30.3.09

EDUARDO SOURROUILLE

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Eduardo Sourrouille (Ισπανία): Villa Edur
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erva_cidreira είπε...

Eduardo Sourrouille: Villa Edur
La casa que muestro en Villa Edur es mi casa, como era (es) la de mi madre. Se trata del primer legado que recibí de ella, el más valioso de todos: además de un hogar, es un proyecto perpetuo, un motor vital y un reflejo de mi trayectoria.
1
En mi casa, el anfitrión recibe a sus huéspedes a la entrada, donde el recién llegado accede al testimonio de todas las visitas que le precedieron. Todo aquello que se desarrolla en este espacio es celosamente escenificado, así que con idéntico celo se selecciona cada elemento del decorado: objetos, vestuario y escenografía componen en sí mismos, y también de manera conjunta, un sistema de símbolos sobre la naturaleza de su propio contenido.
Uno por uno, el retrato del personaje en cuestión se enfrenta a su situación en el contexto que se creó para él, y que a su vez él mismo contribuyó a definir, y cuyo fantasma aún perdura. Cada retrato establece la fijación tanto de una identidad singular como de un tipo de relación en el que interactúan al menos dos individuos, y que es a su vez reflejo de una determinada experiencia vivida. Toda relación deja en el otro, visible y definitiva como la abolladura de un recipiente de aluminio, una muesca que reafirma la experiencia vital y reconforta (provisionalmente) por constituir la prueba de nuestra materialidad. La necesidad insoslayable de realizar esas muescas implica la creación de toda una red de relaciones, donde tienen cabida (a veces confundidos) la amistad, el afecto, el amor, la fascinación, el deseo...
Junto a la puerta, elevada en su firme y leve repisa, mi madre nos observa y nos invita.
2
Franqueando una puerta se llega al salón, espacio multifuncional y finalmente mágico, entorno en el que se pone en escena todo aquello que puede mostrarse y también parte de lo que no. El salón siempre ofrece, en última instancia, una imagen precisa de lo que su propietario es y desearía ser, de lo que deliberadamente muestra a los demás y lo que no puede evitar traslucir a través de las rendijas del inconsciente.
Por ello, el salón ofrece al visitante una galería de treinta autorretratos que le muestran las distintas personas que conviven en mí, qué es lo puede esperar y hasta dónde llega el rango dentro del cual le está permitido elegir. Desde un punto de vista conceptual, estos retratos encarnan de manera simbólica diferentes facetas del amor y la amistad, que se encuentran contenidas en mí, como en todo individuo.
3
Después aguardan las estancias privadas en las que tienen lugar los procesos íntimos y secretos, las ceremonias que generan al individuo y que después lo modelan, lo acuñan y rubrican para el mundo. En una de ellas comparto el espacio con mi padre, porque allí es donde el legado se transmite a la camada mediante ritos atávicos y recurrentes, tan sencillos que apenas causan dolor. En otra, me atrevo por fin a efectuar la llamada que he aprendido, la que me sirve para invocar al Otro, aunque de algún modo a quien busco sea a mí mismo. Hay en esa llamada angustia y desconcierto, pero también el deseo de establecer una comunicación constructiva, pues también me ofrezco al Otro para que imprima su muesca sobre mí.
4
En la habitación más oculta de todas es donde se desarrolla la intimidad de la persona, lo que uno no confiesa necesariamente, pero que en todo caso ha decidido vivir. Es también el espacio reservado a la belleza que uno ha encontrado por sus propios medios -pues no ha sido revelada por ninguna voz ascendente- y que será por tanto atesorada como propiedad exclusiva de su descubridor.
En Villa Edur habito yo porque habitan también todas las relaciones que cristalizan en torno a mí. Cada individuo alberga un espacio que sirve de escenario para sus relaciones, su familia, amantes, amigos, y para la vida toda que sedimenta a lo largo del tiempo, formando la estructura de su tramoya. Es a ese espacio a lo que suele llamarse hogar.

Ianko López Ortiz de Artiñano para Eduardo Sourrouille (artium.org)

30 Μαρτίου, 2009 13:29
erva_cidreira είπε...

2009 January
Villa Edur. Eduardo Sourrouille

From alter ego to doppelgänger: working notes on friendship
Eduardo García
“One always fails to speak about what one loves,”
Roland Barthes
« Of course, what fascinated me in Neitzsche’s manner and in what he
said was just what was least likely to be put into words between him
and Paul Rée»
Lou Andreas-Salomé
«Each man kills the thing he loves»
Oscar Wilde

Murder has long since ceased be one of the fine arts. Nowadays the streets are full of corpses and wounds are exhibited without shame.
Emotional scars are shown in living flesh with desires dripping from them like blood. Even so we carry on searching for refuge in others and
fleeing from ourselves, while our eyes follow our shadow.
We cannot speak about what we love. We cannot speak about our friends, the object of our emotions. Nonetheless I am writing, and
searching for the words that can bring me close to them. In this solitary state I re-think my friends, I re-think myself, trying not to be too
obvious or to reveal my own mistakes or my pain, and to work on the task of being a friend.
I am not accompanied by the words of others, since they say in their texts that friendship cannot be spoken. Therefore even when it seems
that they are going to write about or analyse this subject their words pass it by or fly over it, taking cover in elisions or paradoxes. The
discourse of friendship is not a fragmented discourse, it is the discourse of silence. But the silence does not constitute a whole; it is beset
by stages.
The first stage: in which we wait silently for friendship.
«One can think rapidly back over the day that has passed. Or think
about old friends that are lost for ever, but there is no escape; the
silence is there. Even the worst suffering, that of lost friendship, is only
a way of escaping.»
Clarice Lispector on silence
«Friendship does not keep silent; it is kept by silence.»
Jacques Derrida “The Politics of Friendship”
In silence. That is how we wait for friends and how we speak to them and of them. But silence ends up being a gag, a wall of self-censorship
behind which the «shameless» world of the emotions shelters. We can name someone as a friend or take away this title, but we refuse to
talk about what this means. Even philosophy has eluded the question of friendship. After the philosophy of classical antiquity, friendship
appeared only sporadically, almost incidentally, in philosophy and was not taken up again until the advent of the philosophy of the negation
of discourse, which broke with the order of things. Until people became aware of the limitations of language they did not dare to speak
about friends again. Friends talk about things they did together or about what brought the relationship to an end. They reveal events and
actions but not the effect this had on them. It is as if they were saying: “Look at it, there it is, although it is not said, this is my truth. We
were such good friends then.”
The discourses of friendship are the discourses of flight. People try to lean on others, but others do not provide a firm enough foundation for
building a suitable refuge. The discourses of friendship always contain a slight tinge of reproach.
We are suspicious of our emotions, and above all of their origins and effects. We show this by making friendship sacred and attempting to
show that it is pure, disinterested and far removed from the dangers, dizzy heights and fitfulness of desire. Perhaps that is why we are
silent; we do not want to make it obvious that desire is one of the driving forces behind friendship. The other aspect of friendship that we try
to hide is the fact that we recognise ourselves in the other and demand that the other recognises him or herself in us in the same way. In
love asymmetry is tolerated, but friendship has to be symmetrical. My equal must be equal to me, measured on the same scale, a same
reflected me with nothing to cloud the image.
When the moment of discontinuity occurs, when the «object» of our friendship goes away or does not respond in the way we believe we
deserve, we feel a sharper pain than in love relationships, a betrayal that is close to fraud. The end of love hurts us, but the end of
friendship leaves us out in the storm. It robs us of part of our security, of one of our selves, and puts an end to a sort of innocence.
Nonetheless, the processes of love and friendship are basically very close to one another; in both of them there is desire and the need to
satisfy this desire, to find a place in the other.

Nonetheless we avoid admitting this desire; our Western emotional education leads us to define friendship as far removed from any kind of
passion, especially any passion that can have a physical component. And friendship does have that, whether it is a tone of voice or a
physical presence. We need contact, we need to have another self close to us.
Some people say that there is no such thing as friendship “at first sight”2 but this argument categorises our ways of loving by pre-supposing
that Cupid’s arrow sparks off all love relationships. Revolutions occur when barriers are knocked down. We venture into new territories by
using names that we know are imperfect and look for new definitions for words that others have used3. Here the only security is that of what
may be4, and our only hold on reality consists in doubting our education and starting a new apprenticeship5 where we can look for new
pleasures and new egos that co-exist within ourselves.
The second stage: in which we come face to face with ourselves.
«Yes, a friend is (…) an other, an alter ego»
Giorgio Agamben on friendship
Attempts to re-think friendship have started from a traditional “Greek or Christian canon”6, in which the aim of friendship was to find
somebody who was the same. This raises the question of how we can conceive of somebody who is the same as us when our identities are
more and more fragmented, and when we ourselves are egos in movement.
Interestingly, the term “alter ego” has been used in psychology since the 19th century to describe schizophrenia, thus situating the search
for these other selves in a hidden and fragmented territory.
Our identities are many and changing. They are made up of past memories and of future hopes. Trying to define them is like putting
limitations on them and anchoring them to a fixed point. This rules out change, and yet it is transformation that takes us back to our
beginnings. Trying to find a reflected image of our identity puts limitations on our friends by assigning them a role based on norms and
dogma, and imprisons them by labelling them as belonging.
Aristotle himself, on trying to propose a democratic system of ethics in “Nicomachean Ethics”, ended up renouncing the value of belonging
and imposing the value of choice. In other words he opted for choosing friends for what they are and not for the place they occupy in
society. In this way friendship broke through the discriminative and excluding boundaries of the clan or the family and imposed limits
defined by the individuals concerned, who accepted each other mutually as friends by recognising the “other me”.
However, at the moment it seems that the ego has been anchored to new barriers. In an attempt to re-define our identities and the social
and emotional relationships that these imply, we have gradually rid ourselves of prejudices about gender, class and race only to create new
groups to belong to that are much more perverse. It often seems that friendship itself has become the key that gives access to many of the
privileged areas of the contemporary world.7
Is this one of the phantoms that distorts the image of friendship? If so, it is not the only one. Our alter egos are often our doppelgänger,
those ghostly doubles that walk side by side with us and examine us out of the corner of their eye. This is the reverse of friendship, or its
obverse; a friend can be a masked enemy, an enemy can start a friendship. Thus any attempt to define friendship is subjected to a play of
light and shadow. Friendship is often accused and put under surveillance because of the suspicion that the search for another person is
also something else.
But perhaps the problem does not lie in defining the nature of friendship. Maybe we should forget what is and think in terms of being
somewhere.8 Friendship then emerges as an event.
The third stage: in which we carry out the rituals.
«Nobody would choose to live without friends»
Aristotle “Nicomachean Ethics”
«I was born to love others (…) my love for others is so vast that I can even
forgive myself with what is left over. Loving others is the only individual salvation
that I know: nobody will be lost if they give love and sometimes receive love in
exchange. »
Clarice Lispector
Friendship, love and life are all experiences that we think of as fleeting and changeable. It seems we can only learn about them in the
moments when we are conscious that they are present, when we are brave enough to feel them and name them.9
They slip by in a sporadic, intermittent way but sometimes we can distinguish them clearly. Perhaps our difficulty in formulating them and
constructing discourses around them is due to the fact that we understand them as a rigid whole, something that is, when we should be
thinking in terms of something that flows. On being defined, friendship slips through our fingers, because its nature is change. Life, love and
friendship are not essences but states. They occur.
Thus we can see friendship as a discontinuous process, which, rather like happiness, is more focussed on its own development than on its
agents. This enables us to state that a person can be happy, or be a friend, intermittently.

But this point of view, identifying as friends movable or even interchangeable individuals, creates a conflict in us. We oppose the stability of
friendship, understood as a sort of emotional handhold, to the intermittent nature of amorous desire, refusing to face the fact that friendship
can also be a form of desire. Our friends are not always there as friends, but they are always the people with whom we can feel friendship,
and therefore we must be capable of invoking friendship, of carrying out the rituals.
I am, when I carry out the ritual that tries to explain me. I am in another when I share this ritual, when I dispel productive time and
construct a scene or an invitation to a party, creating a moment in which we re-write the rules, forgetting received ways of thinking.
Perhaps the challenge is to dare to break the contract implied by the announcement of friendship and be able to feel when we are invoking
it, when we are carrying out the “performance” that enables us to feel we are friends. After this all that remains is to conserve the memory
of that moment, as we do for other moments when we have felt alive or loved.
The fourth stage: in which we look at the photo albums .
“But the great identifying sign that aroused people’s amazement and
commentaries was their strange obsession with not allowing themselves to be
photographed. They were they only people who were not known to have
“posed” and who refused passionately to do so.”
Henry James “The Friends of the Friends”
After this itinerary through some of the stages of friendship (and various living rooms) all that remains are memories. Nowadays
photographs are used conserve some of this remembered experience. Lou Andreas-Salomé herself selected from among her own memories
the moment when ‘Nietzsche insisted on taking a photo of the three of us, in spite of the violent protests of Paul Rée, who all his life
maintained a sickly terror of reproducing the image of his face. Nietzsche, who was intensely happy, not only insisted on doing it, but also
busied himself personally with preparing every detail, like the little wagon (which turned out to be too small!) or even the sentimental touch
of the lilac branch on the wood’.10
If we know that we have carried out the ritual and feel that we have experienced friendship, we want to capture this moment in all possible
ways and say to ourselves “I was there, I was a friend and the friendship was returned.”
A friend encouraged me to write this text and talk about this work of art, which is a series in which he speaks about his friends, documents
rituals, displays different forms of friendship and creates memories.
Eduardo Sourrouille has drawn up the principles that govern his policies of friendship. They can either be understood as geopolicies (which
situates us in a framework of belonging) or as based on the right to construct or choose how to use our own emotions. Choosing, in a
society that is as pre-determined by consumerism as ours, means taking a risk and breaking with forms of emotion that we have
interiorised, and with disciplinary forms of love and friendship that are utilitarian but not necessary.
After encouraging me to write, Sourrouille invited me to his studio to be photographed in a “sitting room” and in a portrait. I do not know
whether I can be identified with one of those “dear friends” the animals, but I am sure that I now form part of the history of friendship that
he has documented and that he forms part of an account that I have tried to write following in the steps of his images and his work and
thinking of my own friends. Interwoven amongst all this there have been shared moments in which we have been able to feel friendship and
which have taken their place in the pages of the album of our pleasures.

ARTIUM de Álava. Centro-Museo Vasco de Arte Contemporáneo
Dpto. de Comunicación • abilbao@artium.org • bgodino@artium.org • Francia 24, 01002 • Vitoria-Gasteiz • 945 20 90 23 • www.artium.org





1 AGAMBEN speaking on friendship in “Profanations” points out that Derrida does not use Aristotle correctly. Derrida bases most of “The Politics of
Friendship” on Nietzsche, consolidating the paradoxes or “monstrous births” of friendship.
2 Maurice BLANCHOT in the chapter on friendship in his book “Friendship” states that he believes we know when friendship ends (and even if it is still going
on) because of disagreements, dramatic moments and unfortunate acts that a phenomenologist would call existential. But he asks whether we know when
friendship starts. For Blanchot, there is no Cupid’s arrow for friendship, but rather a step by step becoming, the slow labour of time. People say “We were
friends and we did not know it.”
3 For Michel FOUCAULT, imagining a sexual act that does not obey man-made or natural laws is not what troubles people; the problem lies in that people
should start loving each other. The institution is caught off balance and shot through with an emotional intensity that sustains it and unsettles it at the same
time. See interviews with R. de Ceccaty, J. Danet and Jean Le Bitoux on “friendship as a way of life” in “The Essential works of Michel Foucault”.
4 The second chapter of “The Politics of Friendship” by Derrida is headed "Loving in Friendship: Perhaps--the Noun and the Adverb" In it he writes that if we
knew it was love things would not change. It is necessary for us not to be completely aware of it if change is to occur. Therefore, for this knowledge to
become real and aware of what it knows, a certain amount of not-knowing is necessary. But it is the not-knowing of the person who says he knows what we
do not know.
5 ‘She did not know if she was her friend. By what mysterious criteria does one know that one is the friend of someone?’ Amélie NOTHOMB, Antichrista
6 According to DERRIDA, op. cit. Emilio Lledó in his text on friendship and memory “Amistad y memoria” insists once again on the fact that, after Aristotle,
friendship and love were largely absent from philosophical texts until the second half of the 20th century (with a few historical exceptions, such as Cicero,
Ficino or Rousseau).
7 Merlin CARPENTER “The Tail that Wags the Dog” A talk given at the Art Centre in Pasadena and published on his web site: www.merlincarpenter.com.
8 ‘Only much later would she understand that being there was also a way of giving.’ Clarice LISPECTOR. “A sincere friendship”
9 According to Giorgio AGAMBEN it is well known that nobody has ever succeeded in defining the meaning of the sentence "I love you" in a satisfactory way. It
could be thought to have a performative character – that is, that its meaning coincides with the act of saying it. See Giorgio AGAMBEN, op. cit.
10 Lou ANDREAS SALOMÉ, “Looking Back: Memoirs”

30 Μαρτίου, 2009 13:32

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