Your background in Sociology marks your work as an artist as one directed toward intellectual inquiry. How do you make the differentiation between your research as an intellectual and as an artist?
For me, being an intellectual is related to individuals who devote their lives to Knowledge, with a capital K, and try to move the world into a better place through their ideas and methods, and in my case: also practice.
I understand that my background as a sociologist, specialised in knowledge, communication and culture can be felt in my artwork. The relation between human behavior, how it forms Society and its relationship to art is as fascinating to me as it is abstract in its meaning. This is central in my writings and my visual work. I realize I always ask “why” and “how” things occur. I tend to touch the same issues that bring us to question the Self and how individuals create culture and exist in the world.
Visual artist are a thinkers, researchers in their field. As an artist I learn and develop skills and techniques to best express my ideas that come from my, yes, developed background in knowledge. But I do art because I want more. Living is sensations, routine, emotions, change, perceptions, experiences, feelings, tangible senses, frustrations, challenges, etc. These experiences shape my art. Art has the extraordinary power where magic can happen, hope is felt in the air, perception reaches the indescribable, the moment is illuminated, and through surprise people are inspired. What both practices have in common that it is myself doing them. But the method and the form of representation are essentially different. One works from the beginning to pursue a specific truth, and the other expresses possibilities.
Your current project called "Loneliness: a new beginning" is a very personal effort that at times is raw in its emotional frankness, almost like a sociology of the self. Is this indicative of how you work as an artist?
“Loneliness, a new beginning” is a socially engaged artwork based on my personal experience of loneliness and the participation of people sharing their experiences with me through conversation.
I cannot understand art without frankness and sincerity. Art makes that transparency symbolic and metaphoric, an agent of inspiration and transformation for the viewer, as it does for the creator. In this case, the project was born from my real suffering and sincere interior perception of loneliness in my life in Los Angeles in 2011. I am a researcher of myself, I can surpass the limits of pain through the process. I perform. And my interior world was expressed through the video on which this project is based. It is the world of my intense need to understand things and live them in all of their expressions. The fact that the project is personal and that the artwork, explores the depths of personal experience implies an extreme level of sacrifice, both emotional and physical.
I believe this project has common references in my other work, because it is concentrated on the Self and its subject-matter is existentially sociological. For example, “Atacama, (2008)” is a video installation that reflects the natural, slow and painful reconstruction of a dune after a devastated earthquake in the driest in the world. Reality and existentialist conflictive dialogue when a crisis challenges human beings or nature by natural disasters and requires adaptation to change, and are forced to transform themselves in the process. Also, this project explores how my personal living performance becomes another mere and common experience, and meets other people’s loneliness. In the same way, everyone perceives loneliness in its different modes, intensities, times, places, and nobody shares it.
There are several fragments in the "loneliness" video that demonstrate your current city, Los Angeles, as a solitary landscape. Of course, LA has been depicted as a site of isolation and segregation for some time now . What role does the city, its public spaces, and its history play in this project?
As you well state, this project is site-specific because Los Angeles is the city where I currently live and the people I have conversations with are located in the metropolis. But I would like to say that even though I am a strong believer that the environment helps to create someone’s perception of reality, I also think that people experience loneliness in their lives no matter the place. Loneliness is a non-place feeling, it lives within you in a unique way. Loneliness can have at the same time an identity with an emotion and an association with a particular emplacement.
I have a high capacity or physical and psychological suffering. I love Los Angeles. The city and its diverse people have treated me very well, but my artwork is about loneliness. When I just arrived in 2010, I remember I had difficulty recognizing the city, I could not identify it with any other I visited or lived in before. I was struggling to adapt to the move from Madrid to Los Angeles, and to beginning a new stage of studies in my life. Los Angeles is a city inside a multiplicity of cities, a multicultural world, one where everyone tries to survive and execute their dreams. It seems a very unsettled place in constant, unplanned and unpredictable change.
Soon, I made the city of Los Angeles something to belong to. The free possibility of seeing any point of the city when I drive, and the personal conversation with Downtown’s silhouette at the end of the day in my house, enabled me to not be by myself. The city’s urbanistic esplanades made me think of a long distance race, as if you were able to project and observe your own route in a walking race, that race called life. In my video, there is a search to escape the feeling of loneliness. Driving becomes a traveling and reflective action for me. This city reinvents itself incessantly, and dangerously, without resentment. The pleasure of contemplating the views from Downtown becomes a needed interior balance and the image penetrates into my center, that city center I may need to adopt, as I am European, a still and secure emplacement for me.
Los Angeles is invented for driving from your house to work by yourself in your car. Its people and weather are incredibly warm and welcoming, but everyone struggles to survive economically and searches desperately for company. This city can produce harmful and destructive experiences for people. It is true, this city segregates and isolates people. Its infrastructure is planned for segregating people and families and, therefore, isolates persons after a while. Here, it is difficult to socialize. The working and social systems are incompatible, so one’s workmates become your friends, in one’s anxious need to share experiences with someone. But, you can be living in a paradise and may not see it, too. Los Angeles can help to instill in someone any feeling, and in this case, the experience of loneliness. But this germ may have been living in someone’s existence for a while, or it might have been produced by the city.