Fermín Jiménez Landa

On affection

Barcelona
May 6 - Jun 2, 2017

Text
Installation
Selected Works

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NoguerasBlanchard is pleased to announce the fourth presentation of On Affection, a group exhibition extended in time in the gallery's space in L´Hospitalet focusing on performative practices that emphasize bodily experience and its ability to affect and be affected. Over the period of one season, participating artists are: Mercedes Azpilicueta, Fermin Jimenez Landa, Benoît Maire, Jacopo Miliani, Bruce Nauman, Christodoulos Panayiotou and Cally Spooner.

What we call performance these days is not the same as it was in its beginning. The practice has gone through many changes across the years while the supremacy of the object has been questioned. What hasn´t changed through the past years is the affective potential of performative practices upon audiences. Affection is the process whereby affect - in the Deleuzian sense - is transmitted between bodies and there is no secure distinction between the ‘individual’ and the ‘environment’. In short, Affect cannot be fully realised in language but only through the body grammar.

For this collective project Fermín Jiménez Landa presents Chandler's Wobble (2017), alluding to a small desynchronization that makes us reflect on our relation to the socio-economic context in which we live, the circulation of people and capital. At the same time, it encourages us to consider questions related to the lack of coordination between body, earth and world, through the daily turn of the planet, which ultimately determines our notion of time.

During the course of one day, the 3rd of May, three potters – one born in Asia, one in America and one in Europe, all residents of Barcelona – have worked with pottery wheels making clay pots on site. Their work shifts were scheduled according to the respective working hours of their native countries. This allowed for a performatic layer to be put into action that depended on the rotation of the earth, the succession of day and night, the place of birth of the worker and the politics and history of these geographical points. The choice of three places responds to the western partition of the working day into three sections - 8 hours of work, 8 of free time and rest. The workers have made the same object in the same room. Their schedules overlapped. At the end, the terra-cotta pots were left drying on the floor, like a constellation of forms created by the movement of a rotating body, unglazed, and very fragile.

The term Chandler’s wobble that gives title to the piece consists of a small oscillation of the axis of rotation of the Earth that adds 0.7 seconds the its radius in a period of 433 days to the precession of the equinoxes. The causes that produce it are unknown. The maximum range recorded by this oscillation occurred in 1910. In 2006 it disappeared for six weeks due to unknown reasons.

Fermín Jiménez Landa was born in Pamplona (ES) in 1979 and lives and works in Valencia.