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Artistes

Blanca Viñas

(Barcelona, Spain 1987)

Blanca Viñas is a wholly Oulipian artist. If the photographic section of the Potential Literature Workshop (Oulipo) existed, she would be its most prominent member. Viñas explores the potential of analogue photography by adopting rules and restrictions that determine her creative process. Just as Raymond Queneau, in his Exercises in Style, presented 99 different ways of narrating the same episode, or as George Perec wrote his novel The Disappearance without using the letter “e”, the most frequent vowel in French, so Blanca Viñas creates her own creative constrictions and determines her own rules of play.

The playful component of the photographic shot that embraces chance and accident, sometimes without technical control of any kind, is an attempt to integrate the realm of the unconscious into her experimental research. This procedure embraces anarchic propositions in the Dadaist tradition.

Although her research is based more on form than on content, it also focuses on the experimental process itself and the knowledge that her results generate. Each new form requires a fresh gaze. According to the photographer herself, her Tratado de fotografía desobediente (Treatise on Disobedient Photography) proposes alternative methodologies that question the limitations and rules that have been imposed on this discipline. Framing inclined horizons, using expired rolls of film and colour filters without criteria, forcing the entry of light or exposing the film more than once; these are some of the interventions that render impossible the existence of the technically perfect, hermetic image that classic photography manuals have always recommended.

leitmotiv

LIFE: A USER’S MANUAL

In Ancient Greece, the word POETRY encompassed today's concept of literature. However, the term POIESIS also meant “to make” in the sense of creating, producing. Etymologically it signified to beget, to give birth.

The poet was “the maker”, the person who created something that did not exist before, and the expression referred to any creative act, whether artisanal or artistic.

Poiesis was a form of knowledge as well as a form of play. “Of fire and play” (Del foc i del joc) as our poet Carles Riba would say.

Taking as its own the ironic title of the novel Life: A User’s Manual by the French writer Georges Perec – a member of the Oulipo (Ouvroir de Litterature Potentielle, or Potential Literature Workshop) group – La Nuu 2022 festival will present a series of photographic works that aimed at stimulating thought on the creative needs of human beings.

Creation is both a biological and a cultural drive, for the brain makes culture and culture makes the brain.

Michael Tomasello spoke of the cultural origins of human cognition and, before him, Johan Huizinga, in his essay Homo Ludens (1938), observed that play is a necessary condition for the very existence of culture.

Unless we develop a playful attitude, culture is not possible, nor is any other kind of creative act.

Fire and play. Knowledge and playfulness. Life: A User’s Manual and other ways of complicating our lives.

According to Marcel Benabou, “rats who build the labyrinth from which they plan to escape”. In short, a poets who set their own creative rules and constraints.

The photographers selected this year are poets (in the most profound sense of the word) who show us the world anew through their images and who give birth to new knowledge.