CHILDREN & FOOLS
Barcelona, 2023.
According to the English proverb that gave the title to this exhibition, it is in childhood and alienation that we can live free from the demands of productivity. This approach aims to return us to a space of openness in order to question what "to do" means in contemporary Western society. From a material as fragile as talc (the softest mineral on the Mohs scale), a parure is born, heirs to the symbolic charge of primitive jewellery, which limits the possibility of action and emphasises the act of investiture and portability, forcing us to remain in a state of preliminary indefinition.
Talc pieces. Trimouns quarry, France.
In much of her work, Teresa Estapé confronts us with what we could call the “zero point”: that place where nothing has crystallised yet but shows all of its potential for configuration. A blank page. White as a sheet. Blandness is what she now calls it: the pulp of an incipient blankness. Beside it, panels of lined paper for putting together schoolbooks exist alongside others made out of medical tape and unfolded pieces of gauze. They are all canvasses made up of pure warp and weft: a territory that is open to any possibility. This insistence on the zero point could be interpreted as an evocation of the impersonal that “Ser nadie” (To Be Nobody) attests to: a set of jewellery for donning the guise of indeterminacy. If in “Forget Me Not”—a set of mourning jewellery—Estapé already touched on the need to reestablish rituals of departure, this time round, the jewels act as tools with which we can invoke ourselves in the flight from our personal condition, entering into a form of powerful anonymity. Donning the guise of the simple being, the child, the fool, of a blank somebody, of a blank anybody. Against the injunction to establish oneself by means of a personality that shines through in thought and deed in a coherent and recognisable manner, we are now grasped by the opportunity to become nobody—a blank page lying in wait—as the only guarantee for a subjectivity that is not captured butrather vulnerable and open to unpredictable becomings. Hence the delicateness of the material: Estapé uses talc, the softest and most fragile mineral on the Mohs scale, since the very transition toward the impersonal does not guarantee any endpoint, only the spirited and naive salvaging of our childhood and genuine simpleness.
Martí Peran
Trimouns quarry, France / Talc fragments in Mineralia. Girona, Spain.
Forged bronze anklet. Mbole, DR Congo.
Installation ‘Ser nadie’. Solo exhibiton ‘Children and Fools’ at Chiquita Room. Barcelona, 2023. / Detail of the installation.
Detail of the parure composed by two bracelet towers and a necklace both in talc.
Detail of the necklace made of talc, leather and gold.
Talc box and poems ‘Plums, sparrows, sweet bread’ by Mariano Zaro.
Photograph ‘Blandness’ and diptych ‘Children and fools’.