Interview with Erick Beltrán & Jorge Satorre published in 'Atlántica' magazine #52
Mon, Feb 13 2012 |
| Installation view of 'Modelling Standard' at Galeria Joan Prats, Barcelona. Jorge Satorre and Erick Beltrán (Illustrations by Jorge Aviña), “Modelling Standard”, 2010. 58 photocopies pasted on the wall. Variable dimensions. Courtesy of the artists. |
In the current issue of the 'Atlántica' magazine #52 (to be launched on 16 February at 4pm, at the Sala de Amigos, Hall 8, ARCOmadrid), there is an interview between Erick Beltrán, Jorge Satorre, and Latitudes conducted in November 2011 during the installation week of the exhibition at Galeria Joan Prats, Barcelona. Below is an abstract of the 4,000 words on phantom limbs, microhistory, devil's drool, apophenia, collaboration, information systems, Sigmund Freud's dog Jo-Fi, collage, döppelgangers, Fantomas, mirror neurons, unorthodox research methods, validation...
– PART
I –
Latitudes
(L): Your exhibition at Galería Joan Prats in Barcelona is the latest installment of your Modelling
Standard
project, as well as being a group show which includes the work of
other artists. [1] Where should we begin the story, where does it start for you?
Jorge Satorre (JS): At the core of Modelling Standard is our interest in the methodology proposed by Italian microhistory during the seventies as well as its precedents. Specifically, the essay of Carlo Ginzburg ‘Clues: Roots of an Evidential Paradigm’, which was published in 1979, functioned as one of the main pillars of our project. In the text, he tried to explain a new way of making history in which there are three basic methods to follow: first, reducing scale; second, in-depth investigations of the few sources at hand; and third, exploitation of hints and traces – working like a detective. [2] Ginzburg supported his theory by alluding to the fathers of this paradigm: Sigmund Freud, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Giovanni Morelli. These three people worked in very different fields, though they shared a medical background and operated in the manner of a detective: deciphering clues through symptoms and finding hidden meaning in details. From this trigger, Erick and I started opening up a web of relations.
L: It is now a fascinatingly complex project which involves a whole host of characters and has evolved through an exhibition at FormContent in London in 2010 and a comic book that you produced for Casa Vecina in Mexico City earlier this year. Integral to the project are the amazing drawings of Jorge Aviña, who we’ll come onto specifically in a moment, which you commissioned as illustrations of certain concepts. But as Charles Fort said, ‘one measures a circle, beginning anywhere’... so, let’s pick one drawing and one character – Vilayanur Ramachandran?
 |
| Erick Beltrán and Dr. Vilayanur Ramachandran. Courtesy the artist. |
Erick
Beltrán (EB):
Ramachandran represents a really curious phenomenon that gets further
explored in the comic – the analyses of the phantom limb and mirror
neurons. He found out that there are cells in the brain that possess
a representative image of our body. If those cells are electrically
stimulated, one starts to feel different parts of the body. Via
Wilder Penfield’s understanding of the part of the brain called the
cortical homunculus, neuroscientists concluded that this
representation is distorted, it’s not to scale with how the body
really is. Some parts have more sensory neurons than others, hence
they appear bigger in the brain’s body image: for instance, the
hands of ‘Penfield’s homunculus’ are too big and the torso is
way too small.
L:
What is the relation between the individual line drawings and the
comic?
JS:
For instance, the misperception Erick mentioned really became the
centre of the comic, which is titled El
Hallazgo del Miembro Fantasma (The
Discovery of the Phantom Limb). The 58
individual drawings were the first part of the project and are pasted
on the wall like posters here in Barcelona as they were similarly in
London. Their structure and relations are set out more like a draft.
The comic is basically a story talking about the power of the images
in which we incorporated some of the characters from the first part
of the project.
L:
The comic format must have posed a different challenge; rather than
jumping from drawing to drawing as with the talk-performances you
have done during the openings of the projects, a narrative has to be
set out and digested linearly?
EB:
We made a sort of ‘game of shadows’ with the comic by
encompassing the narrative and the visual part. A novel however is
something we are going to do at some point.
JS:
The whole project has also set out a new problem for us: we began
with the analysis of microhistory,
yet as we mentioned before, now we realise this has evolved into
considering the power of images. All the characters somehow tackle
this problem in one way or another, and with the comic, we created a
detective story where the characters are victims and perpetrators
of a crime related to images.
It
has been a ping-pong of ideas between us, but we have also let chance
be a part of the process. We have had to confront our decisions and
integrate characters. Jorge Aviña is the illustrator who, as you
said, has produced all the drawings for the project, and we realised
that he had a lot to do with Fantomas, a fictional character in a
Mexican comic series of the 1960s, based on the French character
Fantômas. One of the writers of Fantomas,
Gonzalo Martré, who is now 84, becomes the criminal in our comic and
also is the co-writer of El
Hallazgo del Miembro Fantasma.
EB:
By
then we had realised we had gathered a sort of ‘dream team’ of
what Fantomas could represent today.
 |
| Jorge
Satorre and Erick Beltrán (Illustrations
by Jorge Aviña), “Modelling
Standard”, 2010. 58 photocopies pasted on the wall. Variable dimensions. Courtesy of the artists. |
–
[1] Modelling
Standard,
an exhibition organized by Jorge Satorre and Erick Beltrán. With the participation of Christoph Keller, Raphaël Zarka, Paloma Polo,
Bernardo Ortiz, Efrén Álvarez, Meris Angioletti, Jose Antonio Vega
Macotela, Vilayanur Ramachandran, Jorge Aviña and Florian Göttke.
Galería Joan Prats, Barcelona, November–December 2011.
[2] Carlo
Ginzburg, ‘Clues:
Roots of an Evidential Paradigm’, in Clues,
Myths, and the Historical Method, translated by John Tedeschi and Anne C. Tedeschi (Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1989), p. 102. The Italian edition is ‘Spie:
Radici di un paradigma indizario’, in Aldo Gargani and Carlo
Ginzburg, Crisi
della ragione.
(Einaudi, 1979).
Erick Beltrán and Jorge Satorre's 'Modelling Standard' evolving project and forthcoming interview with the artists for 'Atlántica' magazine
Tue, Nov 15 2011
Invitation card to the exhibition at Galeria Joan Prats.
Opening: 17 November 2011, 19.30h (the artist will do a talk at 20h)
Exhibition organised by: Jorge Satorre and Erick Beltrán
With works by: Christoph Keller, Raphaël Zarka, Paloma Polo, Bernardo Ortiz,
Efrén Álvarez, Meris Angioletti, Jose Antonio Vega Macotela, Vilayanur Ramachandran,
Jorge Aviña and Florian Göttke.
The presentation at Galeria Joan Prats is the third iteration of the project which began in September 2010 at FormContent, London and continued in March 2011 at Casa Vecina, México DF.
"Modelling Standard takes as a point of departure the radical historiographic turn introduced by Carlo Ginzburg in the 1970s who focused on localised, popular and disregarded micro-histories rather than universal, over-arching versions. The title Modelling Standard references the scientific concept of the Standard Model used in physics to explain the almost invisible interactions occurring between subatomic particles.
Erick Beltrán and Jorge Satorre use both micro-historical methods and
the metaphor borrowed from physics to create connections between small,
insignificant hints and traces. These are taken from their
heterogeneous references to build seemingly unlikely connections between
literary references, personal experiences, historical data, trivia and
scientific facts through the construction of a diagram. The result is a
series of caricatures and texts through which the artists will construct
a detective plot where Sigmund Freud, Carlo Ginzburg, Giovanni Morelli,
Aby Warburg, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Joe Orton are the protagonists." (taken from FormContent's press release)
In Casa Vecina, Modelling Standard expanded with the inclusion of a comic also with drawings by illustrator and project collaborator Jorge Aviña, which will also be presented in Galeria Joan Prats alongside, as the artists have stated, the "input from a number of artists, illustrators and guest researchers, whose personal research work adds new links to the chain that stretches and lengthens ... like the devil's drool".
Installation process of the exhibition. Photo taken the day we began the interview for 'Atlántica' magazine.
In relation to 'Modelling Standard' Latitudes is currently working on an interview with Satorre and Beltrán for the Spanish magazine 'Atlántica' (to be published in February 2012), where there will be an opportunity to read more about their thread of ideas for this project as well as the process of their collaborative work – the latter being one of the focus of Latitudes' interests developed in exhibition projects such as 'Amikejo' (four exhibitions at MUSAC, León, 2011) or 'The Garden of Forking Paths' (Maisterravalbuena, Madrid, 2009). More news to follow...
–
Related posts:
Portscapes
news: Jorge Satorre's billboard on the A15 and Paulien Oltheten small
exhibition at the visitor centre Futureland and surroundings (18 October 2009)
Portscapes: Jorge Satorre returns an ice-age boulder back to Sweden (18 January 2010)
'Banquete sinestésico' de Erick Beltrán en Halfhouse (30 octubre 2011)
Galeria Joan Prats
Rambla de Catalunya, 54
08007 Barcelona, Spain