Crafts of disenchantment shows the fragile territory where personal relationships are developed through the metaphorical figures of some supposed officiants that operate on our illusions, guilt or purposes. This way, the intention is to visualize the dull forces that moves our soul and shakes it from blame to hope, from joy to melancholy, in search of the meaning of the strange experience that we call life. This cyclothymic thirst is accompanied and driven by these characters of disappointment, which partly materialize our ineffable and multiple consciousness, partly shape the agonizing interaction with others, that daily hell.
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Casa Bardín, Alicante, del 14 de noviembre de 2017 al 9 de enero de 2018
The kill-joy
There is the kill-joy who focuses on the happiness of others. His attention is directed towards the immediate enjoyment of life experienced by the others, the healthy joy of the unconcerned, and the arranged meeting, where friendship is celebrated. In those moments of enthusiasm, harmony and brotherhood, he finds subtle details that he treasures like as abyssal pearls, in which to find traces of melancholy, hopelessness and justified sadness.
Being lonely by nature, he paradoxically seeks company, not for the pleasure of being with others, but for finding in them fertile soil into which to plant his doubts and sadness. And he finds no greater pleasure than when his comment –sad, pessimistic, disheartening– takes root in the other, dissipating their (according to him) stupid and sterile happiness.
The sower of doubts
Armed with his bundle of readings, underlined books, notebooks, even sound recordings of essential readings, where philosophy coexists with grammar and anthropology with history, the sower of doubts desperately seeks understanding of the world. But his inquisitive nature and his need for absolute certainties sentences him to the paralysis of systematic doubt. A sentence that he lives as such, because he longs to find answers, but these only lead him to other questions and it goes like that until a recurrent spiral freezes him in inaction.
Occasionally, sometimes without even noticing it, he spreads his radical questioning of the world about the daily certainties of others, making them doubt whether the small daily decisions that are made or the attitudes detected in others in the daily coexistence are the correct ones, thus leading them from the anxiety of everyday action to a deeper indecision of an existential character, to a kind of cosmic loneliness of uncertainty.
The statistician of love
Sensitive to the sentimental ups and downs of his fellow human beings, the statistician of love scrutinizes the economy of affections by recording the evolution of romantic relationships. Suspicious of the endurance of passion and of the existence of something similar to eternal love, he measures, weighs, evaluates and records the avatars of the domestic, where the miracle and the tragedy of feelings take place.
As a manager of love, he is attentive to the reproaches, the minor disputes and the daily miseries, as well as to the surprise produced by the signs of affection, the healthy enjoyment of company and the community of souls. He books these signs in pictures, diagrams and balance sheets in which he tries to apprehend the indescribable of co-living and love.
The attributer of meaning
Since the world is a permanently rewritten book, where signs must be fixed at every moment, the attributer of meaning entrusts himself with the endless and sometimes sterile task of defining each symbol, each vestige, each shadow of meaning in the chaos of the surrounding universe.
He pursues the designation and ordering of all the instances produced by the material world or the speculation of the human mind. Naming is one of his strategies, to find the sign that binds the object or concept in thought, but also to find the relation between these concepts, the secret of combinatorics that reveal the ultimate meaning of things: of feeling, of understanding, of being in the world and of taking action.
The hunter of hopes
With hopes and dreams eternally postponed yet never abandoned, the hunter of hopes moves in his state of permanent stalking. In his belief that happiness is solved with a roll of the dice, he searches insistently for that fleeting and unique moment that will allow him to find love, fortune, the light that illuminates his existence. He struggles with being between an intimate feeling of defeat and an intimate optimism moved by the certainty that love and fortune await him in some port or at a bookmaker’s. This paradox of delayed expectancy, in which optimism manifests intensely enough to persevere, but in which, at the same time, despair emerges in the long and unsuccessful evenings of waiting, defines the essentially melancholic character of the hunter of hopes.