JULIA PUYO. Lapsus
1 /03/22 - 28/04/22
JULIA PUYO. Lapsus
María Branyas Morera was born in March 1907 and is, therefore, a member of the restricted club of centenarians who survived the First World War. Not so long ago, she also beat COVID-19, the same way she did with another great pandemic, the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918, one of the most devastating in history, along with the Black Death and HIV Aids. It was a very short time ago, a very short period of time. A lapse of time, not to be confused with a lapsus, as a syn-onym of mistake. The COVID-19 pandemic was to be a lapse and is turning out to be a lapsus.
Julia Puyo's exhibition represents a journey that, rather than dealing with the COVID-19 as a lapse of time, with a starting and ending point, deals with the pandemic as a symptom of a sys-temic lapsus.
It begins with Lapsus Temporis, Time Capsule which are two parallel images that are one hundred years apart. A lifetime for María Branyas, but very little time in geohistorical terms.
Julia's artistic strategy of accumulating and connecting existing images led to the creation of this pairing of two snapshots, separated by time and united by the pandemic. Both images por-tray bodies, crowded together in one of them; organized in the other one. Sick bodies lined up in the first image, healthy bodies properly positioned in the shape of a square in the other; like goods in the warehouse of a distribution centre. Healthcare is logistics. Bodies are mass turned into data, contested between the public and private systems. The points of view and the vanish-ing points of the two images are so similar that they produce a temporal estrangement that shortens the historical distance between them even more. And it seems that the events of the past and the present have an all too recurrent and parallel logic, as if history were repeating itself in the form of a farce; of a caricature.
Influenza was wrongfully considered a simple lapse that would get over, like a tsunami that de-stroys everything on the surface but does not affect the foundations. As the virologist Margarita del Val says, it left no literature or art, no legacy, no opportunity to reflect or learn from it. So the Roaring Twenties came along, and we know how that ended. The chicken came home to roost… How many chances are there that the same thing will happen to us? That this pandemic will not rebuild the foundations? That we will go back to what happened before?
What is not told, does not exist, and although knowledge is produced in the form of art, litera-ture, or philosophical texts, it is also important to reflect and talk about it so that it is reflected in public and economic policies, thus bringing about change. And this lack of incorporation into the official narrative is what a 1970s art history textbook, in which the artist has laser-etched Le discours officiel, reflects on. Learning what the pandemic is trying to teach us does not only require a transformation of conscientious individual voices, but a collective and unanimous force. It is not enough to create works of art; they must also be integrated into how we tell the story of this time, and of course this must be translated into a change of mentality, of behav-iour, into a turning point in human evolution. An official narrative that becomes history.
The idea of the confusion in the perception of time that was behind Lapsus Temporis is embod-ied in Time Capsule. Everyone agrees that the psychological sense of the passage of time is different after two years of pandemic, and was altered especially during the lockdown. Julia turns the abstract concept of time into matter, displaying it through the newspaper, which is basically a temporal unit of measurement. And so, she shows us two bundles of newspapers, all of which were published during the two states of alert of 2020-2021. Time thus becomes vol-ume, measurable and accumulative, its rhythm becomes archive. But, unlike the will to recall the memory behind the archive, these time capsules are strapped down, making their interior inaccessible, just as time is irreversible. Julia Puyo collects and gathers newspapers, with a stubbornness somewhere between nostalgia (there are not many people left who buy paper newspapers) and Diogenes. The obsolescence of the information contained in Time Capsule and its materiality are in line with the following piece.
In El tiempo real, thanks to a software tool, all the tweets containing the hashtag #coronavirus are displayed instantly. All the information produced on the social network appears on the screen and disappears as soon as someone else posts something with the same hashtag. The rate at which the flow of information about the pandemic appears intensifies and diminishes according to what the news and the number of people or media outlets posting messages dic-tate. In the most intense moments, this flow of information is so fast that the spectator cannot even read it, its speed is humanly unmanageable. Julia uses this tool to exhibit the rhythm of certain events, not by how they happen but by how they are told, the noise they make, the curve of interest they have for the audience from the moment they start to the moment they die down. In order to understand all this amount of information, we would need to go over it with analytical and big data tools, we would need a lot of discussion and reflection, in other words, time and resources. It also requires an objective that sets the premises for this analysis, but which one? Once again we come back to the same idea behind Le discours officiel: there may be an overwhelming media noise, there may be a huge production of information, data or even cultural productions about an event. But if all this is not digested into a story, all it does is make that, noise, if not directly intoxicate, and therefore, make people feel fed up. The purpose of what ends up being done with all this data, its interpretation, is no minor issue.
This piece also raises a question that the artist will develop in the following piece, Degrowth, which acts as a colophon and as a declaration of intent and political standing: that of materiali-ty as a critical element of the virtual. To call a complex system of physical resources a "cloud" is not only perverse, but also conceals the real agenda of technology companies. A system that occupies real space and scarce materials, whose buildings, as the writer Niklas Maak points out, are constructed in the middle of nowhere to deliberately hide from the public eye.
Yes, the Internet has a huge environmental impact and we are not aware of how much our data weighs in kilos or how much it takes up in square metres. How many servers, cables, satellites, energy and materials it needs. The conflictive regime of raw material extraction, the material conditions of technological production, the ever-increasing demand... all contribute to a supply crisis that is not temporary. Researcher and critical minerals expert Alicia Valero has put dates on this issue: in the last 21 years, we have consumed as much copper as in the entire history of mankind. She argues that we are approaching a raw materials crisis that is not arguable but very real, and that the era of scarcity is already looming. To avoid an irreversible prognosis, Valero bets everything on drastic degrowth: something as radical as sharing, reducing and go-ing local.
Degrowth is a sculpture made of copper tubes, in the exact amount needed to transmit a mes-sage. Copper is a conductor of energy, and it is essential for electronics, telecommunications and transport, which are the fundamental pillars of today's production system.
The question is, can we say the same with less? Is it possible to maintain the benefits of pro-gress while reducing consumption? Well, to start with, the COVID-19 pandemic already put health before economics for a short period time.
“We can't even think of going back to production!” cried sociologist Bruno Latour in March 2020. “The development train is so fragile” he said, “precisely because it is so globalised, and it can be stopped by another global agent like a virus.” Latour suggests that we become, like this virus, globalisation interrupters: that we start to imagine small insignificant gestures or barrier gestures against this system, not to modify it, but to get out of production as the only possible means of relating to the world. And, in line with Alicia Valero's suggestion, to do so, we must start putting on the brakes: “every motorist knows that in order to have the chance to make a big saving steering wheel turn without derailing, you have to slow down a little before…”
This is how Julia Puyo sees it, and so she adds a Coda to this exhibition, a work that portrays two banknotes engraved with the phrases “Too Big to Fail/Too Big to Jail”, an expression that refers to financial institutions that are too big to be allowed to fail and are also so huge and opaque that some of their economic practices go unpunished. This capitalism, the excesses of which go unchallenged because if it falls, it all goes to hell, has become too big for us. But may-be it actually is where we are already half sunk, because also maybe, they have laughed at us and this extractivist capitalism was not the best possible doctrine, given the world it has left us.
The route out of the swamp was pointed out to us by Antonio Gramsci at about the same time as Maria Branyas was watching the 1918 influenza pandemic go by: pessimism of reason and op-timism of will. We have that capacity for action, and not only to act individually by slowing down the pace of consumption, but to demand that it slows down at the macro level, to change the framework of thinking towards a new social pact for the common good (of humans and the Earth). Even if the economic regime threatens us with apocalypse if we let it fall, we have to be wildly optimistic in order to see another possible world. If the system is a lapsus, let's turn it into a lapse.
Pilar Cruz