Adrián Villar Rojas in conversation with Dr Kostas Prapoglou

La fin de l’imagination, Adrián Villar Rojas’ major solo show at Marian Goodman gallery in Paris, transcends ideas around the meaning and the interpretation of time filtered through the prism of human hypostasis and its interrelated historical events. Having been affected by the current pandemic and our heterogeneous response to it, the artist envisions and constructs a new panhuman undeciphered language, echoing the transformation of our race and the ways we perceive reality. The shift in the understanding of our world, its educational, social and political systems as well as its technological advancements in tandem with our inherent need to recalibrate and renavigate it, conjure a new visual language metabolising the polyvocality of our existence. Symbols, coded messages and equation-esque ideograms populate the gallery space, fabricating a metaphysical environment of an emerging post-human syntax. The construction of a new condition where humans continue or cease to exist turns our gaze towards the paramount anxiety of our active presence on this planet.

Adrián Villar Rojas was born in Argentina in 1980. He has presented numerous solo exhibitions in galleries and museums around the world, such as Tank Shanghai, China (2019); The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, Los Angeles, USA (2017); Roof Garden Commission, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA (2017); Marian Goodman Gallery, London, UK (2017); Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Torino, Italy (2015); Marian Goodman Gallery, New York (2015); Serpentine Gallery, London (2013); The 54th International Art Venice Biennale, Italy (2011); SAM ART Projects, Musée du Louvre, Paris, France (2011), and Centro Cultural Borges, Buenos Aires, Argentina (2007). His work has been included in a large number of international group exhibitions at museums, art foundations and biennials worldwide, such as 12th Gwangju Biennale, South Korea (2018); The Palestinian Museum, Birzeit, Palestine (2017); The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2017); Kunsthalle Basel, Basel, Switzerland (2017); Museo de Arte de Zapopan, Mexico (2017); The 6th Marrakech Biennale, Marrakech, Morocco (2016); The 14th and 12th Istanbul Biennial, Istanbul, Turkey (2015 and 2012); The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2015); 12th Havana Biennial, Havana, Cuba (2015); 12th Sharjah Biennial, United Arab Emirates (2015); Centre Pompidou, Paris (2015); Foundation Louis Vuitton (LVMH), Paris (2014); 5th Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, Moscow, Russia (2013); MoMA PS1, New York (2013); dOCUMENTA(13), Kassel, Germany and Kabul, Afghanistan (2012); Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, Brazil (2009), and Castagnino Fine Arts Museum, Rosario, Argentina (2008).

He has also been the recipient of numerous awards such as the Sharjah Biennial Prize, Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates (2015); Zurich Art Prize, Museum Haus Konstruktiv, Zurich, Switzerland (2013), and The 9th Benesse Prize, Benesse Holdings Inc. Naoshima, Japan (2011).

Kostas Prapoglou: Your artistic practice concentrates –amongst others– on the qualities of space and time and how these two interact with our present self. How long have you been interested in this conceptual discourse and what was the embarkation point of your inspiration?

Adrián Villar Rojas: There are two ‘works’ I’d like to use to answer, or perhaps address, this question because it has always been present in my practice. The first is that in 2016 I began a project that would take over two thousand years to be somehow experienced or perceived. I acquired a cenote, forty-five hectares of purified deionised water in Yucatan, Mexico. The cenote is a geological event created by a meteorite that fell in this peninsula about sixty-six million years ago, meaning that its existence results from the same force that exterminated the dinosaurs and gave way to the development of mammals and eventually homo sapiens. It is a project that works with the same slowness and with the same water as that incommensurable soup that first produced microscopic life. What I’m trying to instigate is a series of operations that go beyond the timescale of human perception –phenomena that are closer to the formation of a mountain and how they can be experienced, which, of course, is not possible. It’s about the impossibility of experiencing something that goes beyond our temporality and expectations, which are all formed around our anthropic desires and limitations.

The other example is Motherland (2015), a project I did with the Guggenheim Museum in New York, which is only known as a covert ritual. Motherland is a minimum material substrate that forms the basis of a script –a minimum set of actions– only known by the staff of the museum and by no one else, so in many ways it’s an invisible project or one that will generate visibility after the accumulation of years of being re-enacted. This ritual will be carried out once annually on the same day and hour, until the Guggenheim ceases to exist. The hypothesis was that we can’t imagine the Guggenheim disappearing, any more than we can imagine the White House or the United States vanishing. Motherland is a literal project about the end of the world, or about one world that we know and the beginning of a new one. Of course, this year exactly that happened; the ritual was impossible because of COVID-19, and thus the hypothesis was in some way corroborated.

KP: Your work involves site-specific installations as well as smaller individual sculptures. To what extent does topography define your creative imagination and the scale of your works?

AVR: Perhaps then, more than site-specific projects, I’m devoted to site-specific thought, and this involves a deep and sustained dialogical exchange with a variety of agents; human and non-human, organic and inorganic, human made or machine made. Weather is a moulding force, earth and its geological histories are moulding forces. The growing, sprouting, or decomposing of living matter and of microorganisms and their interaction with us defines a never-ending moulding process. My making of things is aware of and porous to these pollinating forces working far beyond me and my team –and all other human agents– and my projects are closer to a never-ending doing –or mutation– than to a done or finished passive artwork situation.

I’ve been developing a fluid and intense dialogue with the symbolic and material qualities of the space that hosts my work. I’ve increasingly found myself quite uncomfortable with vocabulary that draws a clear line between content and container –‘artwork’ and ‘art space’. Therefore, I decided to radicalise the deconstruction of this ontological difference; I am interested in every square centimetre of a space –things as seemingly meaningless as the electrical outlets, cables, overlooked areas or unpainted walls– because for me everything generates meaning. When I take care of these variables, I call it ‘housekeeping’.

KP: Your show at Serpentine Sackler gallery in London (2013) and your representation of Argentina at the 54^th edition of Venice Biennale (2011) are some indicative locations where site-specificity played a pivotal role in your visual repertoire despite the fact that they were already established venues. What is the process of spatial transformation in order to achieve your desired environment?

AVR: I mentioned this term I like to use, that appeared in my vocabulary thanks to my collaboration with Helen Molesworth, ‘housekeeping’. Housekeeping means someone is taking care of a specific place and its status; someone is sweeping the floor, painting the walls, checking the number of electricity outlets. Housekeeping is a type of labour that enables other types of labour (and life) to happen, and when it’s well done, nobody sees it. And this is a quality I’m interested in, committed to and that I want to embody. I want to cooperate with my hosts and allow them to use me as a platform for transformation. “The container generates meaning”, and ultimately, the ‘container’ is always interdependent with the operations and practices of individuals, so in order to achieve whatever you wish to do, you have to negotiate with people. The architecture is just one component. This is the biopolitical agency of housekeeping, and it’s part of what I call the sustained ‘host/parasite’ relationship that I develop with the agents I engage with.

Moving from the ‘tangible’ housekeeping aspects to ‘onto-political’ levels: I want my work to become an avatar for my own doubts –and those of others– about the highly Western, colonial project of the ‘museum’ and its apparent function to save, gather and present culture. We can neither go on looking at artistic practice as a commodity equally valid in any place and time, nor as a universal subjectivity that can be applied to specially customised platforms installed all over the world, such as galleries, institutions or foundations for our comfort and self-assertion. My response to this deadlock has been a full commitment to social, political, geographical, idiosyncratic, even geological systems, assuming as much risk as I can to produce, not a commodity, but a process that remains topographically and chronologically specific as an irreproducible experience.

KP: You have been using a vast range of materials for your installations. How do you choose them each time and is topography one of the main criteria during the decision-making process?

AVR: Since my first year in art school in Rosario in 1998, I had the fantasy –or the conviction– that what we were taught to produce, so-called ‘contemporary art’, shouldn’t last forever. This was a very early and intuitive concern. With time, I understood that the only sculpture that interested me was our own species, which is certainly both entropic and degradable. The eventual disappearance of my ‘sculptural’ products makes the interface evident; behind them is the human hand, the action of the human being on Earth. This is foundational in my practice.

Further exploring these concepts over the years, I have to reflect that my work doesn’t have a linear construction or ‘sculptural’ connotations of traditional research/material paradigms and processes. There’s no way to repeat what I do –almost ninety percent of it is unrecoverable. This is a consequence of the policies I’ve designed for my practice; limiting its transportability, tradability, reproducibility and the possibility of its preservation. These policies are borderline acts of conflict within the nervous and circulatory systems of art today. The fragments or ‘by-products’ of my work won’t preserve enough information within one hundred years to be the testimony of that work’s experience. Conceptually, I’m working on and within this post-final framework.

KP: Your current solo exhibition at Marian Goodman Gallery in Paris La fin de l’ imagination unfolds a world where humanity is observed and evaluated from an alien perspective. Do you think our planet could become a viable case study for an alien researcher? What could they learn from us?

AVR: The world unfolded in Paris is one in which all my work, thinking and practice exists. The metaphorical conceit of the alien gaze –one with total ‘ignorance’ and ‘lack of prejudice’, unable to construct a differentiation of value between Michelangelo’s David and a sprouting potato, is one I formulated in 2010. I asked what if, in the final moments of humanity, the last of the species decided they wanted to make an artwork? It would be the last human artwork, together with all the logical implications unfolded by this fact. The end of art, end of the world and end of language are then one and the same thing: the same end.
In my fabulations, reaching the shores of art created a vacuum, a silence that gave space for me to explore nonhuman perspectives. This is when I placed the metaphor of an alien into this terminal landscape. What I call the ‘alien gaze’ expresses this impossible paradox; a subjectivity without culture.

La fin de l’imagination by Adrián Villar Rojas at Marian Goodman Paris runs through October 31, 2020.