C:/Hilanda/to_be_expired/Hilando_Sueños.exe
Project by Hilanda (aka Tania López-Winkler)
Hilanda is a Spatial Private Detective. She looks for clues embedded in the fleeting aesthetic experiences of city life. Hilanda’s work involves strolling about and getting lost in the city’s maze and dreamscapes. If she was in Paris she would be a flaneuse, but since she operates in London she is a detective. When in rapture and delirium instead of playing the violin she spins filaments and threads.
At night, Hilanda spins the city’s fabric along with dreams into clues. These clues often unravel, detect or trace back the outlines of personal stories and culprits.
Intervention
The intervention Hilando_Sueños.exe consists in writing on the walls of the gallery at 60cm from the ground and closing up the perimeter. The written text is a chain of dreams that begins with a dream/fiction from the artist, followed by dreams submitted by the public and fellow artists.
Clues and personal geographies are also display in the walls of the gallery.
Concerns
Hilanda.exe is part of the series to_be_expired, which deals with the modern notion of expiration date as imposed capitalism. Thus, to_be_expired is concerned with time, the life-death cycle: expiration is just a way to be re-born from the ashes (as the Phoinix). Water is taken as a motive for this ongoing investigation given that works both as metaphor and tool containing opposite possibilities: calm and destruction, life and death.
The proposed intervention exploits the spatial message of the Minotour Labirynth from which Theseus escaped thanks to a string or clew given by Ariadne to guide him out, and reflects on Pliny de Elder’s Natural History where the origin of plastic art is identified in the tracing of the shadow’s outline of the lover soon to be gone. The collective unconsciousness is the filaments of the clew, and serves to trace the outline of the architecture in the same fashion a corpse is outlined in the crime scene. The intervention offers a threefold commentary:
_At a personal level it processes the fear of death by writing dreams on the wall. And it invites the public to participate of this process.
_At the level of the art industry it comments on the futility of the commercial system surrounding Art. The so called art industry constitutes itself as a circle of power that as any chain supermarket is more concerned with procuring a price (not a value) than with the product itself. In the increasing packaging and labelling of the art industry, the only thing missing is the expiration date.
Chain of thought/readings
The writing of the wall refers to a flooding. / In every flood, water leaves a mark on the walls, inside and outside a building. That is to say it levels out the interior and exterior. / The written dreams on the walls resemble the power of water to reach every corner and to re-define the horizon. / The writing on the wall describes not a ‘straight-line’ but a ‘spline’; while the definition of a straight line is the shortest distance between two points, a spline is defined by the effect of forces. / In the same way the water-level it is constructed by forces. / The (sp)line of dreams traces the outline of the buildings rendering part of the urban fabric in the same way the corpse is outlined in the crime scene. / While writing the dream, the person has to kneel to the wall, as if making a reverence to the past, while at the same time imposing the singularity of each individual on the building. / The tracing of the building’s outline and the outline of the corpse are linked to Pliny de Elder’s Natural History where he discusses the origin of plastic arts in the tracing of the shadow of the lover soon to be gone. / The outline is related to the notion of ‘longing that which is soon to be gone,’ or to be expired. / Carlo Ginzburg relates graphology, psychoanalysis, and private detective through the function of the sign. / Ginzburg model is an intellectual framework linking together handwriting, the dream and detection of clues. / The interior-exterior and private-public limits are blurred. The walls that are usually understood as to divide the private interior from the public space are no longer treated as division but as signs of the fluid nature of dreams. / The collective consciousness is made public from the interior of the building to the street. The street is now full of open ‘interiorness’. / The collective dream - like a flooding - reaches everywhere and defines a new horizon. / ...