Jennifer Allora & Guillermo Calzadilla. Leer el territorio / Jennifer Allora & Guillermo Calzadilla. Reading the territory

Despite the "materialist" definitions (Andre) with which some minimalist artists presented their work, the aspiration of their works to remain outside what was conceptualizable expressed, like a collateral effect, an essentialist and divided vision of their presence . We can understand Allora and Calzadilla's first works as an attempt to dialectise this vision and reveal all their silences from the inside; also to break the minimalist tautology based on Stella's principle of "what you see is what you see." This also corresponds to interrupting what Pierre Bourdieu calls illusio , that is "the enchanted relation to a game that is the product of the ontological complicity between mental structures and the objective structures of social space." As Bourdieu noted in Raisons pratiques (Paris, Seuil, 1994), reality is but a system of mutual connected externalities, and all objects should be interpreted within as the expression of a cross of antagonisms. As opposed to the idea of a "pure art, that is symbolically dominant but economically dominated," Allora and Calzadilla's work tends not to accentuate the purity of the "cultural capital," but to manifest the conflicts linked to the contradictory rule of the work of art and, beyond it, of the system of objects in general, both relational and corporeal. The open nature of their reflection becomes tangible in the street piece Chalks , carried out between 1998 and 2006 in the cities of Lima, New York and Paris. Chalks is based on a simple notion: depositing large cylinders of chalk (the reference to the discourse of minimal art is obvious) in a square in a city; the progressive fragmentation of the blocks of chalk invites passers-by to use the material to draw or write all types of messages on the ground. However, each city imposes a context and a meaning to the work, as well as a destiny: in New York, the images of Asian tourists in front of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum have a vaguely spectacular and leisurely air; in Paris, children and business people give in to the delights of expression and self-censorship, under official invitation. In Lima the case is like something out of a novel and has a political side to it, giving notice of the fact that a work's critical potential depends essentially on the recipient and the context. The chalks, that were left in the city's plaza de Armas in the morning, aroused a whirlwind of spontaneous interventions and were added to the elements used during a demonstration of civil servants, who got together to turn the pavement into a large blackboard where they wrote their complaints. The chalks ended up being removed by the army, and the inscriptions were deleted by the municipal cleaning services, a tidying up that gave way, in the afternoon, to the inauguration of the III Latin American Biennial. Chalks has an evident, albeit contradictory, political meaning, related to a medium -the public space- where, as Michel Gaillot noted, there is no other possible common voice but the voice expressed through singularity. The same principle of disruption we mentioned in reference to Flavin appears in this case with respect to the notion of monument, in its confrontation, as an object, with the public space in which it appears as a sort of echo of the principle of authority. Consequently, the authoritarian "voice" of the urban monument is broken down into real voices and is placed at the service of the expression of those who, in principle, were destined to surround it. The very horizontality of the work contradicts the monumental logic of communication, where the message is associated mechanically to a place of power and a purpose of influence. Chalk is, depending on its context, a toy or a Trojan horse, an instrument for communicative reactivation or just another curio to be photographed.

The vastest project carried out to date by Allora and Calzadilla was entitled Land Mark (extracts have been displayed at the Tate Modern and, recently, a compilation has been on show at the Palais de Tokyo) and is inscribed in the, afo reme ntioned, perspective of breaking the self-referentiality of art by means of the creation of connections between practical and artistic spheres. Land Mark 's point of departure is a serious and specific geopolitical event: the occupation and military exploitation by the us Marines of the small island of Vieques, Puerto Rico. Since the 1940s, the US Marines had been carrying out military tests in a territory that has been gradually sectioned, bored, sunken and contaminated; and also depopulated and ruined historically. The population of Vieques embarked on a long and unequal fight that ended up, in 2003, with Americans dropping military activities and the population taking back the island, giving way to a new period of reorganisation of the land. Allora and Calzadilla's work has documented each of the stages of this development, in the very essence of these fights. Their work has been involved in them as a sort of communicative supplement where the precariousness of forms of protest appeared as a cry for help to imagination. The first of the works in the series, also entitled Land Mark, is a 1:1 scale reproduction of a piece of the land using the language of 3D computer simulators, frequently implemented by planning and military strategy systems. This large black rubber grid, which the visitors' footsteps can collapse or reconfigure, reproduces the craters caused by the military tests using an optical effect that evokes the deceptions and gaps of historical memory. The progressive electronic externalisation of the collective memory (Michel Gaillot), that we experience at present, also involves an increase of the possibilities of manipulation and deception of our own conscience. In the case of the land, this memory is literally impalpable and, at the same time, materially present. The installation shows a sort of illusionism inherent to the material land. Yet Land Mark uses both specific objects and alterations of the objective routine order with a more performance-like nature. This is the case of two works corresponding to the stage when the Vieques conflict was solved: when the public reopening of the areas formerly used by the military was decreed, an activist travelled around the island with a trumpet connected to his motorbike's exhaust pipe, sending an atonal hymn around the island, typical of a new stage, yet to be constructed. This action was recorded in the video Returning a sound (2004). When the authority over the area was transferred to the Home Department and the island was declared a "nature reserve" after a series of meetings, Allora and Calzadilla produced the video Under discussion (2005), that shows another activist surrounding Vieques' coast on board an inverted table used as an outboard launch. This gesture evoked the fact that the islanders had taken back the island's maritime space beyond any political shady deal, and at the same time advocated discussions as the only method to reach political solutions. At harsher times, the artists created soles with which the activists from Vieques could print, during their furtive incursions, their claims and slogans on the sand of the occupied territory.

Consequently, the work connected performances typical of political activism to artistic traditions like engraving. Land Mark is explained semantically as an instrument for reading marks left on the territory ( land marks ) instead of as a simple point of spatial orientation ( landmark ). The disillusion of the minimalist work, the rupture of its tautology, is accompanied by a re-enchantment of the common space. Reading the territory also means rearticulating it. Talking through it is a deep form of understanding.

Translation: Laura F. Farhall