Suscripción

2003 - 2005. The unfinished. Anything that is not fully completed. What we are going through. We look for a title to suit this experience as well as Wolfgang Tillmans’ "If something matters, it all matters”. We attempt to echo the conviction where we wanted (we want) a place for all things that conform us in their grace and in their painful complexity. At moments it is only us, five friends who email an image of Mike Kelley's Destroy All Monsters or the title of a Wes Anderson movie. At moments it is those twenty or thirty friends who are the true intended audience of our small books. Is any of this going to be there tomorrow for us? We said we were more interested in the relationships between the parts than in the whole that they conform. During the last year we crossed two projects: Some Thursday, a Sunday (Algún jueves, un domingo) and Whenever You Want (Cuando quieras). To some extent, they both go through the same territory: How we spend our days here. And how is surplus value installed. We never tried to give testimony about any supposed quotidianness; our challenge has been to build other possible days. As long as we are fortunate, they will open the territory of imagination. We operate from those remains. A shared unavoidability. Our own urgency resonating in a bigger urgency called between us Suscripción (Subscription). A small somehow obsessive idea we cannot get rid of and that for the last years has been taking different shapes. In the project Some Thursday, one Sunday we broadened the bet and invited about seventy people to join the project. In parallel, Whenever You Want was being developed at the Subscription’s core. With one of them we made an installation based on personal journals that some people brought and that the visitors could read carefully or just scan. In the other one, based on images, texts and photographs we facilitated, we invited the visitors to make an issue to take with them and to continue. For us, both projects are part of the same path we have been walking since 1999 and, even if we cannot be precise, we expect to continue walking. We have to confess that we still shiver when someone asks us: But, what does Subscription do? And we actually like that lack of definition. And undoubtfully, it allows us to move at a relative ease, which is not an easy thing to achieve in this universe. Berger says that Goya would have never painted the way he did if he did not have the force of the Castilian plains surrounding him. We have some kind of intuition about the environment around us making the different screens we cross. A Sonic Youth song, being kids that studied during the nineties, working since we were teenagers, remembering when was the first time we heard “Happy happy joy joy”, having read Lipstick Traces (Rastros de carmín), having shared parties and displaying CDs and printmakings. Subscription happens in this city that we make for us in a wilful act. Maybe that is why we find it difficult to think in terms of traditions. We would rather talk about closeness, affinities or familiarities that are shared or that relate us to others. Sometimes to people that were here before and some other times with the people to come, maybe in a path close to ours. We always ask ourselves what those kids, who are growing up and watch Nickelodeon every afternoon, are going to say about the world or about love. The idea of tradition is built afterwards, during a time that will probably be related to the canon, to power. Why it would not be possible to choose another circuit: it showed me something I would not have seen otherwise, someone talked into my ear and made me think something of which I would have never thought, which was the experience somebody gave me, the possibility of sharing and living their work. Even if it sounds naive or childish, we would rather think in relation to the things we, for some reason, love. Maybe that possibility of choosing is one of the marks in our contemporariness. Thus, regardless of the triviality in it, we would rather imagine who would we invite to our house for dinner, with whom would we go dancing or with whom would we like to have an after-dinner conversation. Confessing these affections is for us almost like wearing a pin with an artist’s face on it, or saying who is the guy we like. Although Andi admits he could use a t-shirt with a picture of the Honda brothers below Nan Goldin’s cherry-flower rain, and in the back he would quote Ms Leguin’s “hold on to what is noble” (aférrate a lo noble). Gastix would have one with Christian Marclay and Ceci would wear another one with the transparent umbrella that shines in Sofía Coppola’s Lost in Translation. We already gave Daniel J. Martínez’s Don´t Work poster in fluorescent colours to Eubel, and Sebas is saving for everyone to have their edition of Banana Yoshimoto and Nara’s Argentine Hag. And we would all like to organize a party with the guys from Instant Coffee, of course. Maybe the concept of an artwork is not very compatible with us. We would rather think based on lesser noun words and always in the plural: relationships, processes, experiences, happenings, ideas, encounters... a package that talks about our way of working. Some irreverence or, even better, the decision of not taking so solemnly what we do. Sometimes we film, sometimes we take pictures, and some other times we write or draw; we are interested in the manners these actions graze each other, almost in the sound they make when they graze. That crossing at a particular moment. Installations, issues or events are just some instances. Although we find more relevant the intention of movement implied in Subscription than the planned stops we sometimes make. And from the stops we choose to rescue whatever the other completes and takes from the encounter. A shared experience. Something like a gift. We know that this move could be more than argued. And we almost believe that the argument should be welcomed. Although let’s set things clear; we are clearly conscious that the things that others did and the possibility for us to continue doing things iridizes and gives to the days a particular brightness. An additional characteristic we more than thank. And that we are interested in sharing. “All art is political in the end”, says Orozco looking at the camera. Thus we choose the intention of interacting from communion, of generating spaces for meeting with others. “What is ours and what is not”, would say Bellessi. Maybe that pivotal point where what is ours and what is not generate a new event. And our work processes happen and are based on these forms and from an agreement. At the beginning, there is always an image or an idea that opens up the terrain. Then the ways of shaping that intuition appear. We were talking one night in an EG3 gas station about the ways in which kids appropriate the backpacks they use. That conversation unravelled the map we visited in Are You Going to Be There Tomorrow? (¿Vas a estar ahí mañana?), an installation that, without attempting an answer, comprehended the movements that generate a possible tomorrow based on today. As if any snapshot of what we do would have in a constant looped dialogue: “Are you going to be there?” “I am”. Some of this is present at the event organized by Travel Agency (Agencia de Viajes) as a tribute to Marosa Di Giorgio, celebrated at the gardens in Fernández Blanco Museum. At that opportunity, the music, the texts in the voice of Marosa and the space, all proposed different ways of spending that afternoon. For us, “doing” involves a celebration. It is not a mere installation; we are interested in what happens between people when they give meaning to the installation by being there. Almost what happens each year at the Pride Parade, where an action of a deep political visibility changes into a celebration of difference. We detect a similar gesture in Marcelo López when he gives away any of the posters in the series Do Not Consume Homophobia (No consuma homofobia). Or in the Brandon girls, when they close one of their issues with the wish “and that contagious love gets spread to everyone” (“y que el amor se contagie a todo el mundo”). There is a nerve that allows us to expand the limits, to make something that was implausible possible. Undoubtedly, Reynolds’s production is marked by that will for experimentation and commotion. That attitude also sparkled in Alix De La Barrière’s actions, who took over the supposed wellbeing of the shopping malls by dropping detergent into their fountains. To some extent, that kind of expansion was the meaning of Japanese Pencil (Lápiz japonés). Or, in a different tone, the opening of Parsimony (Parsimonia) in Ruth Benzácar, when people supposedly alien to the artistic scene attended a reception in the mainstream gallery. A scene that extends, and for moments argues about, the existence of a space with the characteristics of Beauty and Happiness (Belleza y Felicidad). That kind of displacement also appears in Nacho Iasparra’s cycle during a Festival of Light (Festival de la Luz), when he projected a collection of images by young photographers on the obelisk of the city. And there are also specific productions that interest us in their development and that surprise us at each instance. Some of them are Daniel Joglar’s, Wili Peloche’s, Mariano Grassi’s, Dani Umpi’s and Luciana Lardiés’. Or unexpected presences which make us happy, like the series of tattoos that currently appears in potato chips and that bring melancholic characters closer to us. In any case, we feel that the action of defining a current overview would be attempting to delimit zones or territories like those physical, political or geographic maps that talk about mountains, cities or ponds but always leave outside something about the people. We would like to believe that there are as many possible overviews as agendas and gazes people have. And we would like none of them to be denied or to be above the others. If we had to be located in a specific zone, we would say that Subscription attempts to move in the open gap between the dancer of Félix González Torres or Prior’s bears, on the one hand, and the man with a hotdog stand and a stereo at the Ezpeleta train station who put the sign: Dance and Dinner for $1.