From series 17 proposition P6 (2007) is a photograph from a series where Joana Pimentel takes different birds-eye views of the Earth. It seems to be a satellite shot, an image similar to the views of the planet used for weather forecasts in the media. As in many of her previous pieces, the artist has included a text or caption over the cloud formations covering the Earth, which here reads ‘stop-ping the ro-ta-tion of the ro-ta-ta-ble hou-sing (breath)’, along with musical notation.

In 2008, Joana Pimentel published a signed, numbered monograph with the same title, 17 Propositions. In it she builds up a tale using a number of images from the NASA website (earthobservatory.nasa.gov) and phrases from Ludwig Wittgenstein, the philosopher who radically changed the foundations of philosophy in the 20^th century. In the book, Pimentel takes the reader on a 17-day journey through successive ‘imaginary relations’ with the philosopher’s words.

At the time of a solo show entitled ‘En circumstancias normales’ [‘Under Normal Circumstances’] at the Ibero-American Museum of Contemporary Art in 2007, she returned to Wittgenstein and, in particular, to his essay On Certainty: ‘Wittgenstein considers the concept of ‘under normal circumstances’ as a linguistic fallacy. We believe that under those (normal) circumstances what we assert and what we hold as true is in fact so, but the philosopher challenges that certainty: the misconception emerges exactly from our conviction about the truth’. That text was the starting point in the exhibition for considering the problem of the misleading perception caused by the production of images, its role in the construction of the notion of ‘reality’ that we handle and the parallelisms established with the concept of what we understand as ‘true’.

Beatriz Herráez