I wanna fold you

How to keep a distance while being fully involved? Moderation is the hardest task. The only thing that follows abundance: more abundance. Pull yourself, or some- thing, together—and then let go again. An infinite game built on repetition. A serious game.

When you knead paper pulp, the amount of substance increases. With other mate- rials it is the exact opposite: when set in motion, they shrink. Some become harder when you knead them, others softer.

Words can have a similar quality: they can entail further words, a whole stream, or also, as a speech act, evoke a reality that remains silent. Not losing words can be a gesture of power in the face of communication. Hard directionality, or soft subtext.

Contrapposto.There is always a supporting leg and a free, playful leg. Control, relinquishing control, insistence and letting-go go hand in hand, they need each other. You barely ever stand on two feet at the same time. The body (of work) moves back and forth in between dichotomies. Everything seems to be a matter of balance—in consumption, in desire, in sculpting. Sometimes it remains unclear if the material shrinks or grows, or a bit of both, one after the other—in an infinite state of becoming and dissolving. Repetition is a serious game.

Lucia Bayón’s sculptural elements lean against the walls of the gallery in a half-in- volved manner. They support themselves and each other—and maybe even the walls feel supported by their contact. They loom into the space and into the vague idea of them as self-contained entities.

The visitors are in an installation, an intervention—some of the walls are works made by the artist, others have been there before. Both sides approach each other, pro- trude into each other, opting for a gentle mimicry. They are as subtle as they are intrusive—they hide themselves and something within and beneath them, slightly bashful, and (literally) unfold their invasiveness and insistence precisely in their withdrawal.

There’s something elusive about them, something defiant about them. They’re understated statement pieces (as they say in fashion). Style is conflict, writes Lisa Robertson.

As with blushing, what you want to hide, to cover up, becomes particularly visible in art. Shame always plays a role, fortunately. It’s an initial part of showing some- thing, showing yourself to others. Another matter of balance—somewhere between consolation and exposure. Somewhere in between too much and too little.

Recently, Lucia Bayón integrates collected objects into her objects, plastic bags, scraps of culture. Perhaps they are less ready-mades than unready-mades? Have they been ready to unready-mades ? In fact, initially, they were made as containers only, containers for goods. Always standing in the shade of the commodities they were supposed to wrap and transport.

Even in their capacity to carry traces of something else, the objects become infinite in a certain sense. Leaving traces means that something is finished. Fortunately, a trace rarely remains alone, but is supplemented by further traces, snippets of culture, whose connotation, reference, relation becomes blurred. I learn from an archaeologist: “traces do not exist in history per se, they are constructed by scientists”. They are looking at things only in retrospect.

Walter Benjamin describes how, at pre-school age, when he was just high enough to reach the lowest drawer of the dresser in his parent’s bedroom, he was magically attracted to the sock section inside. Several times a day, he’d push his hands inside and search, pushed his fingers in the sock packets, lingered for a moment and then pulled them out again, half aroused, half satisfied, never fully relieved. There was something promising about inserting his fingers into the self-wrapped balls – the packages looked as if something was hidden inside their curves. In reality, however, they were only knotted with themselves, in themselves.

I read Benjamin’s short stocking anecdote as a commentary on early childhood desire. Within the ball of socks, similar to the mathematical principle of the Möbius strip, the search for the “content” is in vain: the desired interior remains unreachable and desire persists for this very reason. The apparent futility becomes a necessity – redemption is, fortunately, impossible.

In Lucia Bayón’s choreographic intervention, the doors are open and closed in equal measure, as in the comedy in the theater. Even if they remain closed for a moment, it is clear that they could open again at any time. It is clear that something, someone, is acting behind them—that they are activated, even when they remain still, when they pause for a moment.

They say: Humor is a rotating door in all directions. Push and pull. Pull and push. And again. You can hurt yourself seriously when entering a rotating door too slowly or too fast. A joke can be hidden in between the folds of repetition, just like a confession, a soft or a hard one. Repetition is a serious game.

Olga Hohmann