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.
On chapter 4 (18' 55'') - THE INCOMPREHENSION OF MACHINE
Note 2
«From the marvelous lamp to the magic lantern, the artifact changes and so does the prodigy. The lamp is marvelous because it produces marvels».
Footnote. We could talk about marvelism when talking about the culture that came together with the advent of the industrial world. The marvel-chambers or oddity-cabinets were places where all kinds of objects met and piled themselves up, having no other common characteristic than having the same destiny: any place, in the shelves of time. We could also consider marvelistic the successful multiplications of Panoramas in many European and American cities in the nineteenth century. Big, enormous pictorial representations of the marvels of the world (and history), through which strolled the public, whose absorbed look anticipated cinema.
Note 4
«The lantern is magic because it produces magic».
Footnote. The century that saw the birth of cinema also saw how the Marvel collapsed. Negative relation between magic and marvel. Long ago, magic was the prodigy that made the marvel understandable and communitarian. In modernity, one turns to magic after the marvel has fallen down. Magic is done in front of the marvelous' ruins.
Note 6
«Every function signals another».
Note 8
«The hard laziness is constantly stalked by the shadow of the useless, however, it is not in the shape of fear, but in a hint of falling in disgrace».
Note 10
«I write: [excuse me, I am going move that colon away, momentarily] I write and I wander and I begin to observe myself from another side, I am an interrogatory machine; to be honest, I was abandoned, and not violently, but with the usual decorum that accompanies grey stories, thank you very much, please get out through that door, and do not forget forgetting me».
Note 12
«Love, a foreign language (Kluge). Writing, a foreign land (Duras) ».
Note 14
«Not long ago, I read a little tale of a hugely enigmatic author, and it ended up like this:
"One gets into her bedroom, as tiny as the space that lies between two teeth in a comb, and sees the mattress on the floor, all stuck to the wall, but holding its dignity, and the looks at that faded wall, since one smokes so much, because I do not smoke tobacco, I eat tobacco, and then looks at herself, ditto, laying on the mattress, stuck to the wall. And one thinks: if we spend so much time together, we should feel at ease, right? And the same would happen to the hook, which is always with the spike and the wall. And the chair is always with the table. And the sill is always with the window. In the end, everything works like that, right? At this point, what should I say, one feels... friendship"».
After these Notes on the assembly of matter I say to myself, aloud and various times:
ILLUSION IS WORTH IN ITSELF.
Fourth chapter in the 12-part series shown as a video installation in the Storage -a small space in the building-, adding a chapter each mid-month, starting from the inauguration on September 11, until September 2016.