We live amongst forces. There is atmospheric pressure and gravity. Bodies that sustain themselves in between them and amidst the wind. Swaddled, we can breathe. The relationship is not only from constant contact, but rather from life and musical instrument: we receive, we contain and we let go. Sounds that vibrate in continual movement. Inhale, exhale, circulate. Echo.
The wind is a medium that our bodies inhabit. We move about in a continual dialogue with it. Sometimes, we go through it; other times, it goes through us. The ebb and flow is the constant. Not two poles, but a current that refreshes itself once and again. Breaths, fragments.
The wind and its movement do not cease, the ways in which it moves produce figurative images, scientific, beautiful, indeterminate, affective and also painful. Not only the shapes and mythologies, but also the perceptions and interactions, improvisations and routes where sediment is deposited upon surfaces. We see them with eyes, skin and ears.
Use the body to investigate the ways of the wind. Artist Fernanda Barreto has dedicated many years to its discovery. She knows its scales, as they are compasses for the experience of living. She charts and narrates it while gently caring for its enigma. She knows its magnitudes, its generosity in life and its counterpoint of destruction. Inescapable, it surrounds [life], inhabits it, oxidises it. Nevertheless, there is no such thing as too much contact in order to strike up conversation, the artist gets ready, attentive, to unite with the wind.
Place the body in the wind like a candle on a ship and a ship in the sea.
Fernanda summons the gale winds to activate the nebulous imagination, a desirous, speculative and epistemological production that leads to the potency of the image. In order for the image to become action, she has made different objects that catalyze the relationship between the bodies and the forces of the wind.
Although the first collaboration is with the wind itself, the pieces in this exhibition have been talked through and worked with by many hands. The ceramics—that concentrate the sound of the air that enters—were made alongside Pablo Muñoz. The harp—that registers distinct winds and converts the forces into music—was co-designed by the artist and strings craftsman Daniel López. The videos were filmed and choreographed by the hand and eye of Dan Sánchez Díaz V. The suit was made alongside Horacio Cadzco. All of it together, from a practice of care and agreements to actions, gave way to the arrival of object-action.
The images, pieces and sounds in this exhibition not only form part of an assembly of people willing to become aware of and let the wind pass through, but also are the result of procedures and performances that Fernanda has put into action, whether it be in the workshop, on city rooftops, or on the shore of different seas.
More so than site-specific pieces, her objects-action produce spaces—open to be inhabited—consequence of the indeterminate movements of the wind altering the artist. The landscape is not what is in the distance but rather what emerges when bodies, winds, objects, touch and languages mix.
Welcome.
Sandra Sánchez, Curatorial Companion
