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Miguel Ángel Campano: 'El Naufragio' [The Shipwreck, 1984] (detail) 

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  4. ECONOMIES OF THE RESIDUAL. A THEORY OF LANDSCAPE A AS FOLD. By Víctor del Río

ECONOMIES OF THE RESIDUAL. A THEORY OF LANDSCAPE A AS FOLD. By Víctor del Río

On 25 October 1842, Karl Marx published an article in the «Rheinische Zeitung» entitled ‘Debates on the Law on Thefts of Wood’, one of the first of a series of commentaries on the proceedings of the regional assembly of the Rhine Province. The local peasantry had long enjoyed the right to gather fallen branches for firewood in the local forests.

However, under a bill passing through the assembly, it was planned to treat the practice as theft with commensurate penalties. In his article, Marx analyses the proceedings, revealing the cynical self-interest behind many of the arguments put forward. There are elements to be seen here of some of Marx’s later economic and political theory, but in the specifics, the piece describes the mechanisms whereby landowners were striving to enshrine in law forms of dispossession that would involve not only abolishing socially accepted rights, but proscribing poverty and privatising natural resources.

Seen from the perspective of our own globalised world, Marx’s critique seems almost prophetic. However, the episode described in 1842 not only raises some pressing issues that are still with us today; it also holds out a powerful image. In this itinerary, we take that image as the allegorical axis for a new conception of landscape, linked to that relationship with different declinations and distances of the territory that can be recognised in some of the works in the Banco de España collection. The wood gatherers, roaming the forests, their attention focused on the ground, can be used here to illustrate a sort of fold in our surroundings, in the natural world, that is both a gesture of original re-use, but also the sign of a dynamic in which wealth generation necessitates a secondary economy of the residual.

This dialectic between wealth and waste references the very idea of landscape as a colonial structure and a poetic form that alters the long-established scales of western tradition. The relationship of scales in the proximity to the territory, the bodily choreography of labour, the notion of the fold itself and other elements of that scene we can draw from the young Marx’s writings are all echoed in some of the poetics of contemporary art. In this itinerary, they serve as an interpretation of the stratum that reproduces some of the templates of today’s art. In this proposed tour of the Banco de España collection, we focus on those figures whose presence we somehow intuit, conceptually and symbolically, in a selection of works that swing between attention to detail, the poetics of the fragile and revisions of Western aesthetic concepts in new conditions of production and expression. Each one is a new declination, transforming the notion of landscape from a specific geopolitical awareness.

Among the premises for our tour, we adopt the notion of the fold as a structure that is consubstantial with the very idea of landscape. As Gilles Deleuze wrote in his work on the Baroque, the fold is not a limit between two planes, but the movement that brings them closer and makes them coexist without merging. Similarly, landscape can be seen as an adherence that opens up, a surface in a perpetual state of inflection, an intermediary zone in which the territory, the gaze and the body are folded over on one another. Thus, an aerial image taken from a weather satellite and the miniscule closeness of a soil fragment are not distant extremes, but modulations of the same field of perception. Ultimately, they are different degrees of curvature in the surface on which the landscape experience is etched. From that experience we shall also obtain a voice, a narrative thread that is partly a natural invitation from that structure.

The very fact that there is an art collection in the Banco de España is symptomatic of the twin course of capital, which is both patrimonial and symbolic at the same time. Symbolically, this capital is also necessary for the institution itself and for the system of guarantees and the structure of representation it boasts as a reference point of national identity. Just as the bank commissions portraits of past governors as a testament to their time in office, its collection contains other representations that appear to draw our attention away from the illustrious, to concentrate instead on the narratives of more minor characters. And it is this focus on the residual that becomes a form of surplus, giving aesthetic and political meaning to many of these works, and sustaining the legitimacy of the whole. Perhaps it is this new symbolic fold, associated with the value of things, that defines this itinerary, which begins with what the works themselves express — far more eloquently than the words in which we shroud them.

 

Víctor del Río, Doctor of Philosophy and Professor of Art History at the Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED)

MORE INFORMATION

  • Economies of the residual: A Theory of Landscape as a Fold
Mountain and Rubbish
Madgalena Correa: Women
WilliamDoherty_BeneaththeSurfaceI
WilliamDoherty_BeneaththeSurfaceII
Bleda and Rosa: Handbook
Jochen Lempert: Photosynthesising
Joana Pimentel: From serie 17 position P6
Open Sea: Phygital experience - 01
Open Sea: Phygital experience - 02
Open Sea: Phygital experience - 03
Open Sea: Phygital experience - 04
Pieter Vermeersch: Painting #24 (
Mireya Masó: Washing Away Time
Alfredo Alcaín: Autumn Starts in the Forest
Adrianne Gallinari: Landscape
Ínigo Royo: The Human Voice (
Vasco Araujo; The Path
Jorge Ribalta: Carnac, 1 August 2008. History Lesson
Jorge Ribalta: Petit Grand Tour
Axel Hutte: Yuste I
Axel Hütte: Yuste II (Fog)

Montaña y basura [Mountain and Rubbish]

Magdalena Correa

The gold mining settlement of La Rinconada, a site of penitentiary exile, exemplifies the inseparable link between the search for wealth and the proliferation of waste. Wealth and residue are bound together in an inexplicable complementarity that is not just a landscape, but an anthropological fold.

Women

Magdalena Correa

The hunched figures are signs that form part of the structure of the landscape. Since Millet first established the iconographic archetype, they are all gatherers, no matter whether they are searching for gold (like the women here) or firewood like the Rhineland peasants; their structure is a fold, consubstantial with the very idea of landscape.

Beneath the Surface I

Willie Doherty

Secrets tend to take root, covert pits are covered over with dead or living branches, tracing a labyrinthine screen. The secret takes root and points to the unsettling truth interred beneath the landscape.

Beneath the Surface II

Willie Doherty

Secrets tend to take root, covert pits are covered over with dead or living branches, tracing a labyrinthine screen. The secret takes root and points to the unsettling truth interred beneath the landscape.

Prontuario. Notas en torno a la Guerra y la Revolución. I Trafalgar [Handbook. Notes on War and Revolution. I Trafalgar]

Bleda and Rosa

Once again, the peace of the horizon conceals an undercurrent of violence, intombed by land and water. Any history of contemporary photography needs to explore the common thread of landscapes where something is buried.

Zur Photosynthese [Photosynthesising]

Jochen Lempert

Minimal events are as decisive as the jerky, enigmatic narrative of a haiku. Leaves falling from a wind-shaken tree also instigate a residual universe we cannot ignore.

From serie 17 proposition P6

Joana Pimentel

A distant satellite view is another effective demonstration of the specificity of the contemporary landscape in relation to the fold — not because it is antagonistic to a minimal or proximate perspective, but because it underscores the ceaselessness of the Deleuzian concept of rotation.

Mar Abierto 12-13 horas [Open Sea: Phygital Experience]

Javier Nunez Gasco

Like the open sea, these images stand in another place and another time in the ontological fold of value; despite their arbitrary appearance, their digital structure is inalterable. They are portals through which we can access new financial assets, beyond traditional institutional legitimacy.

Mar Abierto 15-16 horas [Open Sea: Phygital Experience]

Javier Nunez Gasco

Like the open sea, these images stand in another place and another time in the ontological fold of value; despite their arbitrary appearance, their digital structure is inalterable. They are portals through which we can access new financial assets, beyond traditional institutional legitimacy.

Mar Abierto 13-14 horas [Open Sea: Phygital Experience]

Javier Nunez Gasco

Like the open sea, these images stand in another place and another time in the ontological fold of value; despite their arbitrary appearance, their digital structure is inalterable. They are portals through which we can access new financial assets, beyond traditional institutional legitimacy.

Mar Abierto 14-15 horas [Open Sea: Phygital Experience]

Javier Nunez Gasco

Like the open sea, these images stand in another place and another time in the ontological fold of value; despite their arbitrary appearance, their digital structure is inalterable. They are portals through which we can access new financial assets, beyond traditional institutional legitimacy.

Painting #24

Pieter Vermeersch

A sequence describing the gradation of colour is a way of depicting time and a narrative of the landscape. It is also a way of representing the perceptual rotation that combines planetary scale and subjective vision.

Washing Away Time

Mireya Masó

Two moments combined in one, a binary sequence and an act of restitution, witnessed through the minimal displacement of the angle. It is a kind of symbolic reintegration of the residual, a remnant, a tree stump which is also the repository of a memory.

Comienzo del otoño en el bosque [Autumn Starts in the Forest]

Alfredo Alcain

Across the arc of possibilities of proximity or distance we experience in this landscape-based awareness, the almost playful manipulation of the processed organic matter, the wood and the painstaking assembly of the individual fragments to simulate the remains of the forest, together form a worthy tribute.

Paisagem [Landscape]

Adrianne Gallinari

A representation of imaginary territories requires the folds to be credible. A drawing in this tangle serves to recreate the echo of maps as containers of habitable signs.

La voz humana [The Human Voice]

Iñigo Royo

The landscape narrative consists of a set of instructions that serves a self-referential story. A very definite story, no doubt, and entirely sequential: ‘first we do this, then we do that…’. It is a tiny story, but from a narratological perspective, it is self-contained.

O percurso [The Path]

Vasco Araújo

The testimonial voice verifies that the landscape is the steps that cross it; it is a path superimposed onto the wandering of the gaze, it is the need to verbalise the barren or the inhospitable.

Carnac, 1 de agosto, 2008. Lección de historia [Carnac, 1 August, 2008. History Lesson]

Jorge Ribalta

Just as we verbalise the inhospitable, we recreate history as a moment of orality, as a story accompanying a walk through ruins or archaeological remains. The documentary establishes a specific narrative of the landscape.

Petit Grand Tour (Serie) [Petit Grand Tour (Series)]

Jorge Ribalta

And that narrative is based on its own archaeological potential. In the fact that every document is a remainder, a form of retrospective — at once phenomenological and ideological.

Yuste I

Axel Hütte

All forests are the same forest; their only identity is the memory we attribute to them. In Hütte’s photographs we return to the place where the memory of the kings left its mute stratum, now transfigured into fog and story.

Yuste II (Niebla) [Yuste II (Fog)]

Axel Hütte

The fog is the matter of that memory. This image could have been taken in a month of September, like that September in 1558 when Charles V died at the Monastery of Yuste.

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