Things We Do for Love is a project commissioned by Arte Abierto to visual artist Erick Meyenberg (CDMX, 1980). It is a video-installation and a large-format sculpture that, both together, exposes the poetics of art and its effect in our perception of reality.
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The exhibition exemplifies artistic practice complexities and its transformations as resulted from the multiple perspectives and actions intervening in its production. For Arte Abierto it is essential to expose the collaborative nature of art through exhibitions that, such this one, turn out from a process and an exchange of ideas, thoughts and feelings.
Inviting Erick Meyenberg to intervene in our space came up from the interest in bringing us closer to common ideas and concepts, transformed into an intimate reflection through art. Thus, what began as a personal path became a project to recognize how we define our gaze and the meanings that we produced from it.
Erick Meyemberg tells us that at the end of his trip to Japan the book appeared The goalkeeper by the Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas. “Literature always arrives like this, untimely, unexpected, forceful, necessary...”
From this book, a new intuition came to give life to his text in the voices Louise Phelan and Francisco López-Guerra, to whom he dedicated this work and are included in Roderic's music.
(1) In those waters, in all waters, [the human being] expects [n] to see his real image reflected. An image that was mutilated thousands of years ago. In that position, nestled next to the coast, we can find them anywhere. Longing for what? What they themselves were.
(2) To live for hate is to live in the service of our enemy. To have an enemy is to be only half of ourselves, the other part is always occupied by the enemy. When you live under the desire to destroy or under the fear of being destroyed, you don't live, you agonize for the long term.
(3) The search for silence, calm and oblivion. Notice that I'm not talking about forgiveness, I'm talking about oblivion. To forgive means to remember and to a certain extent to make a pact with someone we have detested or loved and who has hurt us!
(4) Where we will go will be a place where there is water and land. The reasons are obvious: all beings are amphibians even though some species have suffered serious atrophies. And we are not only physically amphibians, but also spiritually. No one can withstand a single element and those who can live in all of them are undoubtedly the happiest. Take for example, even if only for once, the case of man, a creature, of course, atrophied. Despite living on land, don't you always try to march towards the water? For a reason that they can't explain, but we can, don't they always manage to set off in strange processions to the very edge of the sea? Observe how they all stop at the line where the waters begin and there they remain as if enraptured... What are they looking at? What are they looking for? Why the need to always march from the remotest part of the Earth to the encounter with the waters? They don't know it, but they are looking for themselves. They are looking for the other part that belongs to them, and that they lost out of cowardice or misery, and that belonged to the waters. In those waters, in all waters, they expect to see their real image reflected. An image that was mutilated thousands of years ago. In that position, nestled next to the coast, we can find them anywhere. Longing for what? What they themselves were.
(5) Could they even if they wanted to dry up the sea? Could they do without water and land?
-silence, calm and oblivion-
