waiting for that image/action that you are talking about, if you could send me a sketch or an idea.

Sept. 4 2022
Paula

Within the series with which they published me in see-zeen is the work "Settle the extended body on the stone, settle the stone on the extended body". From that photograph and others related to it, I had thought about the condition of the stone, of being in function and with the stone. I was interested in the figure of Sisyphus and the political breakdowns that we can get from the exploitation systems built since the Greeks, labor subjugation –increasingly invisible in the face of subjective regret.

The action is quite simple, it consists of a series of three photographs.
In the first you can see my back with a word inscribed on it.
In the second, the stone with the inscribed word.
In the third, the stone on the back covering the word from one to the other.
I've thought for a long time about what word it should be, but finally I think I'll stick with "PUNISHMENT".

I am interested in what this photograph means in relation to the body, then in relation to punishment and how, by uniting both elements, the implicit connotation of the fact is made invisible.

Sept. 6 2022
Curro

Paula, here I send you the image (above left) that responds to your triptych.
Based on the idea of Sisyphus and the punishment that you told me about and on the sketches of your image, I was considering several options and in the end I'm left with this one. The idea of submission, embrace the stone, the punishment, the punisher. I think it is something very political that corresponds to the society in which we live, submission, passivity, resignation, bordering on the Stockholm syndrome, the slave syndrome as well.

Sept. 9 2022
Paula

I kept thinking about becoming stone. The gesture, what you do when adhering to the rock with the rocky bottom, like a stone body metamorphosis, led me to do the exercise of placing myself face down on a rocky floor. You are the stones, they left traces on my torso and face, the part of the body that alludes to identity, the part that I seek to establish as the stone or with the stone. The relationship (body-stone) seems to me to exalt political conditions that denote us as a fragmented and firm structure, but apparently useless in its possible individual movements, hence the establishment of stone. These marks are the memory of the body, a reminder that the dialectic between one and the other mixes in the gesture, breaking down that imposition. Being a stone, it seems to me, is an exercise in positioning and resistance. The punishment that we talked about earlier can take on a different dimension, a possibility when assumed as part of a structure.

Sept. 10 2022
Curro

Your reflection on being stone as a political tool, as a state of being, with its consequences, its wounds and its scars, is very accurate and forceful.
We have gone from embracing the stone as submission to being in the transition from being the stone as a force of fight.
For me, the next step would be to turn to stone and enter inside, like a Trojan horse. Win from within, be fluid in form, not a wall. Use the tools to win from within. This process also reminds me of the poem Conversation with a Stone, by Wislawa Szymborska. I leave you here my next image, the body becoming part of the rock, entering it. Going back to the matrix.

Sept 11, 2022
Paula

It is interesting to think about the exercise that we have been doing in relation to the context, the landscape. My bathroom has been filled with stones, rocks of different shapes and sizes.

Once I read that the first institutional crises occurred in China, I don't remember in which empire, but the fact is that Chinese bourgeois intellectuals, due to this problem, went to nature and from the link between nature and individuals the concept of landscape was born. That crisis seems to me very contemporary to the current system, how the landscape establishes a space that is politically and poetically different from the city. This makes me want to get out of the city, hence the large percentage of the work I've done in the landscape.

The problem with thinking of yourself as a stone is that you are not really a stone. Imagination and words are needed, forced. I liked the poem, I thank you very much, from there I got a phrase that I repeated with a stone in my mouth. “It is limited to my words”, is what could verify the relationship between both voices.

Sept. 12 2022
Curro

I understand you perfectly. It's funny, because last night I went to sleep with an idea in my head, it's the lyrics of a flamenco song, a lyric that obsesses me and I've already worked with the concept, but when I read you this morning I understood how it goes: https://youtu.be/cnds9yyVssU

I was stone and I lost my center
And they threw me into the sea
By dint of a long time
I found my center again

I think it expresses your feelings about everything that surrounds you, about the situation in Chile that makes you uneasy, being stone only in words because we are not alchemists and we can’t change matter. Being lost, throwing yourself into the sea, into fear, and after blows, experiences, finding yourself again, giving you that benefit of losing yourself to focus again.

Sept. 12 2022
Paula

What a beautiful relationship, I like flamenco and this one in particular shows that feeling in relation to the stone very well. I know almost nothing about music, but the vibrato of flamenco makes me want to cry, it's like a choir of tears, which adds sentimentality to our conversation.

Yesterday I thought of Fina Miralles in her fixation with elements of nature, but her varied city context. Keiji Uematsu, Elias Adasme in Chile and even Santiago Sierra have also been around in my head. It seems to me that out there, among these artists, an equation of stone, submission and resistance is formed. Cheers!

Sept. 13 2022
Curro

Very interesting references. And what you say about flamenco is very nice. Flamenco really comes from the Earth, from the stones. And it vibrates, like an earthquake.

Sept. 13 2022
Paula

Today, in my first class in college, I took (stole) the clock from the seminar room and spent time between classes looking for stones. Although I see the action as an exercise, I liked the experience a lot, I wasted my time. I felt that the functionality and daily effectiveness was cut by the game.

Sept. 13 2022
Curro:

Seeing your clocks, the first thing that came to mind was our concept of time, followed by geological time. The eternity. But all eternity is preceded by a beginning, a birth, a primeval creation. I thought of plastic as something eternal, eternal for our vital clock, and I thought of rock. I thought of that rock, which is young, very young, it is just over a year old, I picked it up from the volcano that erupted in Iceland last year, it is a baby rock, it is only 18 months old, but it is bound to be eternal , only the hand of man can change that, just like with plastic. Time passes differently for each being, each object.

15 Sep 2022
Paula:

Thinking about the age of a stone takes us back to being born and by default to dying. The rituals associated with this fact are usually linked to the burial, hence the action. The question that haunted me today:
Do stones die?
How does a stone die?

Sept. 15 2022
Curro:

I have spent hours thinking about it, rambling about this question.

In my opinion, perhaps too romantic and rather unrealistic, stones do not die. In the worst case, the stones undergo a transformation, like energy, they become something else, sand, dust... Is the stone tormented like the skin?

This idea has led me to think about pain, to compare how we suffer being stone or flesh. There is a religious component, an allegory to Jesus Christ, although I am not religious, it is something that is intrinsic to me. Religious iconography interests me a lot. Think of the thorns, the blood, the meat. Make an altar to suffering.

Sept. 15 2022
Paula:

I understand what you are saying, the pressure of Christianity has been reinforced since modernity together with capitalism as an overturning of individuality. It seems to me that at this point we reconnect with the beginning of our dialogue, and that is that God became incarnate and took on our feelings. From romanticism, the artist who has the "gift" becomes very important, something with which one is born, like Jesus. I say that it is related to the beginning of this conversation by the idea of the author, something interesting appears there, a possibility for the individual to create as God created the world. Personally, I don't believe – in belief and creation – in anything, but if I accept the possibility of re-conceptualizing, stressing and criticizing, and criticizing even more assuming the inherent pressures of the West, we all carry a god, alive or dead. I am of the idea that the individual notion must be occupied in favor to free us from these impositions, these pressures.

The stone is charged with religiosity, I am even thinking of derivations of other beliefs such as virgin stones, but it is also charged with political issues such as busts, which were a way of protecting relevant figures, such as a political pamphlet. The monuments are history, they are power and from there I think they should fall.

I did the exercise of resisting as long as I could, holding a stone (12 min) to finally let it fall, throw it, since at the gestural level it has an ideological charge, both religious (throwing the first stone) and political (the people's weapon). Seeing it on the ground, I couldn't help but relate it to the pavement, the structure that gives us support, an important civilizational element for understanding the body and its ways of living.

I leave you this exercise and I tell you that I was left with an idea, the "written in stone". I'll do a piece during the day about it. Write to a stone and cover it. Later I will have a stone engraved with this writing.

Sept. 15 2022
Curro

Paula!!! It's amazing, I've been waiting to do the same. Write on the stone. In fact we were about to do something like that this morning. This afternoon I will send you the answer. It is very interesting what you say, there are many concepts that I have to shuffle and thus be able to answer you. Now I don't want to get ahead of your idea of writing, although it would be curious if we both closed in the same way.

The first image has taken me directly to the Pantocrator. I can't stop thinking about this poem by Sanchez Robaina:

There’re
A
God
Within
Of
The
Stone
I'll spin it around.

I found it very interesting that we both proposed closing the dialogue by writing on the stone. I wrote the poem I told you about, and I went for a walk, for a moment I felt like Sisyphus, carrying the stone from one side to the other, like the initial idea of our dialogue. My intention was to make an altar to the god that inhabits the stone, but I found this basalt wall by the sea, and again, I felt the circle closing. The rock camouflaged with the rock. Return to the origin. I was also thinking about your rock that fit into the pavement and the political charge you were talking about. I could not idealize it, and think that contrary to what you showed, the stone and its return to the origin, the god of the stone, returned to nature, fled from the social to return to the natural.

Sept. 15 2022
Paula:

It seems to me a beautiful way to end a dialogue between stones at a distance. How beautiful that it ended with a common gesture, which takes the stone, the body and the possibility of "being or being" with the language. I wrote something on a stone that was directly related to the one you wrote, so we know that both equally resist at different points. I kept the same structure and almost the same words, I only modified God for memory. One of the problems of the divine is that it is not experienced, instead the memory endures and transcends death, it is the constancy of something that is no longer there. I would like stones to be re-signified as memories, that when we see them one would think of memory, since every stone has and contains experiences. These were thrown, as opposed to inside the poem, and thus they will become part of an insistence on what is no longer there.

I also put stones on my body to measure and record our relationship. My body measures 10 stones, another form of unity that joins me and the stone. (Thinking of the self as all bodies that have and could be measured in stone). Greetings.

Sept. 16 2022
Paula:

I liked the dialogue, it made me think differently. Usually it takes me longer to make the pieces and this time, due to the timing, it was more immediate, like a kind of game –understanding seriousness and playfulness– at a distance. I thank you for the conversations and the references that made me think a lot. I like your work and despite not knowing each other, I appreciate your ways of thinking and making an image, making life.

Once again, thank you very much for this conversation that will continue forever between stones at a distance.

Sept. 16 2022
Curro:

Paula!!
It has been a wonderful and very enriching experience. I too liked it, and almost today I have missed taking photos for our conversation. Like you, I thank you for your points of view, your references and your way of thinking, they have made me rethink many aspects of how and why I do things, and also look for other aspects that I had previously overlooked. Thank you very much from the heart!!

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