Architect Mathias Goeritz declared in his manifesto in 1953 that the primary function of architecture is to be emotional and, the museum he founded, El Eco, was born as a living experimental form, absorbing part of the visible or invisible elements that inhabit its surroundings and exert unpredictable forces onto whatever stands next to them. El Eco aimed to make these interactions perceivable, while proving that only by projecting and absorbing emotions can architecture be considered art. The potentially emotional nature of architecture is an influential idea in the work of artist Beatriz Olabarrieta. For her, architecture is a living element in conversation with the objects that inhabit and surround it and her creative process exists in permanent interaction between her architectural and personal environment. In Olabarrieta’s practice every element included in each process is susceptible to evolving in unpredictable directions.
In Proximity, her current exhibition at Shahin Zarinbal in Berlin, there are no large rammed volumes or radical interventions in the structure of space, as was recurrent in previous exhibitions, where massive smashed tubes and architectural alterations came into play. The dimensions of force and propulsion applied to the space and objects have become subtle, and the gestures and processes have been modulated to become interdependent and only evident through the smashed and modified elements. These forces remain invisible in the equilibrium built upon the placement of works in relation to each other and the architecture. The way the objects are disposed of in the exhibition, in frozen motion, seems to reveal a deliberate yet mysterious gesture.
Vilém Flusser describes gestures as “expressions of intention” and connects two specific ones conceptually: destructing and working. In both cases, the gestures “decide that something is not as it should be,” and they seek change in the nature of the things they approach. Regarding the question of whether destruction is more radical than work, he concludes that destruction is not revolutionary because “it says no, but not dialectically.” (1) To be revolutionary, the being expressed needs to be articulated in gestures of work. The subtle destructive forces in Proximity face a similar dualism and ambiguity. They are work, revolution and dialectic, all at once in a way that feels as confusing as poetic.
Olabarrieta often appropriates elements reminiscent of previous events, which are otherwise kept invisible, offering them a focus and thus altering the traditional levels of attention and protagonism. A group of photographs stacked horizontally rests on the gallery’s fuse box, for instance, leaving only one motif in view, which depicts a precarious circuit connected to a cylindrical battery (Photo Photo, 2024). Rather than to represent the images, it seems that the stack’s role is to make the box present, to acknowledge this infrastructural element, otherwise ignored or deliberately hidden. Elements of this kind are mostly relegated to a spatial and conceptual background, unless they blow out.
On the other side of the room, hooked in the gaps between the floor and the wall, a series of four metal sheets rise vertically with the upper part leaning towards the room’s interior. On the left side of the series, a fifth flat, intact sheet stands out from the group, hanging slightly higher on the wall (Bring no clothes, 2024). Part of the same installation is a series of coloured straws, inserted into existing holes in the cement floor, which were drilled for a previous exhibition. The plastic straws contrast with the metal sheets materially, but they are tuned with them in their bent gesture, leaning towards something that might be there, but we can’t see. The thin, tiny, light straws contrast as well with all the other pieces in the exhibition, all metallic, especially Untitled Undecided, 2024.
The 24kg metal ball is placed in a corner of the room. Its discrete position is deliberate. The placement relegates the ball to a secondary level, recalling a door holder and turning the relation between all elements more noticeable. The invisible lines can be traced among the objects since they all point at the others, as well as the environmental aspects around them, similar to Goeritz’s emotional architecture and Flusser’s notions of gestures. The work’s presence ultimately generates the strength of the visual balance in relation to the other works and elements in the room. In Proximity, nothing is what it seems or what it originally was, and everything inevitably draws attention to the gesture that seeks to alter or recontextualize the pieces.
As Tomaso De Luca and Gerry Bibby–authors of the press release–point out, the sculptures are “gently impolite, exquisite and deceitful.” Furthermore, they claim that they have been dispossessed without disclosing more. (2) One would think, dispossessed of what? And indeed, Olabarrieta’s objects are deprived of their original function and operate as reflections of what happens around them, as communication channels. They are not what they seem–perhaps thus deceitful. The deformations they present, their bendings and gestures, are almost calligraphic, possibly hence exquisite. They are communicative, but what they communicate is a language as personal as it is abstract.
Two sculptures made out of bent and assembled metal tubes and mechanisms’ parts (Premonition(s) and Promises(0), both 2024) hang on the wall. The original mechanisms that they are composed of remain unrevealed–perhaps thus gently impolite–and therefore, they open up the mystery of what their function is in this new context. They inevitably recall the invisible mechanisms that make the world function, that make routines and workflows possible, and only become visible and noisy when they stop working. Everything assumed is not granted in the automated reality we live in, which is entirely dependent on mechanisms that are likely more fragile than we think. Only when we understand this, can we understand its importance and the artificiality of the structures that govern our lives.
The critic George Vasey rightly observes the tendency to fall and fail in Olabarrieta’s work–messages that do not find a receiver or are noisy or misunderstood. In essence, these programmed failures allude to the gesture of communicating. (3) Flusser insisted that to understand gestures, one must know their “significance” and he didn’t see a “satisfactory causal explanation” because there is no proper theory for such a thing. We inevitably read gestures–“from the slightest movement of facial muscles to the most powerful movements of masses of bodies called “revolutions,”” but can’t truly interpret in the lack of theory, he complains. With irony, Bibby and de Luca read the intentions and speculate about the pieces themselves. We, the viewers, might not be the ones observing, but rather the ones being followed by the works. “Perhaps they will move as soon as we look away, mocking our presence,” they write. Whether the works make fun of us or not, one way to “interpret” them is in relation to everything else, without expecting to understand or discover a specific 1:1 literal significance.
Flusser rejects intuition as a method of interpreting these expressions and argues that, although people, in prescientific times, claimed they could know “what was going on when they saw stones falling,” they didn’t. (4) Only the ones who possess a theory of free fall “really understand.” His statement is, however, limited to the realm of physics or science, since intuition is the most valuable key to cracking each artist’s intention in the realm of poetry and art. A realm in which rational conclusions and the objective “truth” do not matter and what matters is an emotional, gestural interconnectivity that Goeritz referred to. The moment of epiphany in Olabarrieta’s work ultimately occurs in the very act of reading, tracing relations and, indeed, speculating and solving the riddles about stones falling in ways that hopefully differ from one person to the next.
(1) Vilém Flusser, Gestures, p.56
(2) https://shahinzarinbal.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/Beatriz-Olabarrieta_Proximity_SZ_Text_- Tomaso-De-Luca-Gerry-Bibby.pdf
(3) https://georgevasey.com/writing/im-sitting-at-a-table-on-a-chair-that-is-too-stiff/
(4) Vilém Flusser, Gestures, p.2
Beatriz Olabarrieta lives and works between Berlin and Barcelona. She holds a degree in Philosophy from the University of Deusto, a degree in Sculpture from Wimbledon School of Art in London, and a Master’s in Sculpture from the Royal College of Art in London. Recent solo exhibitions include: I like to watch, EtHall, Barcelona, Spain, 2024; Lagom (de lugar), Okela, Bilbao, 2022; Medium, CentroCentro, Madrid, 2020; Faces, Espai 13, Joan Miró Foundation, Barcelona, 2020; Stay Twice, Bielefeld Kunstverein, Bielefeld, 2019; Ask the Dust, Museum of Contemporary Art of Santa Barbara, California, 2019; The only way out is in, The Sunday Painter, London, 2017; Book! Don’t tell me what to do, Parallel Oaxaca, Mexico City, 2017; Cosmic Clap, MOT International, London, 2015.
