“Eighth lesson: Between an Image and a Thing, Effort is what Remains.” Iñaki Garmendia

“A shepherd wants to move a dog, a sheep, and a cabbage across a river. He has a boat where he can only fit himself and one of the other ‘things’. If the dog stays behind with the sheep, it will eat the sheep. If the sheep stays behind with the cabbage, it will eat the cabbage. How should the shepherd proceed?”

In contrast to writing, the exercise of building images lacks a conceptual and abstract vocabulary, and as a result is powerfully metaphorical. At most, it starts a fortiori and in metaphorical terms: “nevertheless, particular metaphors, specifically desired, always bring with them something that is inevitably crude and conventional”. Even so, “the poetic, one millimetre thick bark “, the nuanced metaphor, that which is hardly perceptible, “doesn’t seem possible”. The poetically metaphorical part that really is uproariously possible is always in osmosis with another nature, that of prose, which is strictly communicative.

Divided into three parts, with a video for each part, the sessions will be provisionally presented in the form of readings of texts accompanied by images. In tapes 1 to 3, we will see the key to the construction of an image. The story will progressively place itself through some phrases from statements typical of riddles. These represent the experience of the conquest of reality in a concentrated, almost emblematic manner. Through excess or by default, through superimposition or through a certain lack of coordination between image and text, we intend to highlight the iconic and demonstrative value of images, something that involves a binding and voluntary loss of meaning in favour of language, that is to say, of form.

(The quotes in the second paragraph belong to Pasolini-Rohmer: Cine de poesía contra cine de prosa.)

Iñaki Garmendia (Ordizia, 1972) is an artist living and working in Bilbao. Selected exhibitions include: Materiality (Wyspa Art Foundation, Gdansk, Poland, 2012); Gravity & Disgrace II (CGAC, Santiago de Compostela, 2011); Iñaki Garmendia / 1979. Un Monument a Instants Radicals (La Virreina, Centre de la Imatge, Barcelona, 2011); Contemporary Image Collective (Cairo, 2010); La sombra del habla. Colección MACBA (Fundació d’Art Contemporani, Barcelona / Museum of Contemporary Art Seoul, Seoul, 2010); Art Contemporain et Culture Rock (Le Carré. Musée Bonnat. Bayonne, 2010); Iñaki Garmendia. Kolpez Kolpe (Centre d’Art La Panera, Lleida, 2010); Itinerarios 2007/08 (Fundación Marcelino Botín, Santander, 2009); Expanded Box (ARCO 09, Madrid, 2009); Inconformisme, incorreció i rebel.lió entre art i escena musical (Centre d’Art Torre Muntadas, Sala d’Art Josep Bages, El Prat de Llobregat, 2008); Underdox 3. Document und experiment (Munich, 2008); NO R.S. (Galería Moisés Pérez de Albéniz, Pamplona, 2008).