October 24 – January 9. Fermín Jiménez Landa: The Visits

Fermín Jiménez Landa: The Visits
Commencement: Saturday, October 24, 16:00-21:00
October 24 – January 9, Thursday-Saturday 14:00-18:00
Closed November 2nd-30th due to COVID-19

Fermín Jiménez Landa proposes a group of small interventions with the idea of exploring the notion of home, seeking to scrutinize the public dimension of the domestic, as well as the possibilities of touching, of meeting, of winking from the isolated. Jiménez is interested in the looks from a balcony, discrete meetings with neighbours, the smell of fried food, or the sound of a bad song. Invisible but perceptible elements, air currents that filter through the cracks, common airs, domestic spaces that are not so quarantined. The intention is to weave ubiquity into singularity, the political by repetition of the domestic. We work in the contiguous, the adjoining, with the walls, corners, baseboards, edges, sofas and mirrors in times of quarantines, gentrification, airbnb, uber, mass tourism and forced migrations.

At TIER, Jiménez Landa presents The palmist (2013-ongoing), an expanding collection of bars of soap, preserved at their last moment of use, won from the bathrooms of other people’s homes. Poor but precious objects, polished, transparent and fragile, these soaps have no economic value, but rather an intimate one: an extended effort is required to bring these fragile pieces into existence.

In conversation with this work, Jiménez Landa initiates a light bulb exchange with the neighbors of TIER. We ask them for their white light bulbs (to be installed in the space) in exchange for an equal but yellow one to be installed in its place, in their homes in rooms facing the street. If, when walking by the neighbors’, we see a yellow light in the window, we are witnessing the exhibition.

A third work is materialized in a smell. Every day of the exhibition, a plate of prepackaged ramen noodles will be heated. Depending on the position of the curtains of the neighbors across the street from TIER, the smell will be of vegetables or shrimp.

Making performances, public interventions or installations, Fermín Jiménez Landa works in equivalence, inversion and interchange processes that makes us see reality from an equidistant point between absurd and prudent, moving and iconoclastic, empirical and unverifiable. His work has been shown in MANIFESTA 11, Künstlerhaus Bethanien, CA2M, MAZ, Artium, 1646, La Casa Encendida, MUSAC, Travesía Cuatro, and Nogueras Blanchard.

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Amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, new constraints are present. Our public program has grown from social closeness in the formats of encounters, workshops and interventions. We charted a course not to work with exhibitions, instead emphasizing the relations between art’s productive and reproductive elements.

With respect to everyone’s health, and abiding by current laws, we take a step back and look at exhibitions as the most convenient format at this moment. Exhibitions can be a powerful collective experience, but one of their constitutive powers is the contemplation of the artworks by the viewer, creating individual readings in shared constellations. It seems to be the best moment to use that capacity in times of necessary small gatherings. We welcome the format of the exhibition, which brings with it certain expectations. We look to the domestic sphere, which has become an especially important site of production in recent months, as a model for institutions, which always depend on reproductive labor. The domestic model also has many problematic aspects, such as exploitation and unrecognition of labor and rights. It is perhaps in the tension between its conflicts and possibilities where the power of the domestic lies. It is also where the possible paths for the reorganization of institutions can be uncovered.

Titled Maintenance! Domestics as Institutional Becomings, acknowledging the work of Mierle Laderman Ukeles, our series of solo exhibitions and online events for the next months will address the domestic from different vantage points related to institution-making. We are preparing a reader on the topic that will be launched soon as well. During this new program of exhibitions, the previous interventions will remain at TIER. In that way we’ll keep working on the space as an editorial device to be renegotiated, and an ecology of artworks, underlining its conception as an inner garden based on principles of cultivation.

Hygienic measures (updated October 2020): The publicly accessible space of TIER is 35 m², allowing for maximum 5 occupants keeping 1.5 m distance and wearing masks that cover mouth and nose. Guests are requested to individually register for events in advance with the RSVP link (click here). Guests who arrive at events without an electronic reservation will be offered any remaining available reservations, and their contact information will be recorded before they enter the space. Personal data will be deleted after the required four weeks. Hand disinfectant is provided at the entrance. Thanks for helping us protect the health of everyone.

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Existing interventions viewable at TIER:

Luiza Prado de O. Martins, In Weaving Shared Soil, 2020–ongoing
In this long-term project, The Institute for Endotic Research will become home to a small garden of plants associated with revolutionary anti-fascist movements. In promoting this encounter, the garden means to nurture discussions around matters of decolonisation, care and affect, reproductive labor and community-building in times of extreme uncertainty and instability.

Josep Maynou, TIME, 2019
Hanging lamp in the workshop of TIER

Kanako Ishii, Re-Landscape, 2019–ongoing
Painting in four iterations. Intervention in the front window of TIER

Ana Alenso, green and yellow, boom and bust, 2018
Fountain with oil barrel. Intervention in the front room of TIER

Miguel Prados Sánchez and Pablo Ramón Benitez, Planting Concrete, 2018
Concrete planters. Intervention in the front room of TIER

Shannon Garden-Smith, Upright is fine, but downright is where I am, 2019
Microplush polyester curtains. Intervention in the workshop shelves of TIER

Sofia Lomba, Spongy Bodies / Naked Bodies #2, 2018
Painting. Intervention in the bathroom of TIER

The Institute for Endotic Research, Broken Parliament, 2016
Seating and display infrastructure with painted surfaces at TIER

Sara Pereira, Pulso, 2018
Two-channel sound installation. Intervention in the front room of TIER

Tracey Snelling, Interiors, 2020
Intervention in the Manual Model Museum of TIER

Luís Berríos-Negrón, Wardian Table, 2018
Table, blackboard and portable greenhouse

Javier Bravo de Rueda, Ritual Containers, 2019
Ceramics for food presentation and other purposes

Stephen Kent, Were we never fish, 2019
Sculptural centerpiece of the TIER kitchen table

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Publications available for download:

Photos by Benjamin Busch