While the exhibition uses Federico García Lorca's poem Romance de la luna, luna as a pretext to bring together in the same space names, a priori, as disparate as Brecht, Camarón, Cappa, Colita, Dalí, Giacometti, Goethe, Goya, Hugo, Jahnsen, Lorca, Mercadier, Miró, Nietzche, Pasolini, Picasso, Rodin, Trouvé or Zürn (almost all men, by the way), its true intention is to explore the link between affectivity and knowledge.
For Didi-Huberman, one of the most prominent figures in contemporary visual thought, curating is not only organizing an exhibition, it is also formulating a political proposal through culture, following some of his great references (Benjamin or Bataille), all heirs of a solid tradition of cultural Marxism.
What the exhibition opens is a poem, yes, but the real genesis, what truly moves the philosopher, is the idea of the duende that Lorca invokes in his poetry. The fascination with the aesthetic notion of what the poet describes. In Huberman's free translation, one finds the tension between the observer and the observed image. From that observation, an intangible is born, a singular space beyond the physical, the place where the true emotional force of art unfolds.
According to Huberman, the term commotion means "to be moved by something"The philosopher echoes thatduendeand stops to think. But thinking is not just doing a theoretical analysis that could be detached from experience.Didi-Huberman curates this exhibition because he feels moved,and that commotion, by itself, is reason enough to create.
The journey is poetic and intuitive. We agree that it is a personal journey with the intention that the works dialogue with each other to trace a kind of cartography of feeling, highlighting its ethical and political charge. But personal does not mean individual or irrelevant; rather, quite the opposite. What the exhibition brings into play is that everything personal is political or, as Mark Fisher would say, everything personal is impersonal. The idea arises that emotions are not only experienced individually, but are also transmitted collectively. Thus, the exhibition is shaped by exploring multiple channels, but without fully developing that facet. The rooms are distributed under the terms childhood, thought, faces, gestures, places, politics, and again, childhood.
One of the essences of the exhibition is the vindication of affectivity (of commotion, in this case) as a valid and transformative form of knowledge. Something capable of dismantling the reason-emotion binarism that still persists in Western epistemology.
And this is, precisely, the most widespread reading of Lorca's Romancero gitano. The poet turns the gypsies into a symbol of a marginalized way of life and always presents them in contrast to the Civil Guard, who tries to repress that irrationality, located at the center of their knowledge. The anthology, then, can be understood as a poetic exploration of the tension between the marginal and eminently affective freedom of the gypsy world, and the repressive forces of order, which try to subdue it. The poem itself narrates the death of a child through the symbol of the moon which, in a kind of erotic dance, attracts him and takes him away in the middle of the night, mixing concepts such as desire, childhood, and death. The moon is represented as a grim reaper with whom the child dialogues and to whom, sweetly, he decides to succumb, without any remedy. At dawn, when his companions arrive, there is nothing left but to accept the fatal destiny. As often happens in Lorca, personified nature transforms with what has happened: the birds sing of death, the air is moved and watches, along with the gypsies, over the child. The air is the element that allows the two times to be united, the one in which the child was still alive and the one in which he is mourned.
The philological explanation is essential to understand the structure and articulation of the exhibition by rooms, and its seven thematic sections. In a post-structuralist way, without the spectator being aware of it, they transit without difficulty and completely unaware of its meaning.
Huberman uses childhood as a starting point to dismantle the idea of a rational and stable subject, but rejects the idealized vision of a pure childhood. Children are capable of seeing emptiness, destruction, sadness, and death, and suffering it (the end of Germany, Year Zero by Roberto Rossellini, a clear cinematic example of this idea, is projected). In the same way that this happens, they are also capable of abandoning a passive nihilism, very typical of adults, to transform it into an active nihilism that makes them transition towards creation, something that is very clearly taken up at the end of the exhibition.
The gaze and child language are shown, therefore, not only as a possibility, but, above all, as a valid form of knowledge. The absence of an excessively elaborate and articulated language enables the possibility of imagining.
In the Thoughts block, divided into Literacy and Emancipation, the historical division of knowledge from the 17th century is embodied. Modernity cemented this distinction between rational and objective knowledge, reserved for science, reason, and the masculine, and what it called subjective and emotional, linked to poetry, art, and the feminine. Post-structuralism tries to disarm this hierarchy, showing that all objectivity is constructed and all subjectivity is historical. Subjectivity and objectivity merge in a space with texts by Darwin, Descartes, or Kant, on the one hand, and the reproduction of the manuscript of the conference on the duende given by Lorca, on the other.
Nietzsche's face, fixed in his death mask, welcomes us to the Faces block. It is, without a doubt, one of the most striking elements of the entire exhibition, making it clear, and emphatically, that the face is the first place where our affections are embodied. The face is the first surface that is impacted by what we cannot dominate, something that escapes reason, but exists, molds our body and leaves its mark on it. We cry, we breathe, we rest, we yawn, we kiss...
The third block is Gestures, where we see images that reflect the intervention of the body in space. Highlights include Juli González's bronze hand, Rodin's clenched hands, Gonçal Sobrer's performance, evoking the Francoist executions, and automatic gestures linked to the effect of drugs and mental illnesses, with works by Artaud, Dalí, Michaux, and Zürn. The block closes with an installation by María Kourkouta. According to Huberman, gestures allow for the creation of a new spatiality: "By producing this intensity, gestures make the air swirl upon itself, thus creating a choreography of bodies."
In Places, the image of a breath could be what allows us to think more clearly about the union between emotion and space. By breathing, we irremediably intervene in space, depositing particles of ourselves into it. According to the French philosopher, we unintentionally transform that space into a place. Because places are not spaces. This distinction has been widely considered by philosophers such as Michel de Certeau or Marc Augé. For Certeau, place is a fixed structure, and space is a living practice, a place to transit. Augé theorizes about the overproduction of non-places in postmodernity (an airport, for example). Rootless places, merely transit places. Huberman deliberately retains the word sites (or places) to emphasize that all materiality can also open up to commotion.
This block invites us to think about how certain gestures are restricted to certain places. In private space, away from public view, we usually cry, undress, or sleep. In public space, we greet, smile, or shake hands. We rehearse a bodily openness that allows the other to access us, although this is often not desired.
One of the most suggestive ideas, perhaps, that emerge from Huberman's personal reading of places and gestures is that Lorca's duende is not enclosed within an interior, nor contained in a single body: the duende only arises in interaction, in interaction with others. This is how a journey towards the collectivization of intimacy is outlined. Subjectivity ceases to be a merely psychological and introspective exercise, to be realized in the community, in the contact of emotion with space, through the body.
Humanism always needs to return to the innocent or disinterested gaze of the child to reformulate itself.For all these reasons, it is not surprising that the exhibition ends up linking affectivity, body, and politics in an open way, dedicating the sixth block entirely to it. Didi-Huberman simplifies for the viewer the ways that show that the body and emotions are political, and decides to divide the room into two: the line of struggles and the line of mourning. The observer considers that different divisions or treatments could be made, and, perhaps, more interesting or contemporary ones.The body and affects have become central political issues in recent decades,cultivated, above all, by feminisms or the strugglequeer. It is worth pointing this out as the most notable absence from the exhibition. The so-called affective turn that emerged in the late 90s and early 2000s, precisely, as a critical response to the limitations of the linguistic and post-structuralist turn, which places the emotional, bodily, and pre-discursive dimension of existence at its center, and is an idea cultivated especially by women such as Laurent Berlant, Sara Ahmed, or Eve Kosofsky Sedwick.
Although the exhibition actively raises its own questions regarding the affective turn (emotion as knowledge, the body traversed by history and politics), it must be noted that Huberman does not explicitly mention this current nor does he rely on the feminist and queer genealogy that drives it so strongly today. If we add that most of the exhibition's references are men ---something that hints at a bias that limits the very political power of this collective commotion---, we find a paradox. The exhibition fails to be completed due to a lack of references with what it claims and proposes.
Finally, the visitor returns to the initial concept of the exhibition with the last section, which is the first, Infancias (Childhoods). The curator resumes the more abstract reflection from the beginning and places it in contemporaneity. We find various photographs, audiovisual pieces, and drawings that evoke current events from a Western and somewhat naiff point of view. Are actions what change the world, or is it the world that determines our actions? An endless eternal return or a thought closer to the idea that humanism always needs to return to the innocent or disinterested gaze of the child to reformulate itself.
In a world marked by the overproduction of images, such a proposal, which conceives images as spaces for emotional transmission and proposes an aesthetic and critical experience, invites the viewer to stroll and observe with the intention of recovering that deeper and more authentic relationship with the visual. It achieves this, but also by proposing images, and by using a postmodern style that also does not help in the contemplation of the works.
The exhibition, which can be visited until September 28, is made up of more than 300 pieces including photographs, paintings, sculptures, films, engravings, books, sketches, poems, and music. Visitors will find, in addition to those already mentioned, works by Aby Warburg, scores and drawings by Nietzsche, sculptures by Giacometti, paintings by Klein, Tàpies, Miró, Fontana, and engravings by Goya, along with films by Isaki Lacuesta and fragments of films by Pasolini, Erice, Tarr, and Rossellini.