The Promise of the Waves
Anne Faucheret
“On the planking, on the ship’s bulwarks, on the sea, with the course of the sun through the sky and the ship, an unreadable and wrenching script takes shape, takes shape and destroys itself at the same slow pace–shadows, spines, shafts of broken light refocused in the angles, the triangles of a fleeting geometry that yields to the shadow of the ocean waves. And then, unceasingly, lives again.”
Marguerite Duras, The North China Lover 1
The imagery of modernism and its failures as well as its hybrid, popular appropriations, has characterized Wilfrid Almendra’s work until now, but has left little tangible trace on his current output. The pacified ghost of modernism has given way to post-humanist demands. Almendra’s projects are site-specific, both conceptually and physically, and he has a preference for spaces that, formally and historically, are atypical, heterodox, singular. He occupies them, and, above all else, sensitizes the visitor to the experience of this occupation.
In 2013, Almendra installed L’Intranquillité at Brest’s Passerelle contemporary art centre, a former warehouse. In this work, a translucent structure with a rectangular ground plan occupies the central space. But a closer examination reveals that there are actually two structures. One of them has a perimeter of recycled glass sheets glued together. The second is suggested rather than fully realized, with just one wall in sheets of glass; the other sides consist of metal rods at a height of 2.30 metres, supported by three pillars, two in aluminum, the third in shuttered concrete, under the middle of the rod opposite the glass structure. This accentuates the airy, almost floating aspect of the installation. Between the two modules there is a passage, 60 cm wide, that cannot be entered, suggesting a space that is given over to rubbish or ruderal vegetation. It denotes the mandatory separation between houses. There is a profusion of ornamental plants – Monstera deliciosa 2 – that threaten to topple the walls. One of them has escaped from its confinement. By putting these plants in an intermediate space, an interstice, Almendra overturns ideas about the occupation of space, symbolically revitalizing non-places, no man’s lands, wastelands. He celebrates natural entropy, whose rhythms he incorporates into the temporality of his work.
In 2014, at the asymmetrical art centre in Chelles, comprising two adjoining ancient churches that have been turned into a single space, Almendra came back to the idea of a natural, anthropic (and entropic) environment with Between the Tree and Seeing It, whose juxtaposed plates of recycled glass give a home, or a frame, to vegetation. But the ground plan is more complex, with the contours of a kitchen garden. And its mass overshadows the surrounding space. A variety of plants grow freely, as in an untended greenhouse. In the centre of the chapel there is September 25th 2013 at night, whose perfect white 29.28 square metre ceiling, with its skylight, is suspended at a height of 2.50 metres. Visible in the background through three Gothic windows are 1970s residential blocks of the type whose presence in town centres is now much derided. In the exhibition space, a wooden table bearing different traces and inscriptions draws the eye towards the floor. According to one’s viewpoint, it supports or presents a heavy copper plate which was cast collectively, and is unworked, almost crude. The force of the piece lies in a meeting between the evocation of a standardized space–private but transparent, empty–and a subtle though definite incorporation of usage and ritual, togetherness and collectiveness, into the space itself and the objects that occupy it. Potatoes in aluminum are placed on the floor as if they had just been brought in from the garden. They recall those of Giuseppe Penone, but without the theatrical aspect of the faces printed as negatives. They were made with debris found in the aftermath of cyclone Xynthia on verandas in Fos-sur-Mer, where permits had been handed out for construction in flood-prone areas. The piece speaks of non-monetary exchange, alternative economies, local culture, and transversal sociability. The final feature is a soundtrack that is audible within the exhibition space and also broadcast from there into the town every thirty minutes on FM frequencies belonging to mainstream radio stations–but for less than a minute each time, so that the source of the signal cannot be identified. It consists of poems in Portuguese declaimed in a slow, serious voice by their author, Jorge Armando Sousa, a stonemason Almendra met in Portugal while building a house there. This poet of the concrete and the everyday speaks of construction and occupation, (human) abandonment and (natural) reconquest. From the triviality of building sites, waste grounds, and materials, he extracts signs of a celestial community and an immanent link between all things.
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Sensitive Spaces
In 2016, a year after completing a residency of several months with Fogo Island Arts, Almendra returned there to exhibit in a challenging space–a kind of well, seven metres deep, bathed in light (albeit electric), with a lower-ceilinged antechamber. Subtly oscillating between difference and repetition, he recovered certain pre-existing elements or ideas, eschewing innovation in favour of the experimentation and collaborations which can spring up in given situations–and which are thus always new.
Light Boiled Like Liquid Soap is an immersive environment, not heavy but muffled. The spatial approach is delicate and economical but complex, combining vertical and horizontal markers, effects of opacity and transparency, closure and openness, light and shadow, broken lines and curves. Different occupational densities are created by configurations of flat volumes, planes and lines, in islets strewn across the space. Situated just inside the threshold of the gallery, a wooden platform suspended from slim metal cables intensifies the physical sense of confinement produced by the low entrance. But it is attenuated by the rest of the space, which is considerably higher, more airy and less dark, with two other platforms suspended at the same height. Covered in white plaster through which a fine metal grid (chicken wire) can be made out, these right-angle polygons suggest false, fragmented, incomplete ceilings. They lead the eye downward, showing signs of the manual work that shaped them, with variations of colour, marks of cuts and surfaces left visible; or rather, not masked. The horizontal structuring of the space, rigid and uniform, is softened by thick, translucent vertical silicone rectangles with ill-defined edges, hanging from one or more thin copper tubes attached to the suspended platforms and/or anchored in the floor or the wall. This network extends across the floor, where black electrical cables link the sculptural islets in graphic itineraries. The junctions are bound with covered copper wire. On the right-hand wall, a delicate skein of oxidized copper tubes supported by a shelf, also in copper, suggests a candelabra or an altar. On either side of the sculpture, copper tubes morph into electrical cables that descend to the ground, then join the network, or are inserted into the wall, where the origin of the configuration is presumably situated. A plaster-wrapped tube the diameter of a domestic water pipe runs from the entrance, at waist level, to a network of plaster-covered tubes some 10 cm above the ground. On the wall, separate from the rest–both spatially and because it is the only object not connected by the electrical cables–is one pictorial work: a silicone inclusion of a red, orange, and blue plastic bag found on the seashore.
Apart from the touches of colour that can be seen here and there, like the green of the oxidized copper, it is black, white, and transparency that dominate. But this environment is characterized by filigree patterns: sculpture becomes drawing, material becomes flat. The emptiness created between the lines is inherent in the work. Dynamic and active, facilitating projection and connection, discontinuity and reversibility, this void gives a voice to things while also making possible an all-embracing approach to space, the occupation of which is not expressed in accumulation or utilization, but in the fragmentary, the precarious, the evanescent, the immaterial. The deliberate integration of shadows, and a radio connected to a smartphone, are further signs of a desire to disseminate the work while stopping short of its disappearance. The FM radio signal is indispensable but invisible, auditory but inaudible. It is a key to the work, elucidating the networked aesthetic, which also has a particular function, in that the conductive structure, pervading the environment and connecting it to the steel-framed building, creates a massive space of resonance and amplification. But the radio signal cannot be heard in the exhibition space. The artist has spatially separated the transmitter and the receivers so that the perception of the work is also fragmented. A displacement, or incursion, into the local social space is necessary if the sensorial experience is to be complete, above and beyond the discursive apprehension of the work.
The scales and dimensions of this installation implicitly relate to bodies. Along the wall, starting at the entrance, a plaster-wrapped tube at the same height as a dancer’s barre orients and accompanies us, almost inviting us to lean on it as on a handrail. The adept arrangement of the different elements directs movement in space and distances of reception. At hand, in every sense, the piece invites us to palpate and to look through the body. Despite a discreet frugality and an aesthetic fragility, it is acted on by the environment. There is a slight disorientation of visual and spatial perception, a feeling of exiguity and volatility, concurrent strangeness and familiarity. References to habitat are numerous. All of the materials possess a strong power of evocation. Far from being specific to art, they mostly derive from other sectors: construction (wood, copper); medicine (silicone); or contemporary consumption, mobility, and communication (plastic bags and electrical cables). From the standard ceiling height of European social housing (2.30 metres) to the total area of the suspended elements, which is also that of the house where Almendra lived during his residency with Fogo Island Arts, via what look like towel rails (the copper tubes) or a decorated mantelpiece (the copper shelf and the tubular metallic sculpture), there are references, albeit abstract, to a familiar but subterranean space of habitation. Rather than a living room, this is a utility room, a basement, or an amateur workshop. It is a refuge. And there are other, concomitant indications of productive spatial occupation. Almendra worked frequently in the exhibition space itself. And this has left some traces, such as the incision in the wall which reveals, along with the metal structure of the building, its nodal point–that of metal beams and tensile forces. This is where he plugged in his transmitter. The gallery becomes a space for life, and for work; for contemplation and broadcasting. It is an intersection between the private and the public, interiority and exteriority. Fluid, unstable, porous, it is underpinned by circulation and exchange. It gives a persistent impression of being connected.
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Vibrant Matter
It is through spatial organization, but also through the methods and conditions of production and the nature and treatment of materials, that Almendra orchestrates the occupation of space and the orientation or evocation of bodies, whether human or non-human, visible or invisible, desired or disappeared, incarnate or without organs. The surfaces are shiny, matte, smooth or rough, expanded, oxidized, burnt or polished. They look to be either new or worn. They may suggest an epidermis, a roof, or a bandage, but at any rate, almost always, a protective layer that is at once an interface and a place for communication between the inside and the outside. Protection, restoration, or indeed enhancement: these three significant approaches are reflected in the materials themselves. Plaster evokes the immobilization of broken bones; silicone brings to mind plastic surgery. And the omnipresent metaphor of a basement represents the idea of protection and refuge. Paradoxically, however, the space is not hermetic, but permeable. It transmits and communicates outward, like a skin. Some treatments stabilize materials, like the use of a blowtorch to scorch the upper side of the suspended wooden platforms, recalling the power of fire, which has ensured human survival and emancipation since time immemorial. Other treatments, including the uncontrolled oxidation of the copper and silicone, give free rein to molecular recompositions. The artist’s fortuitous combination of two different silicones, for example, unexpectedly generated a runaway chemical reaction that he observes and conserves.
Letting go and experimenting, if always playfully–these are fundamental to Almendra’s work, and they do not preclude fond attention to matter. It is not a question of mechanical or technological intervention, let alone outsourcing, but of a physical, attentive, sometimes repetitive, sometimes collective production process that brings together expertise and materiology. In contemporary art, over the last few years, the paradigm of artisanal activity has reappeared in the form of rigour, attitude, and production methods. Manual work is often highly visible. For Almendra, who has always embraced materials, with a predilection for the handmade, and who welcomes serendipity into his work, what counts is the structural, not the aesthetic; the political, not the cosmetic. He brings art back to vernacular practices, combining the work of the head with that of the hand, favouring experimentation, and slowing down the temporality of production. As he passes a blowtorch over the upper sides of the suspended wooden platforms, he is using a method of insulating and waterproofing roofs that ends with the application of tar. The hole that reveals the steel structure of the building, with the work-machine plugged into the architecture-machine, was made with a jigsaw in a trial-and-error search for the nodal point. The treatment and tools sometimes derive from a practical insight, a “poietic hybrid,”3 as with the silicone, pressed by glass bottles and hardened by natural oxidation. Improvising on aesthetic canons, and the supposed distinctions between “high” and “low,” Almendra de-functionalizes (sometimes unceremoniously), then re-functionalizes, though without completely erasing, past biographies of materials and objects.
Materials and/or objects enter into Almendra’s work in different ways. He collects them during his various peregrinations, exchanges them, or purchases them on the open market. He is interested in local practices such as the use of wood in the construction of houses on Fogo Island; the removal of objects such as plastic bags from the usual cycle of production, consumption, and disposal; or their connection to a form of personal narration. He undermines “the taxonomic structure that defines the world of things, lumping some things together, discriminating between others, attaching meanings and values to these groupings, and providing a basis for rules and practices governing the circulation of these objects.”4 He densifies them, introducing them into a new symbolic form of circulation, and changing their primary status as commodities. “Objects are the way things appear to a subject–that is, either a name, an identity, a gestalt or stereotypical template… Things, on the other hand, [signal] the moment when the object becomes the Other, when the sardine can look back, when the mute idol speaks, when the subject experiences the object as uncanny and feels the need for what Foucault calls a ‘metaphysics of the object,’ or, more exactly, a metaphysics of that never objectifiable depth from which objects rise up toward our superficial knowledge.”5 Almendra is intrigued by things. He lets them act and express themselves.6 As Roger Caillois put it: “I treat stone with deference, but as the insensible mineral that it is, and remains. I treat fables as fables, with the caution, uncertainty and incredulity they command. More than once, however, I have found myself thinking that stones should be seen as something like poems, and that fiction is where one should seek the perpetuity of stones, and their unshakeable signification, in other words, a way to reunify, however tenuously, the disjointed, contrasted parts of our indivisible universe.“7 This is the metamorphosis that is being acted out in the floating, vibrant environment that vacillates between immobility and entropy, subjection and agency. To begin with, there are the aforementioned uncontrolled effects of combination, aging, and oxidation that Almendra authorizes.
But there is also a spatial overflowing, on the order of parasitism. The entire installation is grounded in the architectural space. The plaster-wrapped pipes descend to the floor as though their journey continues beyond their visibility; the electric wires are all connected to the steel structure of the building; the cables holding up the false ceilings are anchored in the real ceiling. And the architectural structure itself nurtures the work: without an antenna there is no signal, and the whole building is both amplifier and antenna. The poetry is transmitted by hacking into official airwaves. For Steven Shaviro, the model of “embodied subjectivity” has given way to a viral, or parasitic, model of subjectivity.8 The body, with the addition of technological and media prostheses, is now co-extensive with its environment and territory–Deleuze’s “becoming-animal.” It takes on vital forces connected to the environment that sustains them. The organisms are collective and interdependent. This is a wholly resonating body, a “vascularized collective”9 with different actors, human and non-human, in an unstable equilibrium of tensile forces, mass, oxidation, conduction. Macroscopically, immobility reigns. Microscopically, chemical and physical processes bear witness to the activity of matter, which seems to self-organize according to its own syntax, offering the world new equivalences and correspondences. More than an absurd poetic flight of fancy, Light Boiled Like Liquid Soap, which is both the title of the exhibition and its main component, suggests an alchemist’s laboratory in which a new set of connections between things is being created.
An awareness that an artwork can be an ecosystem of interdependent elements, human and non-human, past and present, is to be found in this exhibition. But accretion does not just result from an “act of creation,” as the aftermath of a generous human intention. It was already there. A fishing trip included the collection of the plastic bags that provide the material for a series of works, simply entitled bags, though of course they are more than that. The randomly combined silicones create strange iridescences. And even the human initiatives are not exclusively human. “The sentences of this book also emerged from the confederate agency of many striving macro- and micro-actants: from ‘my’ memories, intentions, contentions, intestinal bacteria, eyeglasses, and blood sugar, as well as from the plastic computer keyboard, the bird song from the open window, or the air or particulates in the room, to name only a few of the participants. What is at work here on the page is an animal-vegetable-mineral-sonority cluster with a particular degree and duration of power. What is at work here is what Deleuze and Guattari call an assemblage.”10 There is porosity, and constant exchange, between the organic and the mineral, between humans and things.
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Nomadic Community
Light Boiled Like Liquid Soap is neither the brainchild of a demiurge nor an expression of its subjectivity, but the result of complex collective situations where encounters influenced, at least in part, the direction of the work. On Fogo Island, a meeting with a local architect involved with the Fogo Island Inn, where the gallery is located, led to the drilling of a hole in the wall in search for the steel node at the heart of the installation. And Jorge Armando Sousa’s poems, played over the radio, were essential, as they are in Almendra’s work as a whole. Rhythmic, sonorous, concrete, they turn building sites, work areas, no man’s lands, and construction materials into a vibrant, lyrical, raw, rough universe:
“Entulho a céu aberto / Eu vi aqui bem de perto / Carcaças de frigorifico / Com plásticos a mistura / Lixo de cor diferente / Que infesta o ambiente / Composto que muito dura.”
(Open-air rubbish dump / on this earth I’ve seen / carcasses of fridges / in a mixture of plastics / multicoloured waste / invading the environment / compost that’ll be here for some time.)11
In exchange for the poems, Sousa obtained a year’s worth of olive oil pressed by Almendra, for whom the alternative economic reality of barter is crucial, along with the mobility of production sites and a remarkable economy of means. At the core of Almendra’s work there is “symbolic exchange”12 that is immediate, interpersonal, not subject to the challenges and aporia of social legitimation. The frenetic circulation of words, acts, and gifts stands in opposition to the immobilized time of the obstructed or unilateral exchanges on which power is based. For Jean Baudrillard, the poetic act is a symbolic exchange that offers “reversible dispersion,” in contrast to cyberneticized culture. Here, it is the code that disperses, and, in the end, re-establishes freedom of symbolic circulation.
Walks, explorations, observations, drifts; attentiveness to the abandoned, the invisible, the inaudible; a rejection of methodological or formal systematization; hybridization of knowledge and know-how, poetics and aesthetics; nomadism, in life and production. As Rosi Braidotti writes, “The nomadism in question here refers to the kind of critical consciousness that resists settling into socially coded modes of thought and behaviour. The central issue at stake is the inter-connectedness between identity, otherness, subjectivity and power. The nomadic subject combines coherence with mobility. It aims to rethink the subject-other relationship without reference to humanistic beliefs, without dualistic oppositions, linking instead body and mind in a new set of intensive and often intransitive transitions.”13 In relationships both to the cultural-economic space, temporality, the destination of work and authorship, Almendra foregrounds multiplicities of exchange, de-territorialization, nomadism, porosity, and malleability with regard to systematic, transparent decisions. He agrees with Frédéric Neyrat’s view of the present age as one in which “every trajectory seems geo-localizable, where every knowledge must be situated and efficient, every obscurity cleared up, every real singularity suspect.”14 What Almendra develops in his work–echoing a personal, family history of migration and travel15 – relates to Edouard Glissant’s idea of “archipelagic thinking,” which he contrasts with “continental thinking,” involving system, manifesto, and hegemony:
“Another form of thinking is on the rise, which is more intuitive, more fragile, threatened but in accord with the chaos-world and its unpredictabilities, possibly based on the conquests of the human sciences, but derived from a vision of the poetic, and the imagination of the world.”16
“It informs the imagination of peoples, and their diversified poetics, which in turn it transforms. Here, in other words, its risk is realized… [Archipelagic] thinking outlines the imagination of the past: nascent knowledge. It cannot be halted for evaluation, or isolated for transmission. It is about sharing, which no one can deny, or, stopping, proclaim.”17
This thinking is articulated within two concepts that fundamentally inform Almendra’s work: opacity and relationship. Opacity is an epistemological concept that gives individuals the right to maintain a depth of shadow, a psycho-cultural depth, and non-transparency. Almendra’s work retains its opacity: there is an obscure web of connections, and some decisions, both methodological and aesthetic, are not elucidated. The community of listeners is invisible, in the same way that the genealogy of certain pieces belongs solely to those who have contributed to them. Encounter, exchange, and, thus, relations engage in dialogues between different subjectivities, sensibilities, and forms of imagination. Without seeking to appropriate the Other, and a corresponding culture, Almendra cultivates hospitality and mutual interest. In preparing his 2017 exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, he worked with visual artists Natacha Jouot, Tiziana La Melia, and Gareth Moore; New Orleans musician Mr. Quintron; and Le Berger, a Cameroonian hip-hop musician, thereby enlarging the creative community at the origin of the radio transmission. How, then, is one to enter into “the difficult complexion of a relational identity that comprises openness to others, without a risk of dilution?”18 This is where the interplay between opacity and relationship takes place. Thanks to opacity, relationship can equally be open, contingent, and unpredictable. Glissant cites language and poetics, to which Almendra regularly refers. No language can claim universality. “The poetics of Relatedness requires all the world’s languages. Not to know them, or meditate on them, but to know (to feel) that they exist with necessity. And that this existence decides on the accents of all writing.”19 Portuguese poetry is one such accent. The ontology of relationship, which implies “rhizome-identities” and nomadic communities, sets the seal on an imagination of relationships to a world in which each being–human or non-human–could express the world in its own language and act on the world in its own way. Imagination presides equally over poetic and political formulation.
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Physically and conceptually rooted in architectural space, but also the biographical and local context, Light Boiled Like Liquid Soap constitutes a distinctive apparition, a discrete distortion – an ex machina machine. For Wilfrid Almendra, art is a non-productivist encounter between diverse subjectivities, temporalities, and realms, aside from any teleological consideration. He is less interested in critical manifestos than in the saboteur’s disruptions, the orator’s declamations, the poet’s murmurings. His work is a political whisper that fluctuates between withdrawal and ostentation. It is a promise. The poetic voice conveyed by the appropriated transmission, as the final expressions of the sculptural system, was not in fact heard by very many people. And so much the better, because things appear to us only in terms of what they promise. They hold us in suspense, referring to an elsewhere, a future which, though emerging, is not yet fully present. Living, as Jacques Derrida said, means waiting for someone or something whose coming into being must exceed and surprise all predetermined anticipation.
1. Quoted as an epigraph in Félix Guattari, Chaosmosis, translated by Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995).
2. This was not a random choice by Almendra. Monstera deliciosa is a popular domestic plant. In the wild, it proliferates rapidly and anarchically.
3.
Richard Sennett, The Craftsman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).
4.
Arjun Appadurai, The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
5. W.J.T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
6. Francis Ponge, Le parti pris des choses (Paris: Gallimard, 1942).
7.
Roger Caillois, L’homme et le sacré (Paris: Folio, 1950).
8.
Steven Shaviro, “The Body of Capital,” in Pinocchio Theory (2008): HYPERLINK "http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p=641"www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p=641.
9. Bruno Latour, L’Espoir de Pandore. Pour une version réaliste de l’activité scientifique (Paris: Editions de la Découverte, 2001).
10. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2009).
11. Jorge Armando Sousa, unpublished typescript, 2013-14, translated from Portuguese by Catarina de Oliveira and Paul Figueira.
12.
Jean Baudrillard, L’échange symbolique et la mort (Paris: Gallimard, 1976).
13.
Rosi Braidotti, Metamorphic Others and Nomadic Subjects (Berlin: Tanya Leighton Gallery, 2014.)
14.
Frédéric Neyrat, Atopias: Manifesto for a Radical Existentialism (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017).
15.
In his father’s generation, this was marked by traumas of emigration, flight and economic deprivation. What he took from it was the depth of working-class culture, multilingualism, and openness to the unknown.
16. Edouard Glissant, Introduction à une Poétique du Divers (Paris: Gallimard, 1996). Quote translated by John Doherty.
17.
------. Poétique de la Relation (Paris: Gallimard, 1990). Quote translated by John Doherty.
18. Glissant, Introduction à une Poétique du Divers.
19.
Ibid. |
