si hay territorios
que solo dependen de
ser cantados
an exhibition by María García Ruiz11.JAN.2025 — 08.FEB.2025
If there are territories which are bound by song, or, more precisely, territories which insist
on being sung, if there are territories which are bound by the power of a simulacrum of presence,
territories which become bodies and bodies which expand to become living spaces,
if there are living spaces that become songs or songs which create a space, if there are forces of sound and forces of smell, there are undoubtedly many other ways of being, many other ways of inhabiting a territory, all of which give rise to many different worlds.
— Vinciane Despret, Living as a bird, 2022
In the exhibition Si hay territorios que solo dependen de ser cantados (If there are territories which are only bound by song), María García Ruiz bends and slips stealthily over the threshold of the outlawed traces of this palpitating restlessness of a conditional tense in which the subordinate is left open, to imagine other ways of living and of organising inhabiting. If reflections on territories are usually linked to private property, defence and aggression, the attention here turns to those ways of giving rise to many different worlds. An implicit reference to Bruce Chatwin's Songlines (1987), those immaterial mappings of the territory of communities on the move, which poetically explores the concept of ‘songlines’: traditional routes that Aboriginal people follow across the landscape, connecting various geographical points with ancestral songs, myths and stories. These ‘songlines’ are not only physical distances, they are also oral narratives, whistles, ways of inhabiting ancient histories. Of maintaining a living connection with the forms of life that have been and that their voices prolong not only as a form of memory but also of orientation that is inseparable from the body and from physical space. A mode of deep understanding that is given in these traces when they are traversed and that emerges in the simulacra of presence, in territories that become bodies and extend to places of life.
María García Ruiz does not come to occupy a place that has been made, she produces her own space in order to think about the material dimension of what makes a place. To analyse how a memory of ways of inhabiting that are only provisionally fixed to the ground affects bodies and territory. At times, a critical fabulation or an experimental fiction that shifts between the misplacement of words and the weight of images to produce an experience akin to the opacity of forms of life that create place from their own instability that, like song, proliferate.
Her work deals in different ways with the formalisations, public imagination and contradictions attached to a certain conception of space based on displacement, which originated in the second half of the 20th century in Europe and which continues to affect our present in various ways. To this end, it relates two fields that operate outside the hegemonic space of governance: on the one hand, utopia, that is, the radical and experimental architectures of the 1960s and their developments around the idea of mobility; and on the other the space of what is marginal where various singular projects are applied to sedentarise nomadic communities, in particular gypsy communities, exploring the close relationship that these projects have with the logic of the concentration camp. From this collision of images, concepts and situations, and through these topologies and typologies of bodies in movement, she articulates the difficulties and controversies that arise in architecture when trying to give form to a certain spatial quality that has to do with the flows of life. In the end, what is at stake here, what is questioned by alluding to these spatial paradoxes, is the very act of giving (or taking) shape to a certain form of life.
In The Cultural Class: Art, Creativity, Urbanism, Martha Rosler argues that when the early Abstract Expressionists explored the terrain of the canvas, few acknowledged in these practices a concern for space. J. Pollock, for example, created a kind of disorientation by placing his canvases unstretched on the floor. Devoid of the epistemic security or stability of a field, they abandoned the motifs of continuity and integrity, to become interested in flows, fragmentation, blurred and irregular realities. “The connection between Renaissance perspective and the enclosures of late medieval Europe, together with the new idea of terrain as a real-world space to be negotiated, supplying crossing points for commerce, was only belatedly apparent”. The transformation of urban forms and the ways in which territory is inhabited affects forms of experience and subjectivity. As Henri Lefebvre states in The Urban Revolution (1970) “society has been completely urbanized” profoundly altering the concept of ‘everyday life’ and making it the centre of political organisation. The question therefore is not whether there are non-urban zones but what implications the hegemony of the urban paradigm has when it determines relations and their inner life. For Lefebvre the street is the site of a living disorder, a place, to play and to learn; with its bustle and its vividness, but yet a central task of modernity has been the pacification of cities.
Space has displaced time as an operative dimension in late capitalism. Under this economic regime even time has become spatialised, differentiated and divided into ever larger units, a phenomenon that has intensified in recent years. Hence, movements such as the Situationist International were concerned with the growing role of the visual - and its relation to spatiality - in modern capitalism, criticising visions such as that of Le Corbusier and other utopian modernists for “designing a carceral city in which the poor are locked up and thrust into a strangely narrow utopia of light and space, but removed from a free social life in the streets”, destroying the last remnants of jouissance.
Increasingly dematerialising processes of life where the intensive, spectral and incorporeal of our atmospheric, energetic and volatile age, ranging from the anonymous movement of capital to the interfaces that govern our relationships, might lead us to think that concerns about spatial distribution are no longer relevant. The truth is that it is becoming increasingly difficult to understand the ways in which space operates as a medium.
If we consider that defining a field requires tracing a cutout from the sinuous edges of a certain way of doing, what is off field is precisely that which cannot be situated, but which, at the same time, defines the field in a negative way.
In The Animal Side (2007), Jean-Christophe Bailly shares a desire for an image, an image that could form one of those moments in which the relations - between consciousness and the field, between the speed of a shifting point and the surface - are configured as a point. We could understand that point as the complex space generated by the off field that gives rise to a very singular experience in which a slight gap between familiar features and a slight but profoundly unfamiliar snarl bump into each other. An encounter with a certain skittish movement of silent intervals, as when crossing a field at night. That accumulation of moments in which we think we’ve seen something that after a moment, a tiny hesitation, disappears. That fleeting experience that carries the extension of an instant, a duration that allows its strangeness to be declared anew, as if that which is usually excluded from the gaze would sparkle, the nameless space in which another form of life makes its way.
A space that opens up, that is not linear, nor is it the cut-out of a painting, it is a thickness of trajectories. A bit like the way in which space is formed and deformed in an undefined line when one tries to look at something that appears and is lost. We could also think of all those stories that are not in the painting and that ask for a distance. A necessary dispersion of images to enter into contact with games, dispositions, latencies and fascination to be able to perceive that which has fallen out of place, even when it has no scene, which therefore asks for space.
It is not a montage where one image disappears and a new one takes its place, where one image comes to take the place of another. On the contrary, it would seem that the concern that sounds out here is how to work without one image replacing another, but rather entering into a relationship with it. In fact, I would say that in María García's thought we cannot speak of a montage of images alone but of diverse materials that form complex layers, an architecture that shows its fragmentation and its folds, that forms new layers in order to emerge.
To include space in the montage and, at the same time, to mount in space. A space that is non-linear, that is not the cut-out of a painting, but a space that is not a thing in itself, it is a set of relations, of distances, of comings and goings, between what is seen and what forms perceptive apparatuses and all those histories that are not in the painting. Space is produced dynamically, yet a singular operation is necessary to liberate a space that puts us in contact with those intervals that are not subject to the nomos of modern architecture. To make a space for those fugitive forms of play, dispositions, looks and fascination to appear. A gesture that decomposes and articulates without chaining is necessary in order to produce a certain arrangement of distances.
The montage is also a place for exploring the differences of bodies in relation to themselves. The power of the whole no longer resides in a fusional or expressive body, but in the contours that merge with one another. “To show this montage is to show that an object, an image, a word are constantly in motion, in tension between a past and a future, between an invention and the new invention that it requires of the man or woman who holds it in his or her hand, of the man or woman who looks at its image. [...] art, the active image is not the visible form that reproduces an object. The image is always between two forms. It is the work that is created in an interval ”.
A montage operation that has to do not only with the moderate rhythm of the cuts, but also with a, perhaps, more complex ability to assemble without chaining. More time is required to pay attention to how someone sits down, how they gather their legs just before getting up, how they move their lips to foretell fate or how they wave their earrings in a collective dance. You need space, you need to move the materials, to give them another form so that movement can appear and a potential story may unfold. Perhaps this is why Gilles Deleuze, following Bergson, argued that montage is “the determination of the Whole”, precisely because for Bergson the whole is not a closed system, but an open whole, “the dimension of a time-being that changes and thus lasts and produces the new”. In the process of montage something changes, something happens, something becomes. And, this whole that changes, becomes sensitive indirectly in the relationship that it forms, and this is also where the potential of the plastic is at stake. For this reason, montage is an operation that allows us to establish a relationship with these forms of transitory and fleeting spatiality, as occurs with the body or sound, in order to put the conception of geometric space to dance, as something that is given to us.
Montage, which derives from the French verb monter, and translates as ''to assemble”, holds in French a double meaning: to climb or perch on something, but it also means to set something in motion, to put one's body towards a direction. “Space needs the body that moves through it; architecture implies certain modes of use and practices that happen within space. Through the set of relations that link our bodies to the technological machinery, space adopts its mode of realisation, that is to say, it acquires its form and its way of existence”.
Therefore, in order to make another provisional stitching of the limits and introduce a generative movement, it is also necessary to let oneself camp, to inhabit spatial productions that are always transitory and unstable. María García, says this of her own research, which ‘surrounds’ the vicissitudes of the Romani communities in their historical existence, in the ways in which they have configured places in the violent encounter that seeks to shape the space of Western society by aiming to settle communities that have always been linked to a constant movement. It plays with the French savoir habiter and savoir vivre, the art of living, of enjoying life. Thus, savoir vivre appears to be captured by the architectural machine, which at the time was part of a restructuring of the devices of power over life.
María García's considerations, as well as her plastic display, are not general abstractions, they are always very close to singularity. On different occasions she gives her own emphasis to Ethel Brooks' reflections on the double quality of camp as a political gesture between camp, encampment and concentration camp. Communities that through camps have created their own ways of occupying space, creating spaces of permanence with a structured contingency and, at the same time, assured their mode of being in movement. Communities that will be held against their will to be, paradoxically, expelled to another camp.
María García argues that “we could argue that, if the space of the modern city is generated by architecture and the rhythm of machines, in a camp it is generated by bodies, with their rhythmic dispositions in constant movement: a symphony of gestures that unfolds and folds back to unfold again in another place, being the same and different each time”. Perhaps this is also why, in María's work, the montage is also a structured contingency that follows the off field, the off-screen, that which is agile and which sediments in its movement, “stirs it up”, paying attention to where the wind blows and never stops vibrating. From this very precise attention that she forms by sustaining situations of not knowing, situations not organised by a model, María García employs “a series of documents, archives, bodies and voices. They historicize in another way, it is not a discursive or narrative historicization. References that escape their logic”.
María García Ruiz analyses “how architecture moves”, tracing a genealogy of the ways in which the capacity to give form, the modelling of individuals and the progressive processes of disarticulation of communities are formed. Her reflection addresses the forms of life that breathe in those dense interiors that are not ordered by the imperatives of normativity, through images and spatial staging. By making a sort of scratch to the memories and practices that sediment certain links, moving the materials to crack the landscape that has configured the modern structuring of bodies.
Genealogical practice, as opposed to historiographical practice, is concerned with narratives, but above all with gestures, with minor movements, a particular way of being sensitive to things. From there it questions the conditions for opening up the fibres of time. A practice that at times operates as a percussion and sometimes from other conditions of reception that allow her to be sensitive to ghosts and their horrors. If the production of landscape has generated its forms of narrative, gaze and device, it has not ceased to produce, at the same time, its off-screen: that which remains outside the enclosure where that that is special is supposed to be, that which must be attended to and which forms a particular poetics of the territory. Every landscape “is the reflection of a social and political order”, but, as Gilles Clément reminds us “every order generates a residual space”. Images can alter this order in which a representation has been fixed, their restless and ever unfinished character makes them well placed to welcome the diversity that has been expelled or crushed by a dominant form.
A genealogy for the image is a practice that resists the narrative and the ways of fixing the distributions that have been given to us. It puts its materiality into operation in a different sense, it opens up a potential space of indeterminacy that is not filled by the gesture that articulates its deviation. Potential images are images that are pending resolution, that propose a way of seeing, a possibility, a position. This type of image needs to yield to prefiguration in order to surrender to a realm that is not known. For this, there is no exact way of doing, every other situation counts, but it is necessary to be careful not to establish premises and initial affirmations that fix too much a route of performance. Possibility is not something that has always been there waiting for its moment, that has already been contained in a reality that is yet to be discovered. Possibility has to be created in each case, in a dynamic play with habits, in contact with a singular reality that “operates through the energy of the friction of that which does not fit”, but which finds its rhythm and breath.
That which resists does not necessarily refer to a coefficient of adversity, it can present itself in the form of a virtue, that which can be trusted. It can also take the form of an excess that does not allow itself to be assimilated or modelled and that questions the very status of what is understood by creation. For Michel Foucault, for example, in a period of his research that goes from Discipline and Punish to the elaborations of the first volume of The History of Sexuality, resistance is neither reactive nor negative, it is a process of creation and permanent transformation. But in Foucault's case it is always linked to the functioning of power and close to the notion of life. If power is productive, resistance is inventive.
We could argue that it is in this direction that María García's research is moving, “so that the potential of expelling will be studied not merely in relation to not-expelling” to accompany the densification of these forms of experience, to understand something in relation to their movement, where movement does not mean distance covered. It is necessary to make historical moments reappear at junctures where other events would have been possible in order to touch on their potential history. For such history it is not enough to criticise the existing situation. It is necessary to make the possibilities of what has been violently erased and silenced sensitive so that - amidst artifice and exaggeration - its instability can be felt and different directions may be explored. “Potential history, then, is at one and the same time an effort to create new conditions both for the appearance of things and for our appearance as its narrators, as the ones who can—at any given moment—intervene in the order of things that constituent violence has created as their natural order”.
This sometimes implies skipping the scenic spaces, wondering what it would be like to perform in village squares today, creating partial infrastructures to accommodate the paradox of specific ways of life that slip away to create their own scene, which is always obscene, a way of being-in-movement. A life that cannot be separated from its form and at the same time resists taking on a single form. Perhaps not so much to “disarticulate the dream of the city technocrats of making it a completely intelligible, smooth, deconflictivised and friendly space. Urban space is a perforated space” but above all to shake off history and ask ourselves what relationship does the body establish with this form that it pretends? How to wrap the folds where life is gathered and where could it form a different possibility?
A tension that passes through an architecture that is closer to singing, whistling and slang, for that which does not go through an official language. Evasive zones that recognise the necessary spatial dimension of language, but which also recognise that language cannot incorporate it without shuddering. That it institutes by destituting, while at the same time introducing the other of the discourse. This exteriority that constitutes the very thickness of the figural is the sensitive extension, where thought, in effect, is formed.
We could say that in a certain way María follows the pulse of the question of what is the jargon that interpellates these spaces of the grammar of modern architecture, these ways of making space in informal architecture. An attempt to move with the images, to slide along some thresholds of the intimate relations of its materiality, of its variant geography. A minor extension, a particular dissident force from which the operability of the machine is contested from an opacity that expands or contracts according to the rhythmic movement of the bodies that constitute a space with it.
We can understand the exhibition itself as a way of singing territories and making a provisional camp to generate a density between use and deviation, a minimum capacity of indetermination that can be shared, a movement that is not limited by the obligation to carry out actions but by wandering through minimal spaces. It sketches its own choreography to open up a gap through which to let breathe that which has constrained its form. Like that little thread of cloud that comes from inside us and that only shows its density on cold days and allows the emergencies of our movements to appear momentarily.
Very diverse materials, unfinished poetics, which do not establish a clear beginning or a conclusion, but take things in the middle - in G. Deleuze's words - between the epistolary video-essay, the film essay, photographs, silkscreen prints, installations that form the remains of fragile architectures that weave together other spaces. In ‘Linz / Kosice / Kalocsa’ (2014), for example, she brings together a moving atlas with images of different spaces occupied or inhabited by gypsies in these places in Central Europe. A necessarily incomplete documentation of the traces of certain gypsy habitats in the landscape, understanding these traces as destabilising elements of the modern housing project. The images are interwoven with fragments of texts on utopian architecture that laid the foundations for certain key concepts of modern architecture.
In addition, each window contains a form of respiration: the vibration that exists between the outside (political) and the inside (poetic). In ‘Tierras raras’ (Rare Earths)(2019), the material element escapes from its own meaning. The name refers to a group of scarce metals that are present in most technological devices that populate our daily lives, from mobile phones to electric cars, which are intertwined with a bedtime story, a hand that reaches out and grabs you directly to look you in the eye in an anachronistic time and space. In ‘Allure’ (politics and poetics of bodies in movement) (2020), a work traversed by other research even creates ways of putting them together so that they resonate, so that they produce their own shadow, which is not absence but an outline where a camp is rendered sensitive. Already the very term chosen alludes to something that happens by attraction, an articulation that is made possible by what is not explicitly there, to think the hypertrophy of the technical imagination in relation to movement.
In ‘Muros de viento, sarcófagos cristalinos’ (Wind walls, crystalline sarcophagi)(2024), research takes the form of a performative conference and, later, of an artist's book that never ceases to move out of itself. Figures escape, references appear as if feet had been placed on them to make them move endlessly. The wandering lines constitute an intimate geography in which the images do not function then as “an identity closed in on itself but [from its] power of variation”. A different movement operates in ‘Virgencica, Virgencica!’ (2016), from a critical analysis on the process of urban regeneration that involved the construction of the emergency residential complex called La Virgencica, it attends to the care of the bonds that make the existence of a community possible from an ephemeral installation, introducing a certain unavailability of that which has no scene. An inverse path to the one mentioned by Guy Debord in ‘The Society of the Spectacle’: if everything directly experienced has become a representation, to make representation something directly experienced. Or in ‘Arquitectura moviente (palacios destituyentes)’ [Moving architecture (destituent palaces)](2022-2023), in which a series of colour photographs, colour prints, where what Allan Sekula said about the work of Darcy Lange is entangled and percussive. Where party and politics are confused, because the party is the only possible political space of the community, where it is found and recognised, not as a dialectical pair but as an intensity that unfolds and institutes itself by destituting.
If there is an interest in these minimal spaces, it is certainly not a transparent power, but a porous power, rooted in an experience, which is also an experience of wounding, of tearing. Nor is it properly the power of impotence, but rather a power that is not a productive power, but neither is it a power of not doing. It is rather the power of “an awning open on all four sides (…)", as Tamara Kamenszain says in El gueto de mi lengua [My Language's Ghetto](2022), the drama of being inside and outside, under the shelter of a little cloth that barely swells/looks like an unveiled sheet on four poles. In order not to stop wondering how life multiplies and becomes more and more complex, María García is interested in those ways of doing, savoir vivre that, no matter how hard they try to annihilate, form discrete collaborations on their surfaces, being the same and different each time, to follow a territory’s song that is a place to lie down on, pushing the feet to endure further, to stick out their tongue from their system, a poetic twist that seeks to get out, a little village that descends and loses itself to get out of the shelter transformed into ballast.
Text by Andrea Soto Calderón