In On the Natural History of Destruction<\/em>, German writer W.G. Sebald tries to understand \u201cthe way in which individual, collective, and cultural memory deal with experiences that go beyond the bearable.\u201d In the first of the Zurich lectures on \u201cAir War and Literature,\u201d collected in the book that inspires this exhibition\u2019s title, Sebald points to a sinister aspect of amnesia with an epigraph by Stanislaw Lem: \u201cThe trick of elimination is the defensive reflex of any expert.\u201d In conversation with Jorge Tacla for this exhibition\u2019s catalog, the artist illustrated the tragedy of total annihilation with the firepower of the air missiles that attacked Lebanon in 1996, which inspired his Rubble<\/em> series.<\/p>\r\n Ruin is the state of memory. The only place we can hold onto is history. We walk on contemporary ruins, for which certain records and references must be kept.*<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n Fig. 1. Jorge Tacla, Rubble 19<\/em>, 2010<\/strong><\/p><\/div>\r\n\r\n<\/figure>\r\n<\/div>\r\n\r\n\r\n The destruction caused by these air missiles, capable of making not only buildings disappear but also their rubble (\u201cthe record of ruin\u201d), reclaims a strategy of historical domination through suppression, denial, and silencing. This extreme drive, also present in the violent image of the colonizing tabula rasa<\/em>, as in book burnings or the forced disappearance of people, represents the most savage and devastating manifestation of the antagonism between memory and oblivion, making our history \u201ca sequence of improbable images that distort and overlap reality, mixing and combining in the strangest ways,\u201d as Arturo Uslar Pietri notes. The ruins we live with are not only the material debris and remnants of the past; they constitute, above all, testimony to the losses associated with that disappearance. Furthermore, they force us to deal with a series of conflicted leftovers, the immaterial rust of decaying political institutions, defeated ideological structures, and archaic biases that persist despite the accelerated degradation of the present.<\/p>\r\n I believe the ambition of power has been so deranged that it is making us witness destruction day by day. And in that destruction appears the internal biology, where human activity resides, which is invisible when the fa\u00e7ade is intact.*<\/p>\r\n After the impact, the structure becomes permeable, revealing the complexity of its inner layers. Positioned from the perspective of a missile plane, Tacla pierces the fa\u00e7ade to evoke the echoes and ghosts inhabiting the inner walls. We sense their presence in the forms. In both Biomechanism<\/em> (1996) and Rubble 19<\/em> (2010), the dust is visible in the pigments.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n Fig. 2. Jorge Tacla, Biomechanism<\/em> 1996<\/strong><\/p><\/div>\r\n\r\n<\/figure>\r\n<\/div>\r\n\r\n\r\n In Paso por ti<\/em> (2006), the artist captures the metallic remains of the Twin Towers, the surviving image of a Tower of Babel\u2014which also evokes Vladimir Tatlin\u2019s Monument to the Third International<\/em>, also known as Monument to the Liberation of Humanity<\/em>, which seems like an irony of history\u2014as if in its melted foundations and pillars, its collapse had been prefigured.<\/p>\r\n One used to see the totems, magnificent, with their glass. Inside, there was an internal biology, and that is what remained in the end. Not that great power that is the fa\u00e7ade of things. We walk over the place where humans conducted their activities.*<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n Fig. 3. Jorge Tacla, Paso por ti,<\/em> 2006<\/strong><\/p><\/div>\r\n\r\n<\/figure>\r\n<\/div>\r\n\r\n\r\n <\/p>\r\n In Tacla’s paintings, mind and matter blend over and over. The residues of these frictions form a repository of information he taps into with the rigor of a forensic archaeologist. \u201cThe earth’s surface and the products of the mind can disintegrate and disperse in specific regions of art,\u201d says Robert Smithson. His reflections on landscape and industrial ruins are illuminating for understanding the perplexing shapes created by the relationships between space and the material properties Tacla meticulously works with in each piece. \u201cOur mind and the earth are in a constant state of erosion. Mental rivers wear down abstract shores, brain waves undermine cliffs of thought, ideas decompose [\u2026] and conceptual crystallizations break into sandy deposits of reason,\u201d Smithson writes in A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects<\/em> (1968).<\/p>\r\n Tacla speaks of sites in Destruction<\/em>. These are not monumental ruins or relics evocative of a present yet petrified memory, but rather the perpetual transformation of a moment after the explosion, the image that follows the breaking point that originated it: \u201cThe pictorial solution would make no sense if not for really seeking something of a particular depth.\u201d*<\/p>\r\n The aerial image over the desert marks a trajectory in space, describing an extreme evasive maneuver. In Imaginary Horizon, Chandela<\/em> (1990), the artist alludes to an emergency turn within a minimum turning radius that allows the pursued plane to become the pursuer. An effective maneuver in his Sign of Abandonment<\/em> series, where the gesture towards what is lost no longer focuses on destruction, on rubble and its exposed biomechanics, but on preserving and conserving what remains, the intimacy of a latent space or the memory of an absence that slowly fades. \u201cAll old language is immediately compromised, and all language becomes old the moment it is repeated,\u201d writes Roland Barthes, for whom the only way to escape the alienation of society was then by means of a forward escape.<\/p>\r\n It is not because of the destruction but because of the abandonment of that space. Contrary to what I do with other things, it is a manifestation of passion and love towards those institutions and those libraries, like Trinity College in Dublin, which have managed to preserve their books. If we think of the New York Public Library, the best books, the most valuable ones, are in the underground, where there is no access. They are kept safe so that people do not take them and damage them.*<\/p>\r\n <\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n Fig. 4. Jorge Tacla, Horizonte Imaginario, Chandela<\/em>, 1990<\/strong><\/p><\/div>\r\n <\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n One of capitalism\u2019s problems is that it destroys the human possibilities it creates. People can develop, but in restricted and distorted ways. Inquiring into the psychology of destruction, Tacla has also judged a series of buildings that consolidate the architectural representation of power. Undermining their fa\u00e7ades, exposing their interiors, \u201cI took away their physical strength, weakened them.\u201d* Exemplarily, in Hidden Identity 25<\/em>, the concrete imprint of the territory projects onto the substance of memory. The iconic image of the bombed La Moneda<\/em>\u2014the bluish stain of burning fire, the contours of the canvas catching fire\u2014seems inflamed by a subliminal geography of aerial landscapes, coastal edges, translucent layers where the territory appears viewed from the air in different perspectives and scales.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n Fig. 5. Jorge Tacla, Identidad Oculta 25<\/em>, 2013<\/strong><\/p><\/div>\r\n<\/figure>\r\n \u201cThe aerial nature of sound, and by extension music, always implies some degree of insubstantiality and uncertainty, some potential for illusion or disappointment, a certain ambiguity between presence and absence, fullness and emptiness, enchantment and transgression,\u201d writes David Took. There is a world of sound within silent things. In the desert, monotony was first broken by a noise. Looking at Jorge Tacla\u2019s work, I think that his studies at the Santiago Conservatory and his background as a percussionist are essential to understanding the movements and oscillations that distort the surface of his paintings. At times, it\u2019s as if the lines were reflected in a layer of water or recorded the vibration of strings that prevent the landscape from being fixed in perspective. Facing the silence of the unsaid, he seems always to be working in another intensity, secretly tuning into another silence, the silence of the unspeakable. In Jorge Tacla\u2019s paintings, there is always a background noise, a certain wavelength that seems to resonate with that deafening storm, the accelerated sound of destruction.<\/p>\r\n From the most intimate to the most global, the relationship between victim and aggressor is a common thread in my work. The room of a family home, where a couple lives together; that room can also be a place of rubble. Family conflicts can become very violent and testify to how brutal intimacy can be.*<\/p>\r\n In most of these paintings, there are no bodies. If organic forms appear, they emerge from abstract lines, evoked by some indistinct outline of what remains. In his essay, Sebald tries to understand the fundamental reasons for an entire generation of German writers\u2019 inability to describe and remember the experience of unprecedented annihilation. In the video Injury Report<\/em>, only the ashes and the record of burned evidence\u2014archives, clinical reports, personal notebooks\u2014preserve the artist’s political past. \u201cWhen the fissures between body and mind multiply to form an infinity of gaps, the studio begins to crumble and eventually collapses like the house of Usher,\u201d observed Smithson. Every transition leaves a mark and suffers a loss in transit. Signs of life where no one is. Situated in the interstices of a disappearing world, Tacla manages to capture the echoes and vestiges of humanity that will survive.<\/p>\r\n <\/p>\r\n *Conversation with Jorge Tacla, 08\/18\/2021<\/p>\r\n <\/p>\r\n<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Text published in the catalog of \u201cNatural History of Destruction,\u201d a solo exhibition by Chilean artist Jorge Tacla presented at Il Posto between October and November 2021.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false},"categories":[42],"class_list":["post-5368","texto","type-texto","status-publish","hentry","category-exhibition"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.ilposto.cl\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/11\/Fig.-1-1-1024x946.jpg\")
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