Txuspo Poyo
FOR NO APPARENT REASON
1. On 23 March, 2001 the Mir Space Station was destroyed and fell into the sea from its orbit more than 300 km above the surface of the Earth. The Mir was the first scientific and astronomical research laboratory project in orbit. The Mir (which means Peace or World), built between 1986 and 1996, was at first a Soviet project which, when the USSR collapsed, became an international platform inhabited by cosmonauts as well as astronauts.
The allegorical dismantling of the station which fell from the sky gave way in that same year to a merciless blow to the American financial emblem, the Twin Towers. An orchestrated attack broadcast live by the mass media worldwide whose aim was to destabilize that emblem, drawing new players into the game which have radicalized over time.
2. Several years later, in October 2004, during a compulsory stay –not a residency- of one month in San Eloy Hospital (the former Altos Hornos Hospital), an outbreak of ulcerative colitis triggered –even if this piece of information seems to be anecdotal- the interventions in newspapers; all of it under a state of fasting due to intravenous feeding and high doses of cortisone. The targets of the interventions in newspapers were the social, political and cultural contents, which were re-edited in an intuitive manner, with scrawled and crossed out words directly on the photograph and the text to the image. A year after that incident, the interventions soon focused on legacies extracted from obituaries* in the newspapers, including those such as The Mir Space Station 2001, or the Twin Towers amongst others, which had been kept in a drawer and to which the press had dedicated an obituary all the same.
This action of accumulating newspaper sheets became common practice, with news of very different origins giving the whole a certain sense of constellation, like transferable and interconnected exquisite corpses. These references sent us back to a generational choral and topographical collective memory; some of these legacies project an intense light, as opposed to others, which carry dark shadows with them. This umbrella shelters technological, erotic, military, scientific, poetic, artistic, literary and political contributions, both global as well as local. The newspaper was and is a street format, direct, where the ephemeral character of the news is its leitmotiv. Newspapers invade every corner of a planet which is hungry for the latest news.
I have kept the drawings in the dated paper of the newspaper, thus resisting the transience of its life and its progressive disappearance against digital technologies. This act of resistance of the printed or captured material can also be found in my first works with Celluloid 1993/1996.
3. This publication has made it possible to compile part of the drawings made on newspaper obituaries, most of which were western newspapers, but especially local papers, over the last ten years. The interest of these interventions with pen on biographies is to enhance the value of the uniqueness of this legacy –in past, present and future- which are part of our complex imaginary, both personal as well as collective, in multiple crisscrossed directions, reconstructing a fragile memory to scale; going from the iconic texture of the printed image to the neuronal pulse of what was happening in the world at that time; establishing an apparent historic, generational and interrelated continuity, from which society has been designing its representation models.
*The obituary is the section in a newspaper devoted to death -animal, vegetal, human or thing- followed by a short biographical note. In general, it is about a loss of certain social, political or cultural relevance.