Luis Hernández Mellizo: The Place between Words
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Even the map lies. We learn the geography of the world from a map that doesn't show the world as it is, but rather as its owners order it to be. On the traditional planisphere, which is used in the schools and everywhere else, the Equator does not fall in the middle; the north takes up two thirds, and the south, one. On the globe, Latin America takes up less space than Europe and much less than the combination of the United States and Canada, when in reality, Latin America is twice the size of Europe and considerably larger than the U.S. and Canada. The map, which shrinks us, symbolizes all the rest: stolen geography, plundered economy, falsified history, everyday usurpation of the reality of the so-called Third World, inhabited by third-class peoples; it encompasses less, it eats less, it remembers less, it lives less, it says less. (Eduardo Galeano)
The place between words is a blank space, a void.
At the same time, it is what gives form to words, what allows for each signifier to correspond to a signified. In a way, it is a non-place, something which exists yet is not seen, which passes unperceived – like the wall behind a canvas – existing only in relation to something else, as a moment of moving between one word and another. What would happen if we were to put together all the words of a text and later were to separate its letters at random? A new, unintelligible language. Unlimited possibilities.
Carving up non-existent territories in books from the most varied origins, Luis Hernández Mellizo traces among their pages an absent place, a new geography, automatic and intuitive. Like words in some unheard-of language, the volumes of an encyclopedic dictionary compose the eroded song of an imaginary river. Vehicles of an ecstatic knowledge, the books no longer exist to be read; rather, they become pure form, visual material emptied of their contents and manipulated to construct a new narrative.
After an inverse process, a reconstruction of the moon as a 19th-century illustrator imagined it is turned into a banner-like sign: this time it's words that irrupt into the territory, transfiguring it with tiny perforations. The stratification of gazes is shaped in a subjective topography of one of the territories most explored by the collective imaginary, whose identity continually oscillates between reality and fiction. Similarly, countries which in traditional cartography occupy opposite ends of South America, such as Colombia and Argentina, unexpectedly flirt, in isolation from their neighboring territories, in a map of affects, a formulation of the artist's internal geography.
In the other room, a carefully beamed lighting illuminates one by one the intervened-in books, set out on a circular table, like an ancient model of the universe. Texts in various languages – texts that can't be read, having been emptied out semantically – link remote territories to one another. Their titles and covers are the only selection criterion, their contents irrelevant. The geographies multiply, the books make up an absurd atlas of knowledge. In the background, the sound of a flawed recording sketches an unusual mapping of Latin America: in contrast to the erudition of encyclopedic dictionaries and geographical maps, we have the informality of popular culture, the intuitive – albeit surgical – gesture of haphazardly reconstructing a territory by combining its rhythms and voices. On the side, the topographic representation of an erased Latin America suggests a whimsical refashioning of the jigsaw puzzle.
Through this unusual unglued atlas Luis Hernández Mellizo reconstructs a territory whose identity has been dismembered and long contaminated by colonial thinking. Canonical, conventional knowledge from books and maps is the raw material the artist uses to create a geo-poetial space. What do borders and cities represent if the ocean moves them from their original position, reconfiguring them in a random order? How does one orient oneself on a blind map? What are we to read between the pages of a mutilated book? In a sort of methodical unlearning, the artist breaks apart normative knowledge and the conventional path to it, offering us another view, the result of some chance, intuitive procedure. By recovering this plastic and emotional aspect, it creates it own "corrected world," to the point of overturning the geopolitics of knowledge.
Benedetta Casini
Freelance curator, with a Master's degree in contemporary art from La Sapienza Università degli Studi in Rome