History is replete with myths, legends, and tales that celebrate strange beings, both fictional and real. Rare creatures, considered monsters, banished and forced to exist on the margins. It is there that they can dispose of their bodies with complete autonomy, where they are the radical embodiment of freedom, where they find the possibility of being.
The arts have always shown an undeniable interest in everything that moves within these marginalized territories: the strange, the flawed, the incapable. This has given rise to narrative processes and explorations that show us that the human cannot be separated from the bizarre, the strange, the ugly, and the monstrous. There is no hero without the beast.
But what defines something as monstrous? Isn't it precisely the encounter with "that other," with the diverse or strange, that allows us to embody our own humanity?
Panoptes is an installation-action co-created with visual artist José Herrera, forming Act II of José Herrera's solo exhibition at Galería Bibli (Santa Cruz de Tenerife). Act II was open to the public from November 1st to 8th. The action took place on October 31st, 2024.
Photographs: Sergio Acosta
Video: Roberto Díaz
Comment on panoptes:
" What if the 'monster' looked at me with surprise? What if the gaze of the displaced, the sick, the unsuitable, the strange, were fixed on me? Tonight we are 'that other' on the outskirts. Tonight the urban outside, from the perspective of us, is now an unsafe space. Because tonight hundreds of eyes are watching us from an all-seeing landscape."
Javier Arozena moves within it. His arrhythmic movement is unsettling, fragile, and emotive. He lives within it. He inhabits it, giving it form, and thus laments its loss. He is the guardian who reclaims that physical space, but also that profoundly political one.
Two gazes meet, striking the gallery window: from inside, José Herrera's installation colonizes the space and stares at us defiantly, holding our gaze; from the street, our own gaze, collective, impersonal, critical, hostile, and suspicious. Perhaps because we are uneasy with the suspicion of being that monster trapped in our own eyes. Perhaps because that monster has stolen our privileged place. Perhaps because we don't want to see ourselves in this mirror.
In the cavernous night, the light of the Bibli gallery shines even brighter. We long to stroll safely and confidently through that inner space that has been forbidden to us today.
Ágata Gómez, @mixdegata