PROOIMION

3 speakers, 4 prints and a emakimono.

ROCAMNESIA exhibition , Centro Huarte, HUARTE (Navarra)
11/03/2022 – 03/04/2022

from latin ‘prooemĭum’ and this from greek ‘prooímion’ –‘προοίμιον’– meaning literally  ‘poem or song the precedes’. Synonym of prologue.

Contemplating and trying to understand the immensity of time unfolding ahead is perhaps the most violent feeling we face a flysch. Our senses and concepts of time are completely nullified when we try to read beyond decades, centuries, even millennia. It is a perspective of prehistory that is impossible to understand, a temporal measure that seems to escape any possible story, any narration. And the absence of any possible witness, other than a gigantic sheet of stone that emerges and disappears at the same time, erases any possible notion of scale.

[…] Xabier Erkizia adopts a completely different aproach, in which the impotence facing a natural phenomena imposes a material lucidity: immensity is elusive. Zumaia and these cliffs represent the image of amnesia, the reading of deep time given by the layers of the flysch disintegrates the temporal conception of the human scale. The observation of the immemorial, inscribed in the strata, refers  to the idea that the limitation of human perceptions makes our bodies fragile. Through Prooímion, he translates this sensation of vertigo. He chooses to invite the viewer to an attempt at sound excavation, as if it were an archaeological exploration of the environmental change that iridium is witness to. It is through listening that he activates the memory of the immense meteorological forces and immerses us in their terrifying fragility. In this universe of chaos, an object appears in a display case like an antique. It is a 6 meter long partially open parchment, which is offered as a metaphor for the unfindable and illegible immensity.

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