This text is full of microbes, there are a million between one word and the next. It is impossible to calculate the exact number of threats it will contain when it is read in large format. Invisible and indispensable, their existence is a guarantee of heterogeneity. However, their suppression is the norm, as the removal of differences is the norm for the unity of a human body and its grotesque version, the social body.
Imagine, while reading, that just one of these organisms grows until it becomes fully visible. Imagine that it occupies a space, that it perhaps moves, that it crawls, that it breathes. On the scale of giants, a microbe is a monstrous creature, the threat that difference imprints on the aseptic surface of the room. But, as with birds subject to the air that moves them, you too will not be able to inhabit the room without the monster that now occupies it.
What can you do now? Clean up, eliminate, neutralice, admit, welcome, endure, consent. Choose a verb. What can you do now? Imagine that you feel afraid, that you feel dirty, that you are out in the open, that the fear is provoked, that the dirt is infinite, that the air contains nothing but yourself and other identical bodies. Choose a verb to act on this universe you inhabit without remedy and without alternatives. Take a decision based on hygienic criteria. Make a commitment: the health of others depends on your health.
This text is full of doubts and judgements. There are a million words between one word and the next, in the space for the questions raised by this exhibition, saturated with microbes and disinfectant, but also with intimate, ethical and political possibilities.
Intimacy, ethics and politics, as particles of the hygienic, are the three areas on which ASEPSIA acts. The first of the series, La boca con jabón (Mouth with Soap), refers to the linguistic dimension of hygiene using the towel as a paradigmatic object of private hygiene. Washing hands is made of sponges impregnated with cleaning products reminiscent of sections of the skin, highlighting the conflictive relationship between the body that acts and the agents that question it.
Lavado de imagen (Image Washing), the third of the series, amplifies the effects of the previous two and reveals the political dimension of the act of cleaning oneself by showing the microscopic forms of organisation that sustain and regulate the environment.
Stop reading, the dirt is not in the sign, but in the air. Wash your hands before entering, do not contaminate the space of this room. Wash your hands before leaving, remove any traces of the visit from your skin.
Santiago Mazarrasa
After his previous solo exhibition at the Madrid gallery in 2021, Manuel Minch now presents his latest works in Santander. They are characterized by experimentation with materials and their transformation to create new forms and provoke new sensations. As usual in his artistic practice, each project involves a research work on subjects that interest him and that contain keys to better understand the world or draw attention to aspects that may go unnoticed and have their importance.
The topics on which he investigates plastically are cleanliness and disinfection, both in the everyday and symbolic sense. In our culture, the cult of cleanliness was born in the 19th century with hygienism, when the state began to consider the healthiness of cities, the importance of disinfection and the care of the health of citizens. In the middle of the last century, the philosopher Michel Foucault inaugurated the discussion about government control over people’s bodies through biopolitics. Cleanliness is a subject closely linked to the traditionally purist Western belief system, which also has a lot to do with religion. In the Bible there are many gestures linked to this practice: baptism, purification with water, Pilate washes his hands, the washing of feet is considered a symbol of servitude and hospitality to the neighbor, and the paten (“clean as a paten”) is a metaphor for the supreme cleanliness and cleanliness, as it is the dish that receives the sacred host, the transfigured body of Christ. On the other hand, this cult of cleanliness and disinfection can sometimes become obsessive, even to the point of becoming pathological, leading to major illnesses and dysfunctions. It is a wide-ranging subject with ramified consequences that often goes unnoticed because it is so commonplace.
Asepsia was born out of the artist’s observation of the existence of large quantities of dust on the works in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. It turns out that 70% of the dust deposited in the rooms is composed of detached human skin. This poetic fact (marble bodies with real human epidermis) sparks in Manuel Minch a series of reflections that will materialise in works made of expanded polyurethane sponges and polyurethane foam – some coloured with oil – silicones, towel cloth, laser prints, resulting from experimental – almost alchemical – processes fugured up by the artist.
In Washing your hands, he reproduces with polyurethane foam the section and different parts of the skin, that extended organ of our body that covers us, where a huge of our identity resides. It connects us with the environment, it allows us to feel the world. It is our appearance, the facade we give to others. In Spanish, when we give our all, it means that we “give our skin” (nos “dejamos la piel”). Skin is the hypersensitive matter that we constantly care, treat and scrub. La boca con jabón shows images made whit laser depicting dust particles on a microscopic scale printed in silicone on a towel, and Lavado de imagen refers to cellular organisations, amplifying that invisible scale that intrigues us so much and increasingly frightens us.
We keep exploring ourselves. We begin to know that a large part of who we are is made up of multiple entities, microbes and bacteria that determine many of our biological functions and even our character. In Asepsia, these plastic references to the tissues that shape us invite us to look inside ourselves from abstract images and material bodies. We even perceive them with our olfactory papillae, which will be stimulated in the exhibition through the sponges soaked in different smells of substances related to cleaning and disinfection.
For Manuel Minch, “it is a project that addresses how hygiene constitutes a device of power that normativises and disciplines social conduct, stigmatising and excluding dissident groups and imposing a hegemonic vision of health and wellbeing. This is based on a Western and colonialist logic that belittles and subjugates other forms of cleansing linked to the cultures, religions or traditions of subalternised peoples.
Health has become a tool of power that regulates people’s bodies and behaviours. Hygiene thus becomes an instrument of biopolitical control with economic, political and cultural implications.
Hygiene also has a symbolic dimension that manifests itself in language and culture. Dirt is a testimony to recent history, to the events and transformations that have shaped a society. As in forensic investigation, traces and remains can be used to reconstruct seemingly invisible narratives. Cleanliness, on the other hand, eliminates these marks and generates an illusion of homogeneity.
Aseptic has an aesthetic impact on the perception and expression of reality. Sterilisation generates a social order that annuls the diversity and complexity of the world, imposing a reductionist vision that denies the different, the unknown and the unpredictable. It eliminates the colour, smell and touch of things, creating a vacuum that limits the emergence and creation of other entities”.
Manuel Minch (Santander, 1993)
Licenciado en Bellas Artes por la Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha (2011), donde colaboró con el Museo Internacional De Electrografía, MideCiant (2016) en la Facultad de Cuenca. En 2017 completa en Barcelona el Máster de Investigación en Arte y Diseño en el Centro Universitario de Diseño y Arte de Barcelona (EINA).
Manuel Minch se inscribe generacionalmente en el contexto de una sociedad neoliberal basada en la restricción y el autocontrol. Esto le hace replantear sus capacidades personales y sus posibilidades colectivas, identificando problemáticas en el entramado social que habita. De esta manera, busca formas de actuación que funcionen inscritas en los márgenes, con especial interés en prácticas urbanas que partan de la colaboración y de la generación de comunidad.
Por otro lado, su trabajo utiliza ocasionalmente las prácticas curatoriales para articular narraciones como una metodología liminal de investigaciones artísticas. Es fundador y curador principal de Internet Moon Gallery (2016–en curso), un proyecto de investigación que inaugura exposiciones site-specific cada luna llena, dentro de una dinámica cíclica y produciendo un espacio deslocalizado de diálogo entre artistas, comisarios y visitantes.
Ha participado en proyectos expositivos entre los que se incluyen ARCO Madrid (Galería Juan Silió), Indoor images (Pas une orange, Barcelona), Bahía: El litoral como ágora (Dilálica, Santander), Cargo (Galería Juan Silió, Madrid.), Symbole (Hinterland, Viena).
ASEPSIA
13th April – 8th June 2024
Galería Juan Silió
C/ Sol 45, bajo. 39003 Santander.
Opening Hours: Tuesday – Saturday, 10:30AM – 1:30PM / 6 – 9PM