Last night I came across the idea that "third things" are essential to marriages, objects or practices or habits or arts or institutions or games or human beings, that provide a place of joy and contentment. This is the poet Donald Hall, writing a wonderful essay entitled "The third thing" that appeared in the pages of Poetry magazine in 2004.
It will be then that the substance of daily happiness, of that delight, of genuine joy or gratification is not really to find the square of the circle, but to stop looking at our navel (1) and at each other (2), to direct our gaze beyond (3) in the same direction. And I propose you to join this third thing, which is the after-dinner and the bread, which is the result of the collaboration between Liliana Díaz and Xavi Barriga, creator of the Turris bakeries. In the video above you can see them working together. Elda Ortiz's camera is the third thing in this case.
After the great opening of Sobremesa, we will repeat the dinner in private, for collectors of the gallery next Tuesday, July 26th at 7 pm. To also enjoy the time of sharing, conversation, eating bread, bubbly cava...
Our dear people who are already part of the annual affordable collecting program are invited to join this banquet and those who want to subscribe now, too.
👉 Today for me, the third thing is poetry, a wind from the East and the carmine of my dear Sara Agudo Millán, which have brought me to the Cantabrian Sea of my heart, with its tides and all the permissions of Serrat. Tomorrow the Artesantander fair opens, where we present "Registros de recital" (Recital Registers), a series of drawings based on the movement of the lips painted when reciting. This project links the records with Sara's interest in performance and sound media.
The trace of his lips moving is another form that generates the poem when it is said, without being the sound emitted by the voice. This series of 12 sheets is based on poems by Hugo Mujica, the Argentine poet who spent seven years in silence without saying a word, after Allen Ginsberg introduced him to the guru Swami Satchidananda in the 1970s. His silence began a week after attending the Woodstock festival. Hugo Mujica's poetry was born in that silence. As an example, a poem.
The sun goes down
and everything seems to be in suspense
as if to announce
a secret.
It is not enough to close the lips,
silence must be listened to,
to let it tell us,
what we keep silent about ourselves.
👉 This summer, it is a pleasure to have the American artist Lynn Marie Kirby in residence. With her, it is easy to appreciate the third things. With her, everything is learning, openness, connection, possibility. Lynn tries to leave a light footprint. And it is delightful to follow in her footsteps. She tells me how in her projects she traces emotional topographies, how she has based her practice on listening and attention, how she ends up finding her form, how the form appears.... Lynn explores expanded bodily perception beyond the visual and auditory, to involve the audience in the history of particular places. That's why she is walking around the Sant Antoni neighborhood and the city of Barcelona, that's why she is writing a diary during her residency.
In her text "Highway", written in the unusual year 2020 at the request of SFMOMA, it is wonderful to accompany her to her father's funeral, to recognize oneself in the value of the inherited bedsheets, to go for a walk with her in the San Francisco Bay, the Alhambra, Venice, Istanbul.... Or read about the memory of her friend, the painter and poet, Etel Adnan, who also spoke of silence: "Signs are there as an excess of emotion. Signs are the unspoken".
I am very happy and very grateful that Lynn and Lili have agreed to close the season with an international, intergenerational and intersubjective performance on Thursday, July 28 at 7 p.m.I listen, you nourish me proposes a moment of encounter between the two artists in a mutual exchange through words, silence and listening. Come, it will be very special.
👉 Today I say goodbye with a universal process that is usually invisible and happens in silence: that of creation. BECOMING is a short film by Dutch artist Jan van IJken about the miraculous genesis of life. With great microscopic detail, he makes us witness the "creation" of an alpine newt in its transparent egg, from the first cell division to its hatching. A single cell transforms into a complete and complex living organism, complete with a beating heart and bloodstream. It is wonderful.
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