Escif and Otto 183
From september 23 to december 2, 2022
«I sincerely believe that for the child (…) it is not half so important to know as to feel. If facts are the seeds that later produce knowledge and wisdom, then the emotions and the impressions of the senses are the fertile soil in which the seeds must grow.»
Rachel Carson: The Sense of Wonder
In this exhibit, Nacho draws and Otto intervenes.
In this exhibit, Otto draws and Nacho intervenes.
Nacho is an adult. Otto is a child.
As Rachel Carson writes, this is «in the spirit of two friends on an expedition of exciting discovery.»[1]
In this exhibit, the first chords ring out. It’s a four-hand piano concerto and a bird doesn’t sing because it has an answer. This musical space has no score. No audience is required. There are two of them. A sort of visual and sound-based correspondence between two forces that sometimes converse impulsively, sometimes with restraint. They can be felt. There is jazz. The structure plays at failing. There is a whole. Various wholes begin to take shape. They don’t step on one another; they accelerate each other. They barely glance at each other, not knowing what they will find out about the other. The lines of one seem to replicate the direction of the wind. The scenes of another almost fit within a climatic landscape. The conversation takes place within different scenarios: Otto produces atmospheres that Nacho acclimates to, and Nacho evokes places over which Otto scatters the breeze. The wind moves everything and everything moves the air. The inevitable relationship between colour and form and form and color leads us to observe the effects that everything has on everything. These effects are unknown; they cannot be classified in any established order. If we managed to catalog them, they would be lost, as if we had never seen them. The effects are genuine, and a symbiosis begins to take shape between two collaborating actors partaking in the same horizontality. Nothing is big or small, although we can determine ages. Nacho is an adult. Otto is a child. There are two of them. They equal one plus one.
The child has the ability to activate language before the dictionary. His language always comes before. Otto doesn’t know this and doesn’t say so, yet he speaks and begins nonetheless, bringing new creatures to life. Nacho speaks and sculpts, giving structure to his discourse, distinguishing and assessing all the animals, securing the images that he will later leave in other hands. Otto is unaware of the exact use of words and the designated function of tools; he does not know the reason behind the geometries and cannot articulate them, yet with his movements, he reveals the material that underlies everything: an indestructible wonder. That is the miracle. Otto himself can be the geometries. The child begins with the subject matter and the direction of the lines he draws responds to his whole body. He neither judges nor bestows identities. Exquisitely, he spreads the secret of his latency. He doesn’t remember. He invents the line anew every time. Childhood devises everything and originates memories. Otto occupies his place; he does not build, but rather inhabits his place through his form, his material, thereby declaring, sublimating, and legitimizing non-construction, the starting point. He expresses with his first line that another possibility is possible, and that this possibility is necessary. The adult now understands that the world cannot exist without other worlds. Nacho now knows what would happen if he had never seen this, and even what it would mean to never see it again. He knows that, in the words of Rachel Carson, «an experience like that (…) can be shared with a child even if you don’t know the name of a single star.»[2]
A collaboration has begun.
Otto knows the space between things.
Nacho knows things. There are two of them.
There are two songs, and although the melody is not identical, it is similar. There is equality between the songs. Otto is a child and he questions the role of the elements, conceives of others, and arranges them, but he is unaware; everything in him is experiential: it is all present. Nacho is an adult and therefore believes that he knows nothing when the child finishes effortlessly, without thinking about things with the diligence that comes with maturity. But there is a constant association; new possibilities allow new vocabularies to emerge. These new lexicons will allow other universes to develop. The adult was a child once, and, in the words of Peter Handke, “when the child was a child, / berries fell into its hand as only berries do / and they still do now.” Everything remains as it was: wonder is possible, and the child is possible. Faced with Otto’s lines, Nacho forgets things, he immerses himself in that dimension that exists between things. He waits a while and recognizes the new animals — it has always been this way — and now that he has the use of memory, he remembers: childhood reveals everything and rebels against everything.
In real time, we witness the first epistles: the father writes to the son, the son writes to the father, but not because they have an answer.
[1] Translated from Carson, Rachel. El sentido del asombro. Ediciones Encuentro. 2012. Página 29
[2] Translated from Carson, Rachel. El sentido del asombro. Ediciones Encuentro. 2012. Página 33
Gabinete de dibujos 