EL GENIO SECRETO DEL CATALEJO 

KIKKERTENS HEMMELIGHEDSFULDE AAND

http://elmamm.org/Exposiciones/Detalle/Id/1300

PROGRAMA C

SANDRA RENGIFO

The Secret Genie of the Spyglass (Kikkertens Hemmelighedsfulde Aand)

March – June 2018

Gallery C

*

Towards the end of 2016, in Bogotá, The Lily of the Field and the Bird of the Air (Lilien paa Marken og Fuglen under Himlen) was the exhibition that drew me to the most recent work of Sandra Rengifo. The project was the result of a one-year residency that Sandra carried out in the city. The exhibition confirmed her fixation with Denmark, swayed by the writings of the Christian existentialist philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, author of the book that gave the exhibition its name and guided her Danish journey.

The experience of the The Lily of the Field and the Bird of the Air (Lilien paa Marken og Fuglen under Himlen) was overwhelming. I understood it not as a unit of attempted audiovisual narrative fidelity or a staging of paintings and objects based on Kierkegaard’s text, but as a knot of successive, superimposed landscapes that took me on a journey as spectator from Gilleleje—without ever having been to that town—to the Colombian eastern plains and from there to a more familiar Andean high plateau. The touchstone was the power with which the audiovisual narrative affected through feelings of dispossession and abandon such as, I imagine, artists from other times and other lands came to experience before natural landscapes, particularly the feeling of annulment before the exuberance of nature and the understanding of our place in the scale of life.

**

In the exhibition The Secret Genie of the Spyglass (Kikkertens Hemmelighedsfulde Aand) at the Medellín Museum of Modern Art, Rengifo’s investigation delves deeper into her ties with Kierkegaard while deepening her perception of her environment: she keeps a certain distance from specific cultural elements, puts places and objects in permanent tension, and makes out spaces, experiences, and times. All this is, perhaps, an exercise in what the geographer Yi-Fu Tuan termed topophilia, or the unfinished interpretation of individual perceptions as part of the lattice of collective attitudes and values in specific environments.

Disturbing, suggestive, and demanding images result from the expansive repertoire of visual operations and museum displays the artist sets in motion in this exhibition. However—and although one might think otherwise—this complexity is not associated with unfounded intellectual scaffolding, but rather arises from the cumulative weight of the visual cues that make up the narratives and arguments posted in The Secret Genie of the Spyglass (Kikkertens Hemmelighedsfulde Aand), suggested in a passage in one of the letters that Kierkegaard wrote to Regina Olsen and which is the central reference for this project:

“Thus, in the midst of a friendly chat about the view of the ships, one sees or thinks that one sees, or hopes to see, or wishes to see, or despairs of seeing that which the secret genie of the spyglass reveals to him who understands how to use it correctly. Only in the proper hands and for the proper eye is it a divine telegraph; for everybody else it is a useless contrivance.” 

                                                                     Søren Kierkegaard, Letters, no.17

***

The exhibition is composed of fragments: objects, paintings, silk screens, photographs, written texts, sounds, multiple and simultaneous video projections. That is, it is an image interwoven with many other images that suggest intersections of times, spaces, and artifacts. On the other hand, the repetition of signposts that mark various landscapes points to drifting journeys that overlap over and over again, crossed by suggestions that emerge from the ideas of the Danish philosopher. In this regard, the geography once again underscores that landscapes are always in process by definition; they are potentially contentious, awkward, disordered, erratic, unfinished, and open. By way of example, let us consider this statement by Joan Nogué from the introduction to his book The Landscape in Contemporary Culture, in which he points out that, "for the bourgeois European culture of the nineteenth century, the Nordic lakes emitted tenderness, permanence, or purity; for the culture of the same region in the twentieth century, they represent tranquility, ecological balance, or pollution.”

In the conception proposed by Nogué, the particular places where the ominous events of the country's recent history took place today present things other than those that used to be visible—which, besides, invite numerous interpretations. At this point, it is enough to simply ask some questions that reflect the discomfort and incompleteness of current representations of landscapes such as those that Rengifo registers along the basin of the Mompox marshland (the depresión momposina) in the Colombian departments of Arauca, Valle del Cauca, Casanare, Córdoba, Bolívar, and Cundinamarca. What about other landscapes that for many appeared suddenly thanks to the de-escalation of the conflict in Colombia? How were images of these spaces, stripped of human inhabitants, tolerated for so long as feral magic for the contemplative leisure of the urban? And finally, how has the representation of those spaces and the landmarks that geo-reference them changed?

****

With regard to the artistic operations involved in The Secret Genie of the Spyglass (Kikkertens Hemmelighedsfulde Aand), it is useful to dwell on the idea of ​​fragmentation, which is a—shall we say—"classical" operation in art of the twentieth century that permeated the world, although it may have been the other way around. It is important that the notion of fragment not be reduced to a piece of something else, to a less significant portion of a unit of meaning. It is more productive to think of the fragment as the condition imposed by contemporaneity of what we are, do, and think—that is, a constellation of events that escape any attempt to homogenize history or lend order to our own lives. In this sense, the project that Rengifo deploys in both spaces of Gallery C configures a territory that never comes fully into focus, that is barely whispered, and that does not quite manage to find a location. Moreover, there is no opposition between the statutes of truth that each of the photographs and films of landscapes and objects suggest, nor between their scales and temporalities, attesting to what "must be kept quiet."

The superposition and fragmentation of various landscape narratives are replicated by the structure of The Secret Genie of the Spyglass in two spaces. The exhibition uses constitutive relations between artifacts of museum display, art objects, and set design in order to articulate an ensemble—apparently fragmented and repetitive—that suggests an insistent search for the secret posed in Søren Kierkegaard’s letter to Regina Olsen.

The spatial decision-making for the stage design, as well as the structure described, explain how Rengifo configured the project by having developed the work in several stages over a broad and irregular period of time before presenting the more polished and complex version at MAMM. She involved various collaborators, such as the composer Rune Borup who produced the original score, the photographer Kim Wendt, the set designer René Frisch Rasmussen, and the actor Søren Bang Jensen. She also availed herself of the support of different institutions that at some point in the process offered technical inputs, residencies, and other resources for its production.

Fernando Escobar Neira

Curator