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Outside the Affairs of the World (2013)
Artist: Isa Carrillo
Conceiving the cosmos at both micro and macro scales is a way of perceiving humanity and the universe as totalities unto themselves. From this worldview, Isa Carrillo proposes repetition as the means by which the correspondence between all things inhabiting the universe becomes evident. Hers is a non-linear conception of history—elliptical in character—in which each cycle entails a re-signification of points of convergence. Through this process, every microcosm connects with all others, generating a bond of universal empathy that the artist interprets through coincidences and chance encounters.
For Open Studio, Carrillo foregrounds her interest in palmistry as an opportunity to approach the connections between the part and the whole. Palm reading reveals the traces of paths, experiences, and personal dispositions that maintain an inherent relationship with a much larger cartographic structure: the macrocosm. The exchange of a palm reading for a personal story provides the artist with micro-histories that are later used to create relationships on another scale. During the five weeks in which the palmistry sessions took place, visitors assumed the role of storytellers while the artist became a listener. From this emerges the following question: what, exactly, is exchanged in the Palmistry Parlor?
In the words of Walter Benjamin, “the storyteller takes what he tells from experience—his own or that reported by others—and in turn makes it the experience of those who are listening to his tale.” (1) In this sense, every story told transfers an experience that is then assumed by the artist. Carrillo thus makes her own an experience that was previously foreign to her, insofar as the act of listening allows her to visit, through narration, what she has not lived firsthand.
Later, when Carrillo re-presents these stories on her own terms and through the connections developed during her residency in Open Studio, she assumes the role of storyteller herself. As a form of translation, the artist gives corporeality to her experience by configuring similarities and coincidences between the part and the whole: traduttore, traditore—translator, traitor. The task, then, is to emancipate experiences through narration, while taking into account the permutations that accompany every act of transmission, for both the story and the storyteller: “the storyteller’s trace clings to the story the way the potter’s handprint clings to the clay vessel.” (2)
Outside the Affairs of the World presents itself as a series of connections that seem accidental and fortuitous. Yet a reconstruction of experiences based on records is nothing other than a documented fiction, one that acquires truthfulness when narrated by the artist. In this sense, Carrillo is narrat(ing)ing herself in relation to the scales of her own worldview.
Open Studio
Open Studio is a program of exhibition, reflection, and production that allows participants to explore themes relevant to their practice and body of work. Its premise lies in the intersection of these different processes, bringing audiences closer to the artistic and curatorial practices developed within the museum.
Open Studio is not a closed and completed exhibition in the traditional sense. At the core of the project is a workspace dedicated to production, accompanied by an exhibition area that begins with only a small number of works and gradually incorporates others generated on site. The project also includes an appendix: a selection of works by other artists and a bibliography that provides thematic references while contributing to the theoretical and historical reflection surrounding the processes and work in progress.
(1) Walter Benjamin, The Storyteller, Taurus, Madrid, 1991, Part V.
(2) Ibid., Part IX.