Page 111 - Fernando Sinaga. Ideas K

entire oeuvre is oriented to the abstract conception of a place, or rather a non-place. His is an aesthetic which predefines it as a space of transit, an inhospitable stay, or something he himself has described as a “zone”.19 The images that spring to mind when thinking about
this zone may be among some spatial figures of modernity itself, in
its enclaves, from the autonomy of the “sanctuary” as a monad to the “crypt” as a “cryptic” place. Sculpture, writing, thus become shelter, protection. To inhabit these dwellings would entail remembering Peter Handke, who in Across searched this limit zone of thresholds, inter- mediate spaces halfway between the interior and the exterior, where “doesn’t the archaic usage of the word ‘gate’ evoke the threshold as
a dwelling place, as a room in its own right? According to modern doctrine, of course, there are no longer any thresholds in this sense. The only threshold still remaining to us [...] is that between waking and dreaming, and nowadays little attention is paid to that.”20 In this novel, and slightly further on, the priest character sums up: “the word ‘thresh- old’ embraces transformations, floor, river crossing, mountain pass, enclosure (place of refuge). According to an almost unknown proverb, ‘The threshold is the source’.”21 And this echoes loud and clear when attempting to grasp this sculpture and this thought into a form, or totality. Thresholds that do not prevent the word that echoes from not being that which denotes a place, or rather a non-place that seems
a place; utopia. It is apt to end with what Adorno has to say about
this: “Thinking is not the spiritual reproduction of that which exists. As long as thinking is not interrupted, it has a firm grasp upon possibility. Its insatiable quality, the resistance against petty satiety, rejects the foolish wisdom of recognition. The Utopian impulse in thinking is all the stronger, the less it objectifies as Utopia—a further form of regres- sion—whereby it sabotages its own realisation. [...] Thinking is actually and above all the force of resistance, alienated from resistance only with great effort.”22
19. Zona (1990-1995) is the title
of the Fernando Sinaga exhibition
at the Domus Artium 2002 in Salamanca (from January to March 2006) in connection with which Consideraciones discontinuas y otras conversaciones was published.
20. Peter Handke, Across, London: Methuen, 1986 (orig. 1983), pp. 66-67.
21. Ibid., p. 79.
22. Theodor W. Adorno,
“Resignation”, The Culture Industry, London: Routledge, 1991, pp. 174-175
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Oscillum, 2009-2011.
Aluminio y sosa cáustica, 341,4 16,1 9,7 cm. Colección del artista, Salamanca.
Oscillum, 2009-2011.
Aluminium and caustic soda, 341.4 16.1 9.7 cm. Artist’s collection, Salamanca.