Beatriz Olabarrieta, “Proximity,” at Shahin Zarinbal, Berlin.

DECEIT
…on the move.

One of our* tasks is to give you a WARNING, warn you about invisible fields, of
territories you might not see, but that exist nevertheless.

All parties involved up until this point have attempted to determine all that is needed,
you too are now involved.
Whomever receives a Premonition** from Beatriz is set on a quest to prove it or to
disprove it. WARNING:
life & other forces are on the move & our attempts to translate their inflections here
might approach coercion & a choreography of your movement through this space.

Back in May I was rubbed up the first time I began approaching this current series of
works, citing rubbings from Shakespeare’s ‘Hamlet’ & ‘Macbeth’ of all things. They
happened in Barcelona***.
The second iteration in the series of short-circuited machineries operating
inappropriately moved too
slowly &/or in a directionless trajectory, butting up against walls or other obstacles.
I asked if they asked me to let them be—again absurdly referring to Shakespeare.

These sculptures however counter either of her series’ previous disobediences…
these have absolutely refused to function at all, remaining absolutely still in relief on
the wall. Punctuating their potential movement in freeze-frame throughout the space,
they’ve become screen-shot-still portions; fragments of movement inhabiting the
space in sequence; outtakes from a Muybridge study of movement’s form whose
frames you must stitch together yourself. Like their Barcelona forebears these are
dismembered wind-screen-wipers for cars & other automobiles, whose original
purpose might echo your movements through this space, suggesting an automated
back and forth, back and forth, forth and back.

Thankfully my labours responding to Olabarrieta’s previous hi-jackings in Barcelona &
Berlin, now welcome Tomaso’s efforts. He & I invite you to labour here too…
all WARNINGS still standing. The previous sculptures I witnessed radically undermined a
certain violence by failing the use value of their machinic imperatives. These works
here do too without remorse.

What our mission is, is unclear. To convey knowledge? To give you an explanation? To
warn you?
Am I Progress% or did I turn into Peanuts Gerry?
How do we proceed? Do we hide the function of this text behind the sculptures,
precisely like the magnets that would keep them anchored here to the walls****,
ensuring their stillness? Or do we try to make them; describe them, and think with
them as if they were actual machines? Do we engage, or do we let them do
something to us?
How can a sculpture be? Could it be that giving it a movement, a mechanical
life-liness by transcribing their voice with our literary attempts & your kind efforts,
allows us to let these artworks be? Or not to be? …admitting the welcomed
struggle between self & other, this & that, a committed impulse Glissant gives to a
possibly productive opacity in encounter, encounters between things/selves/rooms/
etc.

A movement goes this way… & then another. More precisely, the other.

Literature, like magnets, ‘rummages – employing exquisite and deceitful techniques—
through the places in which we have hidden our most private garbage’*****.

These sculptures have decided to be gently impolite, exquisite and deceitful, pulled
into this field, attracted and dispossessed. Hence, our labour—reading & writing—
cannot be sure whether we are observed or observing. Could it mean that we
are not here to witness their stillness, but rather the expectation that they will start
moving in our absence? Mocking us and our presence here?

*I, my, you, we, our, your, they, their, these, premonition, her, he, them, that, here, this, there, now, be, rub [you will find these words slightly bent—maybe they couldn’t bare the weight of their own utility] **Beatriz Olabarrieta, Premonition(s), 2024, mixed metals, 80x20cm
***Beatriz Olabarrieta, I LIKE TO WATCH, etHALL, Barcelona 11.05 – 22.06.2024

****Neodymium disc magnets can be screwed in place with a countersunk screw. They are only 4 mm thick and therefore extremely discreet for hanging up sculptures. Please note: Neodymium magnets are brittle and can break if too much force is applied.
***** Walter Siti, Contro l’impegno, 2021, Rizzoli: “…ma allontanare la letteratura dall’elitarismo significa sollevarla dalle proprie responsabilità, che consistono nel rovistare con tecniche sopraffine e subdole là dove abbiamo nascosto la nostra spazzatura più
segreta; solo quando fa male la letteratura può davvero essere utile.”
—Tomaso De Luca & Gerry Bibby