by Ana Gisell Robaina Ancízar Far from where? Far
from what? Almost like an atavistic impulse, travellers confront their need to travel. And I mean travellers, not tourists. The latter are those who wish for a brief change of air and whose journey is linked to their return. Their point of reference, their axis is the house. One leaves the house and then one returns to it. It is always there, waiting for them. Travellers, on the other hand, donÕt have a single point in their minds that they can grab hold of. In order to come across as being adapted to social conventions they may also purchase a house, but there is a long way between doing this and having that house as a point of reference to be taken into consideration. Sedentarianism, a fundamental aspect in the emergence of human society as such and also as we know it today, still waits for the proper time to become part of the philosophy of life of travellers. They continue to journey at their own pace and in a way dissatisfaction torments them to a lesser or greater extent. Just like the desire to make love characterizes AlmodovarÕs characters, a desire for permanent displacement is to be found within travellers. They are not in search of the Golden Fleece the Promised Land or the American dream. They simply search. What do they seek? They seek themselves. The down side is that they fail to find themselves. It is very difficult to define oneself without any contextual points of reference. We are the sons and daughters of, the parents of; we have been born in, we live inÉthese contextual points of reference are directly linked to sedentarianism. From millenary cultures on the shores of the great rivers to this day, we have been unable to resist the temptation to feel that we have reached a pleasant place and we wish to remain there, to found a city or a family in this, our place under the sun. Travellers lack the sensation of plenitude that ordinary mortals experience when arriving at a certain city. Or perhaps not, perhaps they also have this feeling, but only in brief flashes. And with the same intensity that they feel it, they forget it, because the desire to push forward is greater than anything else is. But at this point a question arises: is this permanent mobility merely another name for a permanent escapism? The journalist, who is also a writer, writes travel books. In these books he talks about everything. What he sees and also what he feels, reality and his experience of that reality. His life is inextricably linked to his narration, and this makes travel books both personal and irresistible.The story tells us that everything began with the enjoyment, with the pleasure, with the happiness he and his partner found during the journey and where, almost without realizing it, they discovered that their best moments had been spent outside Spain, after which they decided to continue travelling. Travel per se, travel as a means and as a goal in itself was what kept them together a little bit longer until Òin the end, there came the end.Ó Almost involuntarily, JC Peirone has been developed the itinerary of his artistic production from printmaking, installation work, sculpture, the oven, the antipodes, finally arriving at travel. A process that began with art forms as traditional as the methods of Durer gradually became more essential, compacting to the point of repeating the same motif. What remains? An Igloo, a small source of heat and life in the Andean Mountains, in the Argentine Patagonia or the Gobi desert. One must be completely certain about the reason for the journey in order to travel to these remote places. One must be very obsessed with the idea of building ovens to bake bread in order to self-fund such massive projects. Or perhaps such an obsession has nothing to do with the oven itself? The physical outcome of each journey looses interest over time; it is bled of its significance. It is no more than a sculpture. If making art is the reason for the life of an artist, this series of sculptures, which are strewn all over the world is the fate of JC PeironeÕs existence. But, why is it always the same sculpture? What is most important, however, is not the significant but what is signified. Each sculpture is charged with new meanings by each new context, by each new pair of local hands that help to lay bricks, by each new clayey, stony, sandy substrate where the piece is erected, with every new air that envelopes it. Undoubtedly, an oven in the heights of La Paz is different from the oven in Yucatan. Altitude causes a lack of oxygen, the humidity and heat of Yucatan opens up the skinÕs pores, causing a flow of sweat to rush out, the desolation and cold of a Swedish garden in mid winter makes you want to cry. The oven is both itself and its context at the same time. Each new deployment, as if it were a kaleidoscope, provides a new facet, a new image. Every image is unrepeatable and the anguish of loosing something beautiful and unrecoverable makes JC Peirone begin the entire process once and again and again, ad infinitum, because each new object is a new journey and each new journey a challenge. In countless places around the world there are people who need a project to be part of, every new journey also provides this. It provides an excuse to find new friends, people to remember, and energy with which to recompose the tedium that grips man in this post-industrial society. In Swedish, this is called rastl?shet. I cannot find the precise term in Spanish, but it would be something like agitaci--n (agitation) or inquietud (disquiet), that existential anguish of not being comfortable anywhere, evidence of unease, of a nonconformity that manifests itself as a need for movement. Each journey provides a small goal to be achieved, a part that makes one forget the whole. And what is the whole? It is nothing but life, a succession of days that must be filled with events and characters like in a movie script. Some donÕt even realize that they are already in the movie set and that the word ÒactionÓ has been called. There are others who are more laid back and enjoy themselves. These make of their lives a comedy or exactly the opposite, whichever the case may be. But there are also those who do not wish to act, who do not wish to play any role at all, and for whom the very idea of representation is repulsive. The latter find no sense to their lives and with the illusion of finding this meaning they leave, they abandon the set and begin to travel with no predetermined destination. If they are fortunate, they find their lost other half and they are saved, otherwise, they live only the brief flashes of happiness provided by the journey, the rest of the moments in their lives are a grey, amorphous mass and finally, there is conformity. The most beautiful travel guide, the most heart felt was that of Havana. The journalist abandons his prison cell and goes out for a stroll thanks to that guide. That woman staring into space from a half-eroded balcony on El Malecon could have been myself if it werenÕt for the fact that I have been living in Sweden for the past eight years. If it hadnÕt been eight years ago that I met JC Peirone in HavanaÉ Already at that time, I wrote that his work belongs to that breed of alternative artistic production, moderate in scope, whose point of departure was a trivial episode of everyday life made to rise in a spiral of growth. This homage to formal frugality, which is different from minimalism, I maintain until today. In all these years, JC Peirone has done no more than find concrete form to his ideas and he has dedicated himself to his project ÒFar from where?Ó in my opinion, to forget the question ÒFar from what?Ó In any case, everyone finds his or her own way to quiet down Òold panics,Ó and all of them are valid. JC Peirone has been lucky. The parallels and meridians that cover the surface of the globe are many and the crossings between them also, with the antipodes generated almost infinite. Let us hope that he may continue to unravel this tangle of lines and that each new attempt may bring about another journey. Malmo, 2002-10-22 Translation: Paul Beuchat
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