Nobody Special
[About the “Metaphor Activation” of the Human in the Works of Tahiche Díaz]
Fernando Castro Flórez.
“Diaries speak about everything, except everyday life. Newspapers bore me, they don’t tell me anything; what they narrate doesn’t concern me, it doesn’t question me nor answers my own questions or those that I would like to ask.”1
Is clear how ambiguous the contemporary approaches to art are, thus resulting difficult to know if they are different ways of semiotic resistance, postures of outright revolutionary decadence or cynic gestures in which dramatization has replaced any critical strategy. Radical positions eventually acknowledge their parodic structure; Abstract art drifts towards self-satisfied embellishment and Conceptual art many times reveals a capital ideological impotency. Every religion starts off as a worship crisis, as the ghostly dance of a traumatized society; and maybe we are at a threshold where the disintegration of the experiences that create a sense of community are leading to the museographic ritualization of everything that once served as an “escape” (like dancing, which has been reduced by some artists to something worthy of being accepted or introduced into the canonizing and sanitizing institution that is Collecting, or, why not, the turbulence of desire, the abyss of sex turned into banners or slogans, the everyday life open to surprising obscenity); thus acquiring the silence of aesthetic contemplation (which corresponds to a “please don’t touch” sign) the rank of a sentence: we commune with the strictest stupefaction. Ultimately, the problem of contemporary machinations is not amnesia, given that there is nothing worth remembering, but rather disconnection. The Society of Spectacle has pushed art and even critics to the field of bricolage; thus being the materials used to produce the “work” an amalgam of souvenirs that suggest a pathetic ending. 2
Tahiche Díaz establishes, no doubt, a line of resistance against the hegemonic aesthetics of trans-banality by displaying a whole choreography of the body on extreme gestures and poses. There is a manifest and obsessive component in this creator. Tahiche is, as stated by Ramiro Carillo, “a man who builds mechanisms”3 and yet doesn’t rely as much in “technology” as manifests the pleasure of doing things with his hands, of dominating the materials to compose allegories of humanity. As Elias Canetti said, before the primitive man4 tries to give it shape, his hands and fingers should start by representing something (for example, the fingers of both hands intertwined to become the first crate): “One could imagine that objects in our sense of the word, those objects to which corresponds a value because we have made them ourselves, first existed as hand signs.” 5 The hand is the extremity of the thought; what starts to make us “human”. Hand in hand with the works of Tahiche Díaz, we enter a domain that is mainly a unique theatrical construction 6 in which the artist can use sculptural elements, drawings, videos and installations. The exhibition that Tahiche Díaz has presented in Room A of TEA, in Santa Cruz de Tenerife, is an impressive gathering of his artistic works that shows extraordinary creative energy and concern for plastic proceedings. As Ramiro Carrillo rightly points out, this exhibition’s proposal “reflects on the creator’s role as an explorer and on the process of artistic creation as a kind of –or a model for– knowledge.” 7
Tahiche Díaz’ works could be understood as an extensive and relentless construction of a “self portrait”; starting from our awareness that all men live immerse in dramatic soliloquies, they can lead us to the funeral depths of “self representation”, to a finiteness that paradoxically remains definitive before our eyes. “Absence is taken as an opportunity for figuration, as a reason for the portrait. The scenography that embodies its invention is a sentimental device: the image is the retention of the one who’s absent, of who’s going ‘abroad.’” 8 The face is inapprehensible in all portraits; it’s an epiphany that can never been compassed. Variations and small differences refer to a repetitive unravelling, in which there is potential for simulation; this means,alongside the effectiveness of the displacement, the fainting of the disguise’s appearance.9 It could be that the face is nothing more than the backdrop of a scene only shown during intermissions, something subjected to continuous metamorphosis; but deconstructing the face is no easy task, Deleuze reminds us that it can lead to madness. It is not by chance that the schizophrenic loses, at the same time, the sense of the face, of his own and others, the sense of landscape and the sense of language and its key meanings. “Deconstructing the face –as argued on A Thousand Plateaus– is the same as trespassing the walls of the signifier, as going out of the black hole that is subjectivity.” 10 We also know that fantasies rule reality and you can never wear a mask without the flesh paying for it. The other may resemble an abyss, while the symbolic order is concealed by the fascinating presence of the spectral object. “We experience this every time we look into the eyes of another person and feel the depth of his gaze.” 11 It should be noted that, when the subject is too near the fantasy, (self)effacement takes place. What is left is art as aphanisis.12 The eye of the Gorgon connects us, definitively, to dreams and death.13
Tahiche Díaz presents, in a stylized and even deformed way, the reality around him. “The reality that this man works on, that is, the grounds and purpose of his work, is a truthful –and it’s not redundant to say it– reality: his way of approaching objects and facing their representation, the actual construction of his works, seem to be processes that invoke the human condition. His work and his works are experimentation, learning, engineering, machination; they constituted not only a way of being in the world but a way to access and represent reality.” 14 Uneasiness is, as reflected upon by Heidegger, a means of existential self-understanding but, mythically, it is also the body’s imprint, the image that, even leaping into the realm of death, wants to stay alive 15. Tahiche joins the anguish; his obsessive imaginary cathartically captivates the eye. “Through the scopic drive, the subject –Lacan note– sees the world as a spectacle that possesses him. This is what seems to have fallen from him. There he is the victim of a lure, so that what comes out and faces him is not the true a but its complement: the mirror image i(a). The spectacle captures the subject, who rejoices, exults… […] The proof is what happens in the phenomenon of unheimlich. Every time that, due to some accident suddenly provoked by the Other, the image of the subject itself that is reflected on the Other seems to be lacking its perspective, the weft of the chain that keeps the subject captive in the scopic drive becomes undone; and this means returning to the most banal anguish.” 16 Certainly, Tahiche uses the body to express emotional states; in his works everything seems to be “moving”, venturing into melodrama, taking advantage of the grotesque.17
The works of Tahiche, which are characterized by originating, as he suggests, from a “neo-pagan approach”, 18 have a disturbing character. They fascinate and repel at the same time. This is an experience as ambivalent as the dumping of corpses in the northern wall of Athens narrated by Plato, which led the subject to violate the primitive taboo of seeing the dead, and, ultimately, to that central figure of allegories that is personification .19 His aesthetic does not shy away from gesticulation or fears capturing grimaces, thus unfolding with magnificent theatrical tension.20 The artist literally leaves his mark on everything, although he may later transform what he pulls out of the hole into a mask he would like to get rid of. “But also –writes Nietzsche in some reflections about Heraclius– men who have a sensitive heart avoid such a mask, which seems to be cast in bronze.” Maybe the only thing left to do is, instead of babbling, muttering what is essential, drawing and erasing what we desire .21 The dark enigma that may be uncovered has to do with what we would call the “masking of eroticism”. Bataille considers that the dialects of transgression and prohibition are the condition and even the essence of eroticism. What takes place in the violent field of eroticism is the dissolution or destruction of the close minded attitude, which is the natural state of whom plays the game. One of the ways of extreme violence is nudity, which is a paradoxical state of communication or, even better, a tearing of the self, the pathetic ceremony of humanity turning into bestiality.22 In the face of nudity, Bataille experiences a sacred feeling that mixes fascination and horror; in it emerges an equivalence of the act of killing: the sacrifice (vertiginous horror and inebriation). 23 Passion makes us commit to suffering and is, ultimately, a search for the impossible. Passion gives name to a death halo that evidences the continuity of the beings: “The images that excite or cause the final spasm are often murky, misleading: if they show a glimpse of horror or death, they do it surreptitiously.”24 The sphere of eroticism is committed to slyness; death is diverted to the other.
Ultimately, desire is fear. Even though what we would certainly want is to live wonderfully 25. What captivates us is the real thing, which, additionally, eludes any symbolic treatment and belongs to the order of the ineffable.26 The works of Tahiche resist “verbalization”; from their gestural excess we can access an inhospitable dimension. We must remember that, to Freud, the “stronger” example of the unheimlich experience is the (re) appearance (Spuk) of the dead.27 Derrida notes that what he calls “body” is not a presence: “The body is, so to speak, an experience in the sense of the most fickle word (voyageur). It is an experience of context, disassociation and dislocations.”28 As Michaux said,the artist is the one who resists the instinct of leaving no trace, thus setting the materials on a territory similar to a crime scene 29; the trail is what makes a sign but doesn’t get erased; what is never present in a definitive way. In a time when we have assumed, maybe too quietly, what Derrida calls destinerrance, opposing the ideology of the virtualization of the “world”, appear a number of veiled situations, traces of what is different, that push us towards a creative path: “we leave traces everywhere–viruses, lapses, germs, catastrophes–, signs of imperfection, like a signature of mankind on artificial world’s heart.” 30 Art can be not only an obsession but also a viral process, as those figures that multiply in Tahiche Díaz’s works; this disarticulates the supposedly “normal” way of communication.31 The barred subject Lacan has spoken about 32 brings us closer to the desire that can arise from uncertainty, undecidability or even destinerrance. “Therefore –writes Derrida– I think that, like death, the undecidability, which I also refer to as “destinerrance”, or the possibility of a gesture never reaching its destination, is the condition of desire’s movement, which would otherwise die ahead of time.33 Desire is a mixture of enjoyment and dissatisfaction that cannot be resolved as it was an “essential absence”; perhaps the abandonment of the differential suffering has to do with renouncing ourselves and, of course, with the difficulty of establishing an encounter with the other. Lyotard spoke about the postmodern formula, in a conflictive imaginary, as a response left on hold,not excluding the presence of something from the other, “some need and some desire.”34 Tahiche Díaz enjoys his construction of the body, devoting himself, as he confessed, to “triggering metaphors”. 35
In the works of Tahiche Díaz white is the dominant colour, but we can also say they are characterized by the “clarity” of their narrative .36 Through plural and passionate works he reflects on the metropolitan condition, giving to the city and the home a playful or, better still, relational dimension.37 From the contemporary ruins emerges a rare intimacy: “Intimacy is what is left from a community level led to the plains of the city. Remains. Wastes. Fragments. Rags. Smithereens. Scattered.”38 It is about familiarity with what has fallen in a time when we all trace an insurmountable barrier with those excluded. Therefore, when speaking of intimacy, there is no place for a fortified subjectivity or one with a conservative ideology of property: “Intimacy is not the new prison. Its need to make bonds could establish, later, another policy. Today, psychological life is aware that it can only be saved if there is time and space for rioting: breaking, remembering, redoing. From prayer to dialogue, through art and analysis, the main event is always the great liberation, the infinitesimal one that has to continuously begin all over again.”39 The rebellious sentiment, which is often part of the artistic experience, urges to go beyond the everyday flatness to propose other situations, to escape from the logic of equivalence and, instead, pay attention to what is discrete; that is, to the pleasure that is gift and detail. However, in plastic scenarios what prevails is an altered everyday life, in which banality has apparently been sacralised, during this time of suspension that is perfected in what we would called, parodying Barthes, the Xerox state of culture. Baudrillard spoke about a kind of trans-aesthetic of banality, a kingdom of insignificance or the nullity that can lead to the strictest indifference.
Art is thrown into a pseudo ritualism of suicide, a simulation sometimes embarrassing in which banality is magnified. The world has been broken up and each one offers, before anything else, an image of their way to take it or leave it. When drama fails we have fun perverting meaning; after the sublime heroic and the orthodoxy of trauma, appears the ecstasy of the gravediggers or, in other words, a third degree simulation. Contemporary art’s duplicity emerges with its eagerness to assert nullity, insignificance, nonsense, “aspiring to be null when one is already insignificant. Aiming for superficiality in superficial terms. However, nullity is a secret quality that cannot be claimed by everyone. Insignificance –the real one, the victorious challenge of meaning, the stripping of meaning, the art of dismissing sense– is an exceptional quality of a few rare works which never really aspire to it.” 40 In this time of change we endure a convulsive, zapping like pace that hypnotizes us and leads to impotence. Tahiche Díaz reflects through his works on what he calls Habitáculos de la voluntad (‘Dwellings of will’), which speak about absence.41 The domestic stage is, to a large extent, sinister, thus producing a manifest subjective anxiety. The sinister occurs when limits between fantasy and reality fade; as defined by Freud, it is the “intimate-homely” that has been repressed and returns with all the discomfort (familiar yet simultaneously concealed). Every effect of an emotional impulse, whatever its nature may be, is turned into anguish by repression; “the sinister wouldn’t be anything new but something that was always familiar to the psychological life and only became strange by a process of repression.” 42 The aesthetic of Tahiche Díaz captures a sinister, and even cruel, corporality without falling into hegemonic obscenity, trying to never lose the compass of art as an experience; in his models, on one side, he minimizes reality,43 but what he essentially proposes is the display of a “psychic world”. 44
Perhaps art that make us see reality45 has to resort to trompe-l ´oeil, which leads not as much to perfection as it does to scatology, to the wastes46 or, in the case of Tahiche Díaz, to the dynamic representation of the body. According to Lacan, what the subject finds in the (specularly) altered image of their body is the paradigm of all forms of resemblance which will give the world of objects a tinge of hostility by projecting on it the avatar of the narcissistic image, which through the rejoicing effect of its encounter with the mirror, turns into relief for the most intimate aggressiveness. Sometimes we are captured not as much in the reflection as in a transitional object: “a thread from a diaper, a piece of a beloved item that doesn’t separate from the lips or the hands.”47 We return to the notion that detachment and castration are involved in the emerging of the subject. “Castration means that is necessary to reject joy to actually reach it within the inverted scale of the Laws of desire.”48 Some of Tahiche Díaz’s works take us to that dimension of the specular castrating and even to conceiving beauty as something that doesn’t protect us but scares us when reminds us of the image of death. 49 We have to understand the instinct of death as an ontological derailment or a gesture of un-investiture that refers to the dissolution of libido: what dislocates the subject (in the process of their constitution) is the traumatic encounter with enjoyment. The self, specularly constituted, believes that around him there is only a field full of debris and precisely because of this, he is fortified;50 seeing oneself as a unitary subject implies a kind of visual repression. If desire always leads to the impossibility of its satisfaction, then the instinct finds its satisfaction in the same action destined to suppress it: “While the subject of desire is based on a constitutive lack (it exists as long as it is searching for the object-cause which is lacking), the subject of the instinct is grounded on a constitutive excess: in the excessive presence of something inherently “impossible” that should not be there, in our present reality: a Thing which ultimately is, of course, the subject itself.” 51 Tahiche composes an intense reality that represents human complexity through a unique play of specularity.52
While in the Middle Ages the representation of the body only seems to be tolerated if presented undone, “fragmented, dismembered, or either “put back together” or reassembled according to unprecedented procedures.”53 In the Baroque, corporality is something that drips an excess, “the regulation of the soul through “corporal fluoroscopy.”54 There is a neo-baroque side to the works of Tahiche that is close to Michelangelo’s terribilitá. Christine Buci-Glucksmann points out that the baroque thinking is a theatrical interpretation of existence, an ambivalent logic that leads to other thinking, the one pertaining modernity, up to a Reason of the Other which is continuously flooded.55 The Baroque is chaos and excess as is that dark side of modernity which eludes totalizations. The baroque embodies the split: the shadow The Enlightenment wants to corner. The baroque world is about distinction, dualism even;a differentiation which entangles with infinitude: “a difference that continues to unfold and refold on each side and doesn’t unfold one without folding the other on a coextensive veiling and unveiling of the self, of the presence and withdrawal of the entity.” 56 The bodies that appear in the works of Tahiche generate a true baroque commotion. Tahiche Díaz has expressed a strong interest in Deleuzian reflections on the Baroque and has introduced many times fragments of the book The fold. Leibniz and the baroque: “If the baroque has established a totalizing art or the unity of the arts, it has done so firstly in extension, as each art tended to prolong itself and even to get accomplished in the art overflowing next to it. It has been noted that the Baroque often restricted and confined painting to altarpieces, but painting actually got out of its frame and is realized in polychrome marble sculpture; and sculpture exceeded itself and was realized in architecture; and, at the same time, architecture found a frame in its frontage, which is separated from the interior and is instead related to the surroundings in order to accomplish architecture in urban planning. At the two ends of the chain, the painter has become an urban planner, and so we witness the prodigious development of an art continuum in either amplitude or extension: a nesting of frames, each of which is surmounted by a material that goes through it. This extensive unity of the arts constitutes a universal theater that carries air and soil, and even fire and water. In it, the sculptures are the real characters and the city is a setting in which spectators are themselves painted images or sculptures. Art inits entirety becomes a Socius, a social, public space inhabited by baroque dancers.”57 The tableaux vivants of Tahiche Díaz bewitches and disturbs us: we don’t know if the living body has been paralyzed or if it is the statue that will begin to move.58 Nobody knows, said Spinoza, what a body can do.
Tahiche Díaz has presented some of his works as dioramas or sculptural assemblies which accentuate the feeling of strangeness with a bluntly disturbing aesthetic.59 This artist is able to give everyday life an “aura” of strangeness, as he did when he stacked some “book-sculptures” before some beautiful crystal shelves during his intervention for the project La Casa Hilvanada (2003) (‘The Basted House’) and which he entitled Recovecos el enigma (‘Nooks The Enigma’). In a short passage from Poetics, dedicated to the forms of artistic diction, Aristotle defines enigma in this way: “The shape of the enigma consists, therefore, in connecting two impossible concepts by saying words that already exist”. There is a particular density of metaphors in the enigmatic but also an impossible combination or connection, the mixture of literal and figurative meanings.60 It may happen that the expectation of the enigma leads inevitably to disappointment,61 but we also know that, mythically, its solution, the collapse of the Sphinx, has to do with the most obvious answer: mankind. Tahiche Díaz’s body of works is a profound meditation on human existence.62 Even though in the title of his impressive exhibition at TEA Tahiche Díaz introduces the term “forgetful astronaut”, we cannot identify him with this character. On the contrary, the artist wants, in an excessive manner, to preserve the memory of humanity by building some sort of prodigious and fantastic “natural history museum”, 63 a kind of wunderkammer.
We are dominated by the aesthetics of pathos overdose; reality, when turned into a show, enforces banality on a global scale. “If indeed the subject has lost the ability to extend his pretentions and withholdings through temporal multiplicity and to organize his past and his future in a coherent experience, it is hard to imagine how the cultural productions of such a subject could result in something other than “loose pieces” and the practice of what is haphazardly heterogeneous, fragmented and random. These are, however, precisely some of the terms we have used to analyze (and even defend, like its apologist did) the postmodern cultural production.64 The “Victorian” concept of saying everything (perhaps because of a secret intention of cataloguing the perverse and, at the same time, controlling collective delusions) and the vertigo of reality turned into a show, are not related to creative memory. On the contrary, they are symptoms of what we might call, following Heidegger, the abject subjectivity. Tahiche Díaz “mirrors” that deranged world by materializing an absurd world that is marked by an almost beckettian nonsense.
Tahiche Díaz produces works obsessively so he can think about the human condition. “Man, like a good animal which has become aware of having aconscience –the artist writes–, has attempted to solve the problem of meaninglessness (…) constantly inventing symbol systems and philosophies that we call languages and that are based on standards as contingent as necessary in order to survive in the surrounding environment.”65 Tahiche assumes the posthumous fate of art; its “coming after” is, in terms of Hal Foster, a spectral one.66 The absence of self, or rather the absence of myth, leads to a need to accept the ruins.67 In his works cruelty, violence and beauty intertwine, embodied in a very intense gesticulation. Despite all of this (with ample reasons to justify pessimism or to indulge in an apocalyptict one or a nihilism without railings), the artist continues to take a humanistic perspective: “Arts, philosophy and science –he writes vehemently and lucidly– should take command of interpretation, which is emasculated by all those images that, instead of relying on the world, urge the individual to integrate into a structure of mercantilist sects. The artist must narrate the world over any genre or classifications that alienate communication by using visual allegories and creating spaces open to the existence of the spectator. His objects (coming from hermeneutics and going only towards mayeutics) should allude time and be mediators of the individual’s experience; they (should) develop an exercise of freedom and ability to choose halfway between information and structure management while channelling energy and inviting reflection and the use of allegorical ability to represent and account for the world, and to participate in life taking action in society (without actions), just like any other worker who shouldn’t drift in heights. They (should) communicate by all means and through hybrid properties, represent ideas and solve theoretical problems through a conceptual connection between the materials and the methods suitable to the shape, searching for solutions to the imperative bad taste which is crushing us and providing a product to society and a sense to the ineffable without thinking about absence and encouraging the impossible.”68
The essentially corporeal fantasies or oniric processes of Tahiche Díaz have something of a strict double bind, a quagmire in which what can be seen is disputed through “familiar” bodies.69 “The Longing, vertigo, anger, rejection or dreamlike weightlessness latent in the works –wrote Jorge Mora about the works Tahiche Díaz made around 2006–, are imbued in almost tangible dwellings, which belong, however, to the sphere of our dreams, of our perception and of our unconscious state.”70 If his installations are metaphors of a deranged world, they are also promises of something different, as if those sounds of the paradise to which he refers in the title of his intervention in TEA were forcing us to maintain a cheerful tone or, at least, to not bury hope. Life as staged in the models and sculptural compositions of Tahiche Díaz, with impressive dynamism and great gesticulation, can be disconcerting to us,71 but will certainly never leave us “indifferent”. His extremely passionate sculptural allegories are largely a “diary of the everyday life of the artist”, 72 which has the ability to question us and draw out a revealing image from our “forgetfulness”. This body of works, which unfolds as an exploration and, at the same time, as a labyrinthine story,73 invites us to confront the many traces of the body with a titanic aesthetic effort that is implied in any construction of a self portrait.74 Trough an “archaeological” space we begin to feel that what we see affects us, that all these dynamic forms of corporality mirror us but, in reality, “are nobody special.”75 The enigma is still standing and the doubt of what a body can do persistently resonates.
1 Georges Perec: “Approches de quoi?” in L´infra-ordinaire, pub. Seuil, Paris, 1989, pp. 3-4.
2 “For the first time, arts from all civilizations and periods can be known and accepted all altogether. It’s a ‘souvenirs collection’ of Arthistory that, if made possible, would also imply the end of the art world. In this Age of museums, when there is no artistic communication,all former moments of art can be equally acknowledged because none of them suffer from the loss of their particular communication conditions withintoday’s general loss of communication conditions.” (Guy Debord: La sociedad del espectáculo, pub. La Marca, Buenos Aires, 1995, fragment 189).
3 Ramiro Carrillo: text in Tahiche, Ateneo de La Laguna, 2005, p. 8.
4 Tahiche Díaz has pointed out, in a recent text he wrote to go along with his exhibition Cavernario (‘Cavernous’), that in this times of “aesthetics of superficies” we have to deepen and delve into an attitude that takes time and commitment: “When delving into this uncomfortable perspective we can perceive authenticity. This imaginary of transits is an invitation to deepen into the cave and is inspired by the concerns of those who first created images and meanings in caves. As a way to delve into the self, its fears, longings, desires, and in order to express those feelings to narrate the world. This human from the caves penetrated the depths of the earth as well as his own mind. He gave into exploration. Because in this times we need to ‘go deeper’, know about the magic of the particles that interact behind the scenes, get back to science and the transit of the cave,feel and find albino resources that are dormant, which haven’t yet seen the sun and claim to exist, and claim… like new ideas we have to bring to light”.
5 Elias Canetti: Masa y poder, vol. 1, pub. Alianza, Madrid, 1983, p. 213.
6 “I would like to narrate this theater of consciousness as interplay between the reason and unreason of a hominid nature that learns and adapts to thesurroundings by solving theoretic/practical problems; all of this as an attempt to balance its selfish passions with objective social morals (…). But, although all of our historic memory provide us with solutions, it’s necessary to forget (…) and play to construct the world according to new needs. We are all it was but also what will be.” (Tahiche Díaz: text in Tahiche, Ateneo de La Laguna, 2005, p. 44).
7 Ramiro Carrillo: text in the leaflet of the exhibition Tahiche Díaz. Arqueologías del astronauta desmemoriado y sonidos del Paraíso, TEA, Santa Cruz de Tenerife, 2015.
8 Jean-Cristophe Bailly: La llamada muda. Los retratos de El Fayum, pub. Akal, Madrid, 2001, p. 106.
9 Cfr. Gilles Deleuze. Diferencia y repetición, pub. Jucar, Madrid, 1988, pp. 460-461.
10 Gilles Deleuze y Félix Guattari: Mil mesetas. Capitalismo y esquizofrenia, pub. Pre-textos, Valencia, 1988, p. 191.
11 Slavoj Zizek: “La sublimación y la caída del objeto” in Todo lo que usted quiso saber sobre Lacan y nunca se atrevió a preguntarle a Hitchcock, pub. Manantial, Buenos Aires, 1994, p. 145.
12 “There is a gap that will forever separate the phantasmic core of the subject from his most “superficial” symbolic and/or imaginary identifications –I would never be able to fully assume the phantasmic core of my being: when I get too close, the aphanasis of the subject takes place: the subject loses its symbolic consistency and disintegrates. Perhaps the forced actualization of the phantasmic core of my being in real society is the most humiliating form of violence, which undermines the very foundation of my identity (my ‘image of myself’).” (Slavoj Zizek: El acoso de las fantasías, pub. Siglo XXI, Mexico, 1999, p. 197).
13 “The image of dreams elevates, therefore, during sleep. It is the hypnosis of Hypnos. And if intermittent sleep produces a dream, what “great sleep” will not produce the eternal dream of death? What magnificent dream will not reside in the grave? Alcman’s Fragment 3 is even more precise regarding the similarity between the effects of this three difficult to discern potencies: “Through desire (póthos) that breaks the limbs (lysimelés) women have a gaze that melts even more (takerós) than Hypnos and Thanatos.” That erotic, hypnotizing and “thanatic” gaze it’s the gaze of the Gorgons.” (Pascal Quignard: El sexo y el espanto, pub. Minúscula, Barcelona, 2005, p. 77).
14 Ramiro Carrillo: text in Tahiche, Ateneo de la Laguna, 2005, p. 8.
15 “The fable [of Higinio, incorporated by Heidegger in Being and Time] turns Uneasiness into an allegory and tells that, one time, when she was crossing a river, she saw clayey mud and took a piece to give it shape. While she was thinking about what she had modelled, Jupiter arrived. Uneasiness asks him to give a soul to her clay figure and he does so. She also wants to give it her own name but Jupiter forbids it and insists to give it his name instead. While they argue, Terra, Mother Earth, rises and demands that it’s named after her because that’s precisely why she gave away part of her body. They decide Saturn should act as a judge and he gives an equitable sentence: ‘You, Jupiter, should recover the soul after its death because you have provided the soul; you, Terra, should receive again the body since you provided it; Uneasiness, however, given that she was the one who first thought of the image, has to possess it while is still alive. But regarding the present discussion about the name, it should be named homo since it was made from humus’.” (Hans Blumenberg: La inquietud que atraviesa el río. Un ensayo sobre la metáfora, pub. Península, Barcelona, 1992, pp. 165-166).
16 Jacques Lacan: De los Nombres del Padre, pub. Paidós, Buenos Aires, 2005, p. 81.
17 “In the manner of Greuze, T. Díaz makes sculptures full of movement [in the sense of a trail or stroke that leaves an action behind it]; the characters that inhabit his sceneries compose symphonies of poses and passions, attempts and actions, wills and decisions. And, like Greuze’s, the figures of T. Díaz are made with almost obsessive attention to detail, depicting accurate portraits of actually real characters that give to his works a quiet special carnality; this is so unusual in Contemporary art that the appearance of his works seem to approximate kitsch style. However, his images are closer to the grotesque tradition of Goya or Ensor; they constitute a group of cruel, tender, wild, laughable stories that are epic or pathetic. They are portraits of the greatness and anomaly of the spirit, which speak about the complexity of the human soul and its contradictions.” (Ramiro Carrillo: “Al arte por amor” in Cristina Gámez y Tahiche Díaz. Pliegues y parábolas, Galería Cuatro Tablas, La Laguna, 2006, p. 7).
18 “Through a neo-pagan approach, the artist tries to convey infinity using analogies and plays god to give meaning to something that doesn’t have it.” (Tahiche Díaz: text in Tahiche, Ateneo de La Laguna, 2005, p. 44).
19 “When a human being has a taboo idea or desire and can’t elude that creation of his imagination, “the immediate consequence [says Freud] will surely bea partial paralysis of his will and an inability to make decisions about those actions for which love must provide the driving force”. Nowhere is thisparalysis more evident than in the story of Plato about an ambivalent emotion and focused on the “taboo of the dead”, the primitive prohibition to seethe dead: “The story [as we can read it in Republic by Plato] tells that Leontious, the son of Aglaion, coming one day from the Piraeus, noticed several bodies lying on the floor, on the outside of the north wall, the place for executions. He felt a desire to see them but also fear and disgust towards them. For a while he hesitated and covered his eyes, but finally desire overcame him; he opened his eyes and ran towards the bodies saying: ‘Look, unfortunate ones; be full of this beautiful view’. When the state of paralysis breaks, consciousness splits. Leontious separates the actions of his body from those of his authentic self; he attributes the guilt of the act to them and, to do so, uses a main figure of allegory: personification.” (Angus Fletcher: Alegoría. Teoría de un modo simbólico, pub. Akal, Madrid, 2002, p. 220).
20 “The (sometimes bizarre) experience reminds us of Goya and his playful, ironically brutal, heartrending details and understanding of the human condition and its finitude. Along with the situations and manners of Louis David and clear allusions to theater, which has been quiet visual since the 17th century, they serve the artist as giants, although he later gets rid of that time’s mythological themes to search for a current vocabulary.” (Jorge Mora: “Desde la naturaleza” in Cristina Gámez y Tahiche Díaz. Pliegues y Parábolas, Galería Cuatro Tablas, La Laguna, 2006,p. 12).
21 “[…] the name “mystery” itself (from mu, which means being with the mouth close, a muttering), that is to say, the silence, hasn’t been so far sufficiently explained. If it’s true that the original form of the mystery experience wasn’t a knowledge but a suffering […] and if that pathema was essentially excluded from language, was a can’t-say, a mumbling coming from a close mouth, then that experience was quite close to men’s experience of childhood.” (Giorgio Agamben: Infancia e historia, pub. Adriana Hidalgo, Buenos Aires, 2003, p. 89).
22 “The decisive action is to get naked. Nudity is the opposite of a close state, in other words, the state of discontinuous existence. This is a state of communication that reveals the search for a possible continuity of the self beyond refolding upon itself. Obscenity means the disorder that rearranges the states of the bodies in accordance with self-possession or affirmed and durable individuality.” (Georges Bataille: El erotismo, pub. Tusquets, Barcelona, 1985, p. 31. Cfr. Mario Perniola: “Entre vestido y desnudo” en Fragmentos para una historia del cuerpo humano, Parte segunda, pub. Taurus, Madrid, 1991, pp. 245-246).
23 Cf. Georges Bataille: Las lágrimas de Eros, pub. Tusquets, Barcelona, 1997, p. 244.
24 Georges Bataille: El erotismo, pub. Tusquets, Barcelona, 1985, p. 370. We must also remember the radically ambiguous character of fantasy images’ horror in Lacanian theory: “Horror isn’t just reality that can be tolerated and has been concealed by the screen of fantasy –the way it focuses our attention imposing itself as the unknown and, for that very reason, as an even more important point of reference. The horrible can by itself function as a screen, like something whose fascinating effects hides something else “more horrible than horror itself”, a primordial void or antagonism.” (Slavoj Zizek: El acoso de las fantasías, pub. Siglo XXI, Mexico, 1999, p. 16).
25 “Perhaps in this context the need to live wonderfully instead of live in fear has a different meaning. Is not difficult to acknowledge that we usually move in a sphere where our life comes from fear. It molds our everyday life filling it with mediocrity, which can take the form of an apparent peacefulness. The terrible return of the unrepeatable in our existence keeps life wonderful. But the terror of living is, at the same time, joy and happiness to do so. It isn’t about the fear of everyday life’s events but the simplest terror, the wonder of existence. Hence Hegel marks the culmination of modernity with the compliance of another way to silence wonder. And, at the same time with it, the cry of the need for freedom.” (Ángel Gabilondo: Mortal de necesidad. La filosofía, la salud y la muerte, pub. Abada, Madrid, 2003, pp. 160-161).
26 “The roman taedium lasted until the 1st century. The dreariness of the Christians appeared in the 3rd century. It reappeared with the form of melancholia in the 15th century. It came back in the 19th century with the name of spleen. And it returned in the 20th Century with the name of depression. They are just words. A more painful secret inhabits them. It belongs to the ineffable order. The ineffable is ‘real’. Reality is nothing more than a name for the most intense detumescence in the depths of detumescence. Actually, there is no other language besides language. And everything that is not language is real.” (Pascal Quignard: El sexo y el espanto, pub. Minúscula, Barcelona, 2005, pp. 171-172).
27 “Derrida has made some extraordinary considerations regarding this (re)appearance, which has a lot to do with the mind. Spuk has todo with the uncanny; is the repetition that properly terrorizes us: Welcoming, we said, but apprehending at the same time through the anguish and the desire of excluding the stranger, of inviting him without accepting him; this is a domestic hospitality that welcomes without welcoming the stranger but the stranger within instead (das Heimliche-Unheimliche), which is more intimate to itself that oneself; the absolute proximity of a stranger whose power is unique and anonymous (is Spuk); a neutral and nameless power, that is to say, unspeakable, nor active or passive, anon-identity that, without doing anything, invisibly occupies spaces that ultimately are neither ours or his.” (Jacques Derrida: Espectros de Marx, pub. Trotta, Madrid, 1995, p. 192)
28 Jacques Derrida: “Dispersión de voces” in No escribo nunca sin luz artificial, pub. Cuatro, Valladolid, 1999, p. 159.
29 Cf. Ralf Rugoff: “More than Meets the Eye” in Scene of the Crime, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1997, p. 62.
30 Jean Baudrillard: “La escritura automática del mundo” in La ilusión y la desilusión estéticas, pub. Monte Ávila, Caracas, 1997, p. 85.
31 “In part, the virus is a parasite that destroys and introduces disorder into communication. Even from a biological point of view, this is what happens with a virus; it derails a communication type mechanism, its coding and decoding.” (Jacques Derrida: “Dispersión de voces” in No escribo sin luz artificial, pub. Cuatro, Valladolid, 1999, p. 153).
32 “Lacan’s ‘barred subject’ isn’t ‘empty’ in the sense of some psychological-existential ‘emptiness experience’ but of a dimension of self-referential negativity that eludes a priori the dominium of the lived experience’s vécu” (Slavoj Zizek: El espinoso sujeto. El centro ausente de la ontología política, pub. Paidós, Buenos Aires, 2001, p. 276).
33 Jacques Derrida: ¡Palabra! Instantáneas filosóficas, pub. Trotta, Madrid, 2001, p. 42.
34 Jean-Francois Lyotard: “El imaginario postmoderno y la cuestión del otro en el pensamiento y la arquitectura” in Pensar-Componer/Construir-Habitar, pub. Arteleku, San Sebastián, 1994, p. 38.
35 “And in this game of shifting boards, sometimes even sinning by unleashing my hand, thus resulting in irreverent finishes, sometimes needing circus pirouettes, I displayed the characters to activate metaphors… This gave rise to a Decalogue of rhymes and grimaces…” (Tahiche Díaz: “Diario…” in Tahiche, Galería Artizar, La Laguna, 2009).
36 “As usual in most of his personal works, ceramic is deliberately stripped of color. White dominates the piece not as part of the language of dreams oras a structure of thoughts but the precise layer for a clear story.” (Jorge Mora: “Desde la naturaleza” in Cristina Gámez y Tahiche Díaz. Pliegues y Parábolas, Galería Cuatro Tablas, La Laguna, 2006, p. 11).
37 “His works allude to the city as a stage for life, although to the city that Italo Calvino said wasn’t made of physical components “but relations between its space measurements and the events of its past”. Indeed his sculptures are made of relations with which he doesn’t intent to reflect the material but what animates it.” (Ramiro Carillo: text in Tahiche, Ateneo de La Laguna, 2005, p. 9).
38 José Luis Pardo: La intimidad, pub. Pre-textos, Valencia, 1996, p. 291.
39 Julia Kristeva: El porvenir de una revuelta, pub. Seix-Barral, Barcelona, 2000, p. 98.
40 Jean Baudrillard: “El complot del arte” in Pantalla total, pub. Anagrama, Barcelona, 2000, pp. 211-212.
41 Habitáculos de la voluntad (‘Dwellings of will’) comes from this general idea of “house” and draws from the concept of model that existed before the Renaissance, when an excessive rationalization of something that had previously been full of “aura” took place; this houses were receptacles for the worlds of the mind. The dwellings presented in this exhibition are a hybrid between rational concepts about space and their poetic interpretation. As they are bodies/containers, they are presented through constructions that signify by being absent. To represent (subjectively) the living space, the house/the city/the world intertwine to represent, with models, plans and maps experienced spaces. (Tahiche Díaz: text in Tahiche, Ateneo de La Laguna,2005, p. 17).
42 Sigmund Freud: “Lo siniestro” precediendo a E.T.A. Hoffmann: El hombre de arena, pub. José de Olañeta, Barcelona, 1991, p. 28.
43 “The modeller doesn’t need to experience the world; only to know its dimensions and appearance in order to reproduce them on a scale. Since the model reduces the complexity of the world to a problem of formal construction, it can be considered as an image not responsible for reality: a representation that doesn’t require a commitment to what represents. In that sense, the model is an immature entertainment; it recreates life scenarios but doesn’t neglect the value of experience. It is the representation of reality as an insignificant distraction.” (Ramiro Carrillo: text in Tahiche, Ateneo de La Laguna, 2005, p. 9).
44 Tahiche speaks about how in his exhibition Habitáculos del alma (2004) (‘Dwellings of The Soul’) he made a tour through the different representations of space, “investigating its various Historic aspects (with models, plans and maps) and applying them to create and provide a personal view of the surrounding space and, by poeticizing this excessively rational representations, I designed a series of game boards of what I had experienced. I was especially interested in the concept of ‘houses of the soul’, and, building on the general idea of ‘house’, I intended to recover the concept of model that existed before the Renaissance, when an excessive rationalization of something that had previously been full of ‘aura’ took place; this models-houses were receptacles for the worlds of the mind.” (Tahiche Díaz: “Diario…” in Tahiche. Diario de rimas y muecas, Galería Artizar, La Laguna, 2009).
45 “Concept, therefore, of an art outside of the visual sphere which makes “true reality” visible; a heart of the visible. Two purposes: to show and define reality, which condense into an art that makes us see what is real.” (Gérard Wajcman: El objeto del siglo, pub. Amorrortu, Buenos Aires, 2001, p. 199).
46 “The trompe l´oeil forms a natural alliance with all kinds of detritus: leftovers, shells, peelings, the wear and discoloration of paper and other objects that are occasionally used and looked at –documents, letters, pens, combs, watches, glasses, coin books–. In this eclipse of human attention, objects reveal their own autonomy: is like they were the ones who create the world and the unconscious strength kept within their seemingly humble appearance instead of their human users. Hiper-realistic trompe l´oeil imitates and parodies the feeling of reality in such a way that makes us question where the place of the human subject in the world is and whether this place actually exists. The trompe l´oeil provokes vertigo and commotion during the split second it releases its effect: is like we were seeing the appearance the world could have without a subject perceiving it; the world minus the human consciousness, the appearance of the world before we entered it or after we had abandon it.” (Norman Bryson: Volver a mirar. Cuatro ensayos sobre la pintura de naturalezas muertas, pub. Alianza, Madrid, 2005, p. 149).
47 Jacques Lacan: “Subversión del sujeto y dialéctica del deseo en el inconsciente freudiano” in Escritos, vol. 2, pub. Siglo XXI, Mexico, 1989,p. 794.
48 Jacques Lacan: “Subversión del sujeto y dialéctica del deseo en el inconsciente freudiano” in Escritos, vol. 2, pub. Siglo XXI, Mexico, 1989,p. 807.
49 “It may happen that we look at something beautiful and think it could harm us. We admire it without joy. By definition, the word ‘admiration’ isn’t adequate: we venerate something which possesses an attraction that can become an aversion. The word ‘venerate’ refers to Venus. It also refers to the word Plato used when he refused to distinguish beauty from horror. We get, therefore, close to the French verb méduser: that which prevents us from running from what we should, and makes us venerate our own fears, forcing us to prefer our horror over ourselves, even at the risk of dying.” (Pascal Quignard: El sexo y el espanto, pub. Minúscula, Barcelona, 2005, p. 73).
50 “The formation of the self [je] oneiric symbol is a fortified field, or even a stadium, which contains, from its inner arena to its fence, gravel outline and swamps, two opposite battlefields where the subject insists on searching for the haughty and distant inner castle, whose form (sometimes juxtapose in the same script) staggeringly symbolizes it” (Jacques Lacan: “El estadio del espejo como formador de la función del yo[je] tal como se nos revela en la experiencia psicoanalítica” in Escritos, vol. 1, pub. Siglo XXI, Mexico, 1989, p. 90).
51 Slavoj Zizek: El espinoso sujeto. El centro ausente de la ontología política, pub. Paidós, Buenos Aires, 2001, p. 329.
52 “As a link with real space, the fictional dimension itself disseminated metaphors created from the play itself, like free-standing figures that played to make analogies between art space, spectator, the representation of the spectator and the representation of the representation’s space (as an specular image).” (Tahiche Díaz: “Diario…” in Tahiche. Diario de rimas y muecas, Galería Artizar, La Laguna, 2009).
53 Jean Clair: Elogio de lo visible, pub. Seix Barral, Barcelona, 1999, p. 211.
54 Jacques Lacan: Aun. El Seminio 20, pub. Paidós, Buenos Aires, 1981, p. 140.
55 Cfr. Christine Buci-Glucksmann: La raison baroque. De Baudelaire à Benjamin, pub. Galilée, Paris, 1984.
56 Gilles Deleuze: El pliegue. Leibniz y el barroco, pub. Paidós, Barcelona, 1989, p. 45.
57 Quote from Gilles Deleuze: El pliegue. Leibniz y el barroco, included in the catalogue Cristina Gámez y Tahiche Díaz. Pliegues y Parábolas, Galería Cuatro Tablas, La Laguna, 2006 and in the invitation card for the exhibition Tahiche Díaz. Parábolas y Retablos, Casa de Los Coroneles, La Oliva, Fuerteventura, 2008.
58 “In Elective Affinities, Goethe provides a good description of the practice of tableaux vivants among aristocratic groups of the 18th century; this was a domestic amusement that consisted in representing famous scenes from History or Literature with the help of living people who remained still on a stage, that is to say, resisting the urge to move. The practice of tableaux vivants is part of the long, ideological tradition of conceiving statues as frozen, immobilized, living bodies whose movements have been paralyzed (usually as a result of an evil spell). The immobility of the statue therefore implies an infinite pain: the object petit that emerges from the rigidity of the living body and its fixation in the form of a statue usually is a miraculous sign through which the statues make feel their own pain; it’s either the drop of blood from the garden statue in Gothic novels or the tears miraculously shed by all respectable statues of Virgin Mary in Catholic countries. The last advocate of this series is the street comedian who dresses like a statue (usually of a knight in armor) and stays still for long periods of time: he only moves (makes a sign) when someone throws money to his plate.” (Slavoj Zizek: Lacrimae Rerum. Ensayos sobre cine moderno y ciberespacio, pub. Destino, Barcelona, 2006, p. 246).
59 “Alluding to their narrative character and adding movement to these spaces resulted in disturbing scenes with a certain tinge of strangeness where metaphors about life and art were shown. Referring to Juan Muñoz, Antony Vidler coined the term ‘vagrant surroundings’ to allude those places that reject the fireplace and home topics in order to express the uncertainties of a no man’s land. For him those strange architectural spaces are “the most direct equivalent of otherness in the modern self (Anthony Vidler, The Arquitectural Uncanny).” (Tahiche Díaz: “Diario…” in Tahiche. Diario de rimas y muecas, Galería Artizar, La Laguna, 2009).
60 “The enigmatic sense manifests itself, therefore, as a formally undecidable meaning, which involves two levels of the enigmatic: on the one hand, the simultaneous presence of two alternating and reversible forms of understanding (literal/figurative) that can be similarly but inversely applied to expressions produces not only the ambiguity and ambivalence of the statement but also its incomprehensibility, the closure of understanding after finding connections between undecidable meanings; and, on the other, the realization of that semantic undecidability is limited by the detection of two possibilities of understanding whose formal coexistence turns to meaninglessness or contradictory sense.” (José M. Cuesta Abad: Poema y enigma, pub. Huerga & Fierro, Madrid, 1999, pp. 34-35).
61 “The most inherent character of the enigma is that the expectation of mystery it provokes is at all times frustrated since the solution is precisely to demonstrate only the appearance of the enigma existed.” (Giorgio Agamben: Idea de la prosa, pub. Península, 1989, p. 91.
62 “We can say that the body of works of Tahiche Díaz speaks about the soul, the breathe that animates our individual existence and the myriad of human relations. His works flow between the dimensions of individual experience and social space; they are reflections on our living space, which is why they convey so much movement: these sculptures –models–machines are images of a movement which measures life.” (Ramiro Carrillo: text in the leaflet of the exhibition Tahiche Díaz. Arqueologías del astronauta desmemoriado y sonidos del Paraíso, TEA, Santa Cruz de Tenerife, 2015).
63 “This narrative logic of the exhibition refers to the concept of museum, particularly to the Natural science museum as a rhetorical framework to show the results of knowledge. The artist uses this rhetoric to arrange the works across exhibition rooms.” (Ramiro Carrillo: text in the leaflet of the exhibition Tahiche Díaz. Arqueologías del astronauta desmemoriado y sonidos del Paraíso, TEA, Santa Cruz de Tenerife, 2015).
64 Fredric Jameson: “Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” in New Left Review, n° 146, July-August, 1984, p. 71.
65 Tahiche: text in Tahiche, Ateneo de La Laguna, 2005, p. 44.
66 “To describe this ghostly persistence in Contemporary art, Foster revisits some of Jacques Derrida’s considerations: ‘After the end of History, the spirit returns as revenant’, says Derrida regarding ‘hautology’, which he considers ‘the dominant influence on speech today’; ‘Configures both a deadman who returns as a ghost and a ghost whose expected return is repeated again and again’.” (Hal Foster: “Este funeral es por el cadáver equivocado” in Diseño y delito, pub. Akal, Madrid, 2004, p. 135).
67 “The absence of God is greater: it is more divine tan God (hence I am no longer my own self but an absence of self: I expected this sleight and now I am immensely jovial). […] lasting or fleeting myths get lost in the absence of myth, which is their duel and truth. The decisive absence of faith is the unwavering faith. The fact that a universe without myth is a universe in ruins –reduced to the nothingness of things– by depriving us of it,equates the deprivation with the revelation of the universe.” (Georges Bataille: “La ausencia de mito” in La felicidad, el erotismo y la literatura. Ensayos 1944-1961, pub. Adriana Hidalgo, Buenos Aires, 2001, p. 77).
68 Tahiche Díaz: text in Tahiche, Ateneo de La Laguna, 2005, p. 45.
69 Family is determined as double bind; this a term coined by Gregory Bateson which refers to the issue of two contradictory orders that cause the subject to go crazy while in a situation of double quagmire: “Now, which family doesn’t emit double binds? Which father holding his child’s hand doesn’t say ‘I am your best friend’ and, at the same time, with his free hand threatens: ‘if you are not polite I will slap you’? That is the exact definition of double bind.” (Gilles Deleuze: Derrames. Entre el capitalismo y la esquizofrenia, pub. Cactus, Buenos Aires, 2005, p. 60).
70 Jorge Mora: “Desde la naturaleza” in Cristina Gámez y Tahiche Díaz. Pliegues y Parábolas, Galería Cuatro Tablas, La Laguna, 2006, p.12.
71 “The figures of a model are not actors, not even spectators but above all users of a planned system to manage our presence in it. Contemporary life can be more frequently perceived [and hence represented] as a diorama in which people are nothing but dummies who complete the staging of Contemporary life. And we must acknowledge that the show seen that way is tragic and, at the same time, graceful.” (Ramiro Carrillo: “Cuatro addendas a las fabulaciones de Tahiche Díaz” in Tahiche. Diario de rimas y muecas, Galería Artizar, La Laguna, 2009).
72 Tahiche Díaz: “Diario…” in Tahiche Díaz. Diario de rimas y muecas, Galería Artizar, La Laguna, 2009).
73 “In this regard, the conception of the artistic process as an expedition or an odyssey results in a particular interest in fables, in narrative; showing the results of his work as a novel or as a story developed over time which invites interpretation following the logic of time and apparently –and only apparently– heads towards a conclusion.” (Ramiro Carrillo: text in the leaflet of the exhibition Tahiche Díaz. Arqueologías del astronauta desmemoriado y sonidos del Paraíso, TEA, Santa Cruz de Tenerife, 2015).
74 “Undoubtedly self-portraits are extremely controversial in our time: “At this fin de siècle our self-portraits don’t seem to stick or develop. Why? Maybe because the fury of acceleration and the fatigue of deceleration that are usually felt at the end of each century, and even more profoundly in the nineties, make us desperate for new bodies. Perhaps because our resemblances are as fragmented as our lives. Maybe because our false intimacies immerse us in a kind of narcissism: always in love but displeased with resemblance. Perhaps because we are shooting caroms within a ‘fictitious culture’ whose obsession with representing a role leads to a portrait which is as unstable as conventional. Maybe because in the midst of the display of electronic spectacles everything we do with ourselves seems suspicious. Maybe because the best we can do in a world of simulations is adopt a dishonestly generic face.” (Hillel Schwartz: La cultura de la copia. Parecidos sorprendentes, facsímiles insólitos, pub. Cátedra,Madrid, 1998, pp. 83-84).
75 “Module characters are nobody special (even though they come from a realistic and semi-blurred figuration); art is the protagonist, they are rather spectators or troupes, a mix of loved ones that inhabit my memory, heirlooms from the Baroque that sometimes feed on icons and Art History references, always crossing the labyrinth of art and life, in which we don’t often know where the stands and the tracks begin.” (Tahiche Díaz: “Diario…” in Diario de rimas y muecas, Galería Artizar, La Laguna, 2009).
