Andrea Angulo Martínez

About the work

As this was my first experience in an artist residency, I asked myself many questions about this specific creative context. On the one hand, you are adapting your circumstances to a new space. On the other, you are guessing your position in it, as well as what your action within it will be. It is a way of organizing yourself in order to give of yourself. However, perhaps the real moment of giving has not yet occurred, and will come in another situation, in another residency? It is curious to think about this with a map in front of you. Space and time merge into one and the same.

Just as we cannot drink water while we talk, it is also unrealistic to think that a month-long residency in an unknown place can be a space for production, because if it were, the concept of residency would not make sense (the temporary move, the assimilation and exploration of the town, the attentive gaze). It has been a month of drinking water at all times. It is true that some days, my mouth felt tense from drinking liters and liters.

At those moments, I would put the bottles away and let her rest. After half an hour, or two she would articulate a word she had never articulated before. She would invent a word. Then I would continuedrinking water. I realize that my sculptural practice seeks to make the objects I work with seem strange. These objects are usually mass-produced, nothing “special,” very easy to obtain: packaged food/drink, clothing, toys, furniture… which I relate to others, which I install in space, which I arrange in different ways. This change of residence and circumstances has made me miss a lot. I have missed what I didn’t have—Bilbao, my people there—and I have missed what I did have—a lamp, bottled water, a mountain, a river, a sky, myself. Do you forget the name you have if the people who usually pronounce it don’t pronounce it?

I think so. And in Blanca, I have been an unbaptized person, I have known nothing and said nothing, I have tried not to name the things I have been working with in any way. And so, just as the meaning of a word, something fluid and imprecise, is condensed into the signs ‘letters’ that make up its spelling, I try to re-domesticate the objects I use on a daily basis, which my context uses on a daily basis. Their practical use has never meant an understanding of what they are to me, but by observing and manipulating them playfully, I at least understand the fact that these objects contain numerous versions of themselves.

In collaboration with Acción Cultural Española.