Then suddenly I threw myself on the playthings, if there were any

Performance 15’ // BBB Art Centre, Toulouse // January 2024

j was seven or eight years old. In Jaureguiberry, a seaside resort eighty kilometers from Montevideo, his parents had built a little shack to spend the summer away from the noise of the city. A square, pink-brick shack, surrounded by pine trees and the calls of Pyrocephalus rubinus.

Martin was the neighbours' son over there. With a screwdriver and a pair of pliers, he had once shown j how to remove the ends of action figures and transplant them, deftly grafting them onto foreign bodies. The arms of a Bat-man in the torso of a Hulk, a green Titan with the head of a Wonderwoman; bare-chested Spidermen with little or big legs, different from each other, hydrocephalic heroines, limping amphibians in polyvinyl chloride or soft vinyl.

A Bat-man’s arms in a Hulk’s torso, a Hulk with a Wonderwoman’s head; bare-chested Spidermen with little or big legs, different from each other, hydrocephalic heroines, lame amphibians in polyvinyl chloride or sofubi. Braves, wounded, amputated, remade, transvestites. The big cardboard box in which he kept his toys resembled a mass grave: monstrous bodies that one wanted to get rid of. j contemplated the box in fear and love, and his love was the slobber of a dog, the ultimate delicacy on which the love flowed from his drooling, apostate mouth.

I shall leave no memoirs

DNSEP (Higher National Diploma of Plastic Expression) received with congratulations from the jury // Performance 30 ”// Palais des arts, Institut supérieur des arts et du design de Toulouse // June 2023

- Hello, today I’m going to tell you about my work...

With this welcome, I begin to read. j is a small A5 book, a tool, a repository of images which, by dint of proximity, I translate into objects, actions on these objects, stories about these actions. Mixed with intimate memories, anecdotes and quotations from History, my past performances are recounted. Descriptions of events themselves sparkle with new images that condense into new objects, new actions, new narratives.

I shall leave no memoirs explores this dynamic of remembrance, the condensation of events into images through narration, of images into objects that become tools, a part of a formal vocabulary that produces new events, in an inexhaustible cycle that constantly recovers and tinkers with its own remnants, the fragments of which remembrance is composed and which narration agglomerates.

This is his garden! Over there in the secret darkness where the spring flows

Performance 20 ” // Room 203, Institut supérieur des arts et du design de Toulouse // April 2023

Good evening H...., V.....,

I finally have time to write to you, first to thank you again for your generosity and also to tell you that - if we ever have time before the end of the year - nothing would please me more than to hear your accounts of this journey I’ve made with you, me from my studio and you in Brittany in the gardens, among the flowers.

Yesterday was my performance whose title, This is his garden! Over there in the secret darkness where the spring flows, is eloquent enough, I think, of the images that have populated my thoughts for over a month. The phrase comes from Danièle Huillet’s translation of Hölderlin’s Der Tod des Empedokles for the film she and Jean-Marie Straub made in 1987. This film and this text tell the story of Empedocles’ double exile: the real exile from his Sicily and the inner exile, his separation from Nature, the muteness of the genies who populate it towards him, his former interlocutor.

In my performance, I wanted to explore the deep bond between childhood and nature. My own memory is populated by plants from the psammophilous scrubland where I spent the happiest hours of my childhood on the Atlantic coast, when plants had no names but a presence that was consubstantial with the act of seeing and feeling.

This performance would not have taken place without your invitation, and I thank you: it is yours.

Best regards,

Joaquin

the foam and slobber

Performance, 20” // for Tremblements 3 0 7, cycle of exhibitions organised by Simon Bergala in the painting workshop of l’Institut supérieur des arts et du design de Toulouse // March 2023

Invited to perform at the Isdat painting studio on March 30, 2023, I wrote la espuma y la baba. Re-enacting the gesture of the Greek painter Protogenes, who, unable to render the foam and slobber of the dog he was painting, threw his pigment-soaked sponge onto the image and succeeded in this gesture born out of impotence, I intervene on a drawing by Edouard Riou, illustrator of the magazine Le Tour du monde, which in the second half of the 19th century devoted its content to the voyages of European explorers to unknown regions fantasized by a popular readership. Riou’s drawing, based on a lost photograph taken by explorer Arthur Thouar, depicts a jaguar hunter from the Gran Chaco region and his son.

The jaguar hunter’s son stands to the right of his father. Dressed in costume by Jesuits, Franciscans, schools, masses and competitions, by the letters of the alphabet and the interjections of the master and mistress, he is barefoot, small, submerged by the fabrics that cover the nakedness of the body that resists in the feet, and the soles of the feet that strive to touch the dust ravished, warmed by the scorching afternoon, strewn with anonymous grasses and lonely shrubs. For this performance, I tried to recuperate Protogène’s gesture on this drawing by Edouard Riou of the New World, following the opposite path: we start from the foam and the drool - from fortune, the happy encounter, pictorial representation and the accomplishment of the work - and move towards the unaccomplished, the drooling, the foamy, that which wildly escapes narratives, paintings and the whims of diacritical signs.

He is sitting, his face is painted / Blue. Bare feet. A suit a little too big. / A hunter and his son face him. / Three buckets and a sponge. To paint green, wash his skin, and paint blue. / He stands up, and passes on his colour to the young boy. The blue moving mask of what is alive / The wanderer advances slowly, retraces his steps. Green water splashes in his path. He hesitates, imperceptibly transforms. A liquid sky that you carry with you, that you put down as you please / A man begins to sing. Suddenly, our protagonist pulls handfuls of mate from his large pockets. Back to the greenery. An offering, a gesture of pure generosity / The sound and scent envelop me. A vestige / I feel as if I've seized a memory that doesn't belong to me; that has only been lent to me. - Zoe Viala

Bye Bye Bird

Performance 20”// Palais des arts, Institut supérieur des arts et du design de Toulouse // December 2022

Bye bye bird / Bird, I’m gone / Find myself home – Willie Dixon et Sonny Boy Williamson II

Under the white neon light of the Palais des Arts, The Burning Bluesman awaits the audience, seated on the floor behind a hot plate, a small square of yerba in front of him. Through the plastic syrinx of the kettle placed on the plate, the simmering water emits a long, courtship-like glissando, a cloud of water vapor floating amid the silence.

The Burning Bluesman stands up, picks up the squash called mate, pushes in the straw called bombilla and drinks from the water he’s put in, the stimulating herbal infusion, the tonic juice. From his pipe he elicits panicked cries of Pyrocephalus rubinus, scarlet flycatcher, churrinche.

Akinetic, sometimes waiting a long time like a gramineae, then suddenly hyperkinetic, on the surface of his body slips dystonia, athetosis, chorea and ballismus, leaving behind a body frozen in the madness of dance. He jumps to the yerba square, Elvis Presley, James Brown, Lola Flores, Josephine Baker, charleston, vaudeville tap, candombe.

The yerba scatters and the dance ends in immeasurable dust and the aroma of elsewhere.

The Burning Bluesman

Performance, undetermined duration // Palais des arts, Institut supérieur des arts et du design de Toulouse // November 2022

In October 2022, I had the idea for The Burning Bluesman. I imagined a character, in the sense given by Susan Sontag - a state of continual incandescence, a person being one, very intense thing - without a personal history, with a burnt, hairless face, features disfigured by the burns of a forgotten event, mute, deaf, a child, an animal, such as the heterocephalus glaber, also known as the naked mole-rat or the hairless mole-rat, a creature extremely well adapted to its subterranean way of life, its visual capacity atrophied in an almost blind exacerbation of its sense of smell and hearing, which resounds with the echoes of the underground galleries. The Burning Bluesman also had to be particularly sensitive to ground vibrations and air currents.

I built The Burning Bluesman’s hairless skin by making a mask of my face, the face I wear and had to shear to make the hairless mask, the swollen skin deprived of somaesthetic stimulation that is now and forever his. I poured latex by heating it with a heat gun, intoxicated by the urine smell of pigmented latex slowly warming in the plaster hole of my head.

The inaugural performance - simply called The Burning Bluesman - took place on November twenty-six, 2022 at the Palais des Arts - the largest exhibition hall in Toulouse’s Institut supérieur des arts et du design. In the dark, illuminated by the light of a small five-watt bulb, a plaster cast of my head rested on a large circle of yerba mate, ilex paraguariensis, in the left-hand end of the Palais, over the arabesques of colored marble slabs. Around the circle, which became a focus of light, two adjacent walls enclosed the participants in a twenty-square-meter area. Between the walls, through a twenty-centimetre-wide slot, participants could see The Burning Bluesman, the rat - mole, hopping, playing guitar, singing, dancing, at once a freak, illuminated by fireflies and lanterns, lost and found, disappearing over the invisible terrain and altering the sound that filled the air of the Palais with distant machines. Only once did he come closer, let himself be seen, gave himself up to the view of those who piled up behind the crack and tried to unravel the strange uniformity of the orange face, the hairless skin of the face, the cadaverous face, soft, neutral. Then he disappeared, jumping like a toad.