Serie N 01

2021 - 2025

Objet trouvé, acrylic, assemblage, installation.

Exhibition at La Empírica.

Granada, Spain.

In collaboration with Jimena Blanco Jalil y Claudia Arenas.

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Serie N was born from El alma y sus afecciones: la salud mental desde el legado médico y filosófico andalusí, a doctoral study by Jimena Blanco Jalil [Mexico] from the University of Granada, who asked a number of artists to do an artistic transference [ in this case, Serie N 01 ]. Here, ReSources delves directly into an immaterial dimension of waste, that of an internal pollutant and generator of interference as well as an obstruction, presenting the idea that waste exists on an internal level, also, and that it must also be addressed, managed and purified so as not to cloud the environment.

The piece Serie N 01 will be exhibited from October 17th to November 16th at La Empírica [Granada, Spain], as part of the collective exhibition intentos de círculo.

The exhibition project "Circle Attempts," linked to the doctoral thesis "The Soul and Its Affections: Mental Health from the Andalusian Medical and Philosophical Legacy" by Jimena Blanco Jalil (Doctoral Program in Languages, Texts, and Contexts, University of Granada), arose from the intention to explore the limits of traditional academic frameworks and to look toward possibilities for dissemination and transfer to more pluralistic, open, and symbolic formats. Eleven contemporary artists created pieces based on premises from the research, and all of them, without exception, are participants to a greater or lesser degree, in their own or others' bodies, in some reality associated with the notions of mental health and suffering. This exploration, both discursive and plastic, moves from the present to the past, while returning to forge epistemological, narrative, and emotional bridges on issues that, despite having been uttered centuries ago, and setting aside any anachronism, still resonate with us.

From the resulting artistic production, and incorporating the symbolism of the number four in pre-modern Arabic epistemology, four non-linear moments have been formulated that serve the curatorial process to (de)construct the exhibition spaces: speculations as moments of doubt, symptoms as moments of suffering, sutures as moments to seek healing, and affects as moments of accompaniment, each alluding to the possible circumstances that coexist, or coexisted, in situations of psychological and, perhaps, psychosomatic distress. Rejecting the fictitious illusion of linearity and finitude in narratives that aim for the therapeutic, the exhibition raises the question of the imprecise circularity, inescapable and ever-changing, of mental health. Within this unpredictability, the pieces are arranged across three exhibition spaces in the city of Granada (Casa de Zafra, La Empírica, and Espacio Lavadero), inviting visitors to create a journey, perhaps almost circular, to present space as a shared narrative, a changing, hypertextual matrix, whose ultimate aim is to pose questions to all who inhabit it.

Human nature as an imperfect attempt at closure, like a circle drawn freehand. In the researcher's words, we are attempts at a circle.

Claudia Arenas López
Curatorship

Speculations.

Medieval Arab medicine was a flow of knowledge where speculating about human nature was speculating about all kinds of knowledge. It was an invitation to interdisciplinary and holistic thinking that perhaps gave equal weight to facts and possibilities, to our rational perceptions and our imaginative ones. The pieces in the Speculations series reflect on the similarities between contemporary artistic practice and this form of medieval medicine: speculation as a central axis of both practices. But they also reflect on that ambiguous suffering, that initial uncertain interval that announces itself at the onset of illness, where conjecture becomes an act of listening.

EVA G. HERRERO. Aguaespejo (2021)

ARCADIO M. LANZ. Cuatro Aguas (2023-24)

LAURA TAPIA & ERIKA FRITZ. Intersección involuntaria de cuatro elementos en lo dancístico lo acuático lo granadino (2024)

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Symptoms.

For centuries, illness was explained as any humoral imbalance due to excess, deficiency, or corruption. There is no consensus on black bile. This black or melancholic humor, the most enigmatic of the four, was considered potentially the most detrimental to mental processes. The very term melancholy comes from the Greek mélaina kholé: “black bile.”

This section explores the notion of illness and its constant and close link to culturally situated criteria of abnormality. It places us within the suffering itself, the symptom, citing the causes by which melancholy could (and still can) arise: excessive mental activity, excessive wakefulness, or the loss of someone or something valuable.

HÉCTOR VÁZQUEZ DE LA ROSA. De un dolor y algunxs hu/amores (2024)

HELENA NEHME. Epitafios de un presente pasado (2024)

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Sutures.

The pieces in the Sutures series explore the role of water as a stimulant of the soul's sensitivity and a key element in preserving the emotional stability of the patient. The common presence of pools with fountains in the architectural typology of the bimaristan, or "Islamic hospital" (medieval), suggests that, in continuity with its use as a sensory, visual, and auditory element in Arab-Islamic gardens and palaces, water contributed to the comprehensive care—both physical and emotional—of patients housed in these institutions.

By using the image of water to evoke an image of care, the viewer is placed in a symbolic space where the possibility of healing emotional wounds is explored. By evoking the memory of the bimaristans and the importance of water to them, the artists reactivate a holistic conception of health that, in the present, becomes an artistic proposal and offers those who inhabit it a breath, a pause, and a space to rebuild what is vulnerable.

KATARZYNA PACHOLIK. La contemplación suspende el paso del tiempo (2024)

FERNANDO DIYARZA. Espejos de Agua / De la promesa a la realidad, de la transparencia a la opacidad (2024)

ESQUÍE. Wādi (2024)

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Affections.

In the psychosomatic dimension, a vital question arises: how to strengthen the soul to prevent illness? They proposed educating and preparing the mind; generating and retaining pleasant ideas, and recalling them. And frequenting people and places of emotional warmth. Practicing self-care in the absence of a knowledgeable person capable of providing assistance, not only when affliction appears, but also in times of health and stability. Faced with the possibility of relapse, they proposed shifting from affliction to self-care, with the help of others. In this final moment, the pieces place us in that act of caring for oneself, in the imperative need for anchors—our own or others'—to emerge from suffering and mobilize affection as a necessary framework for collective healing.

JULIA PÉREZ AMIGO. Blanco y negro (2024)

LUIS ALFONSO MONJE (KOTO). Serie N 01 [ReSources] (2021-2025)

PIEZA COLECTIVA. Exvotos corales (2023-2024)

Focusing on waste as an artistic medium, the work Series N 01 [ReSources] presents an interactive installation centered on the reflection of agency, both individual and collective, in the treatment of mental illness.

The more than 600 nails that comprise the work attempt to interpret, on the external and material plane, what the darkness of the soul represents on the internal and immaterial plane, through the rhetoric of the broken, the deviant, the useless. Applying the concepts of defamiliarization (V. Shklovski, 1917) and attentiveness (Y. Saito, 2017), the artist invites us, as if following a kind of instruction manual, to two continuous processes of removing the nails—and consequently, the darkness of our spirits: only through the direct and collective extraction—defamiliarization—of those nails we find on the cement block (the artist invites the viewer to remove them one by one and take them with them) can we sit on the block and observe, with individual purifying attention—attentiveness—the nails that make up the canvas and, even more so, the cleanest part of the canvas. The work challenges the obvious tools of healing—through a hammer head that would easily serve to remove the nails from the canvas—opting instead for strategies related to the collective, the contemplative, and the aesthetic.

Claudia Arenas López
Curatorship