TAGS

artist, javier-penafiel, plan-of-readings.

BIOGRAPHY

Javier Peñafiel was born in Zaragoza, Spain, 1964. Lives in Barcelona 2007 Encuentro Internacional de Medellín 07, Colombia 2006 Os acasos convenientes, Play Gallery, Berlin 1999 Maltrato, Sala Moncada, Fundación LaCaixa, Barcelona Selected Bibliography COHEN, Ana Paula, Habla (cat.), Barcelona, Galería Joan Prats, 2004; MARTINEZ, Chus, “Naturalismo animado” IN: Palabra natal, Zaragoza, Gobierno de Aragón, 2004; OLVEIRA, Manuel, “El actor autor” IN: Proxecto Edición anuario 2007, Santiago de Compostela, Centro Galego de Arte contemporánea, 2008.

INTERVIEW

Jaime Cerón: Let’s talk about the role of your drawings in the project Vivir entre líneas [Live Between the Lines] and in your work as a whole.

Javier Peñafiel: Vivir entre líneas is an attempt to make videos with drawings and locutions. The drawings are related to an impulse to recover oral narratives, to rely again on the act of listening as something that seduces and affects. I like to think that I write as if I drew, and that I draw while I am listening. To think that drawings are polyphonic embodies a beautiful irony, because an artist imitates anyone’s voice.

In Dibujos para un teste de conversación [Drawings for a Conversation Test], I wanted the images to be completed by the audience. I am not interested in drawing as an isolated method, I mean, I don’t see drawing as a beginning or an end in itself; thus, in my view, the collection of drawings is a good scenario for community. In the last videos and performed conferences, there is always an animated drawing in the background, which makes it possible to talk about drawings in a way that invites empathy.

Jaime Cerón: How do these performed conferences relate to drawings, oral narrative and polyphony?

Javier Peñafiel: I use the format of a performed conference when it is necessary to present an experience for which it is virtually impossible to create an exhibition. Mera coincidencia [Mere Coincidence], Agencia de intervención en la sentimentalidad [Intervention Agency in Sentimentality] and Escritorio, archivo sonoro [Office Sound Archive] portray intentionally prolonged working processes, which for me are more related to publishing work than to theatricality; and which could be identified as a mix of poetic locution and resignification practices of real success.

Jaime Cerón: If “an artist imitates anyone’s voice,” what is the role of the audience, when they take part in the conversation?

Javier Peñafiel: By “an artist imitates anyone’s voice” I mean that the artistic activity is extremely permeable and, at the same time, embodies a heavy irony regarding the author’s melodrama. There is a desire for the drawings to be completed by the audience; one has to trust and prove. And yes, it really happens.

Jaime Cerón: Many artists need to conceive exhibitions instead of single pieces. Do performed conferences correspond to this idea for an artist who produces books or publications as artwork pieces? If such “publishing mise-en-scènes” work as a circulation space that is alternative to the exhibition, can we understand that they include an implicit questioning of this format?

Javier Peñafiel: For me, it is very important to make it clear that when I work, I act as a publisher (in Mera coincidencia, I decided to introduce myself as a host) and not as a director. I am more concerned with editing scenes and considering the possibilities of the various publishing resources. Establishing interchanges with the designer, as well as talking to the curator and to the institution that receive the project are some of the things that make my concerns more publishable than performable. In this sense, a correspondence can be established with the concept of an amplified exhibition. It is true that I feel disappointed about the exhibition mode, but it is not clear for me how to define this disappointment. As many people do, I have a critical opinion that exhibitions must be amplified by a publishing process that comes before and also after them. All of this is present in my work in São Paulo. An exhibition has a dead time, a necrophiliac aspect, yielding anachronistic results regarding the ever-changing times of the artistic activity in its multiplication of methodologies, productivity, receivers, etc.

Jaime Cerón: Is there any possible classification for the time involved in Vivir entre líneas?

Javier Peñafiel: Vivir entre líneas is involved – that is the exact word – with the times between spaces and inhabitants and their transformations. In São Paulo, I have decided to classify days by types: plural day, proper day, ordinary day, improper day and similar day, applying a kind of (classifying) fiction or illusion.


Jaime Cerón is a university professor, art critic, and independent curator. He lives and works in Bogotá.

PROJECTS - 28TH SAO PAULO BIENAL

Projects with updated content