ARTESANTANDER 2022, MANUEL MINCH:
3 minutos, 3 días, 3 semanas
By human standards we are capable of surviving for about 3 minutes without breathing, 3 days without drinking and 3 weeks without eating.
This project is inspired by a personal experience, by the realisation that certain ailments and bodily discomforts have a psychological origin. Manuel Minch reflects on the individual limitations and latent states in our bodies in the face of the challenges we have to take on day by day. He focuses especially on the state of anxiety that time management provokes in a hyper-productive society like ours, causing the individual to somatise stress and accumulate dysfunctions, deformities and tics that wear out and mistreat the body.
In an interesting play of relationships and metaphors, he creates a series of pieces with materials and techniques linked to medicine, construction and climbing, which he makes explicit through the creation of curious climbing walls (a symbol of overcoming limits) whose supports are made up of 3D reproductions of the artist’s own organs.
The bulk of the exhibition is made up of representations of different organs and parts of the body: thorax, lungs, stomach, ribs, bones, lungs? They are made with ropes, plaster, bandages, salt and 3D prints, with a pristine white finish that mystifies the carnal and bleeding origin that is assumed to the organs that structure the bodies. It is creative to relate it to that body without organs of Artaud’s utopian vision: “When you have given it a body without organs, then you will have freed it from all its automatisms and returned it to its true freedom”. Deleuze took it up in his analysis of Francis Bacon’s intensive bodies: “the spirit is the body itself, the body without organs”. In an act that could be considered cathartic, even shamanic, Minch feels the need to take the organs out of the body, to reproduce them symbolically and show them. He decontextualises them, distorts them, “extracts” them from their natural packaging and shows them in theatrical form so that they can tell us something, to question us, to question the pressures to which they are subjected. As Joseph Beuys predicted in his 1976 installation, only by “showing the wound” is it possible to heal it. And this is a systemic and universal wound that, especially in cities, is spreading like wildfire.
The appearance of these false anatomies resembles the calcium concretions of sensitive and fragile coral reefs, whose alarming deterioration certifies the serious imbalance of the ecosystems and the constant danger to which they are exposed due to the continuous environmental threat.
The 3D printed parts remind us that organ reproductions are already being tested with this technology in materials that can be installed in real bodies to replace damaged originals. A technology that brings us fully into the new paradigm of the post-human being that we already inhabit, and whose future remains to be seen. And beyond the imperfection of matter, virtual existences emerge in stainless corporealities.
We may be having an awareness of the body unprecedented in recent times, many artists talk about it in different ways, reminding us that we are fighting against time and our natural rhythms. We still need a dialogue with our corporeality, remembering the old maxim mens sana in corpore sano, knowing as we already know that mind and body are the same thing, that the health of that organism is connected to the health of the community in which it is inserted and that this in turn depends on the system that organises it. Somatisation, according to the RAE, is the involuntary transformation of psychic problems into organic symptoms, and we live in a society that is increasingly medicalised to correct this somatisation, surviving in many cases on drugs and psychopharmaceuticals.
These new entities, games of strings and complex knots that resemble new organs like coral formations, are also signs, traces that “continue with the problem” (Donna Haraway), with the need to act to improve a world that is less and less habitable.
MANUEL MINCH (Santander, 1993) is an artist and researcher whose work studies the margins between technological development, politics and natural times. As a millennial, Manuel considers himself a product of a neoliberal society without access to any real alternative for change. This makes him rethink his personal and collective capacities, the scarcity of resources and the current unsustainability of the system in opposition to the macro-narratives imposed by the system to lead a life away from alternative scenarios.
This is why his research focuses on possible changes in the current conditions of life, whether due to political, economic or natural causes. He is particularly interested in the ideas of collapse, the point of no return and the disconnection of society from natural processes.
His latest works take post-capitalist theories, accelerationism and the post-internet condition as references, formalising these projects through a variety of techniques; installations, texts and audiovisual productions.
On the other hand, his work occasionally uses curatorial practices to articulate narratives as a way of approaching artistic research. He is also the founder and curator of Internet Moon Gallery (2016 – present), a networked non-profit gallery research project in which he inaugurates curated projects every full moon, referencing natural cycles and creating a space for reflection and dialogue between international artists, curators and thinkers.
ARTESANTANDER 2022
BOOTH 22
XXX Feria Internacional de Arte Contemporáneo
Palacio de Exposiciones y Congresos
Avda del Stadium s/n. Santander
HORARIO FERIA: De 17h. a 21:30h.