#3 Mañana goodbye

12-part series that explores the changing production model by which the old tobacco factory became the current International Centre for Contemporary Culture. Lurking two big questions: what do we need from the past when it comes to work? and how and from where one can speak of memory ?

Tabakalera embodies these and many other issues, which has allocated a small space in the building, the Storage, where this series is shown as a video installation, adding a chapter each mid-month, until September 2016. The project is accompanied by a public side events.

Third part: Fresh Work Machine

After I had talked to the German expert on "mixed feelings", on an afternoon of clear absences I started to write something I called, temporarily, Notes on the assembly of matter.

Note 1

«On the left side of my desk, there is a small and thin lamp that looks up in a somewhat enigmatic manner, as if raised by a spirituality fit. When lit, its light halo barely yellows the roof. And then, I say to myself "so dignified in its aspiration, so short in its scope”».

Note 3

« In Brechts' poem, Ulm 1592, a tailor and a bishop argue about the possibility of flying. The tailor, in whose passion we can read the spirit of a new era, puts together all the technique he's able to, and jumps into space. He dies (and so, we can see how, as Brecht states in another text, spirit always precedes matter like a little dog that pirouettes around). The poem ends as the bishop concludes, reasonably, that "man was not born a bird, he will never fly"».

Note 5

«Oh, foreigner, stranger of ours
that our guts miss so».

Note 7

«I feel a tremendous laziness, close to apathy. A laziness that is covered with remorse, and this is one of the worst types of laziness, for you do not eat, but neither do you permit the rest to eat. I miss that chill laziness of the lover. I miss that eternal bed with the eternal book on eternal mornings. And the eternal embrace. And the eternal silly joke and the eternal laughter. Those who have not only praised laziness but also put it into practice know what I'm referring to: laziness expands bodies, melts spaces, looks down on clocks, time becomes flaccid and untidy, tomorrow plays with yesterday, yesterday gets mixed with today, it is never too much becomes too much is never. Now I am taken by a hard laziness, a laziness that responds to work dictated as fallow land. It is a sick laziness: it is not that, really. Die neue sklaverei!».

Note 9

« (...) Why should we make our mind a home, all the time? ».

Note 11

«A neighbor told me that, when she was little, she used to listen a fisherman from Zumaia telling an old story about The Sea of the Four Pains, repeatedly. "...Once upon a time, a man named José Zaldua, citizen of Pasaia, ventured into this sea, hungry for fish, in a boat no bigger than a thimble. After the man had befriended himself with the mistral wind, he stopped the boat and spread out all of his weapons: nets, rods, baits and hooks, and a image of Saint Claire. He stayed for so long he waved at the moon six times and he ignored it as many times, tired. He lost a foot because of the cold, and two teeth because of a disastrous scurvy. As we all know, when it rins it pours, but it is also true that many times the rain is not outside but inside ourselves, and Zaldua, in absolute pain, with no foot or teeth, had a diarrhea so acute that he spilled a meter and a half of his guts all through his boat, which is something. Anyhow, there stayed the man, no foot, no tooth, no stomach: for him, the most painful aspect of it all was that the fish did not respond"».

Footnote. The truth is that Modernity would take that fourth pain and make it into a cause for struggle, while the other three pains would form a philosophical condition: «there where the rest see ideals, I only see that which is human, too human».

Note 13

«Gilbert Simondon: "the machine is the foreign land, a foreign land in which that which is human is captured, unknown, materialized, made into a servant"».