Georges Didi-Huberman (Saint-Étienne, France, 1953) is, without a doubt, one of the most influential art historians of our time, but he is also a philosopher in whom anthropological concerns are latent, capable of bringing into play psychoanalysis to account for “what we see and what looks at us.” Student of authors such as Benjamin or Brecht, Pasolini or James Turrell, Carl Einstein or the photographs of the Auschwitz concentration camp and with a large number of books translated into Spanish and numerous recognitions, from the Adorno prize in Frankfurt to the Gold Medal of the Círculo de Bellas Artes de Madrid, Didi-Huberman has also set a standard with his exhibitions, especially with those he has held at the Reina Sofía. This is the case of ‘Atlas’, which has its continuation in ‘The moved air…’ [título tomado de un verso del ‘Romance de la luna, luna’, del ‘Romancero gitano’ de Lorca]. Organized by the Reina Sofía and the Center for Contemporary Culture of Barcelona (CCCB), the exhibition will be open to the public from November 6 to March 17, 2025. It brings together three hundred works by 140 artists. Among them, Dalí, Giacometti, Goethe, Goya, Victor Hugo, Óscar Muñoz, Miró, Picasso, Rodin or Ensor.Related News standard Yes Valle-Inclán’s esperpento, a legacy that is still valid Natividad Pulido The Reina Sofía frees it from customs and explores its revolutionary potential in an ambitious exhibition Extremely friendly, Didi-Huberman has agreed to talk about theoretical and philosophical issues that are developed through his fruitful works. — I would like to remind you of a quote from Walter Benjamin that, perhaps, is related to your own way of working: «Working method: literary montage. I have nothing to say. “Just to show.” To what extent is your own way of thinking also a process of montage?—I totally recognize myself in that phrase of Benjamin’s that I know very well. I would add that it is very important to mount and not just show. Let us remember that ‘The Book of Passages’ is a fascinating montage. Showing and mounting are two fundamental operations and, in my opinion, it is essential to do it from ‘little things’, always taking the details into account. We can start from the ‘minimal sensoriality’ or from minimal historical circumstances. This is what I did, for example, from Warburg’s ‘Atlas’ and now, in the case of the exhibition ‘The moved air…’, taking a verse by Lorca as a starting point. It is, therefore, about putting together very modest things. Capa, Picasso and Man Ray Above, ‘The Madrid neighborhood of Vallecas (1936-1937), by Robert Capa. Above these lines, on the left, ‘Study for a Weeping Head I’, by Picasso, preparatory drawing for ‘Guernica’, 1937. On the right, ‘Prou del Pilar dansant’ (1934), by Man Ray Museo Reina Sofía / Man Ray 2015 Trust, Vegap, 2024—The place where ‘the good God’ is, in the small details.—It is true that we have to understand what those details are. That is a great question that involves methodological issues, such as that search for the ‘key’ of the painting, something that Daniel Arasse admirably developed when he considered that the meaning of an entire painting could be understood in a small detail. This is not about proposing a Sherlock Holmes-style decipherment, this is a debate that I have had with Carlo Ginzburg. Can we equate that detail to the Barthesian ‘punctum’, as proposed in ‘The Camera Lucida’, versus the ‘studium’? ‘ or the general conception of the work?—The ‘punctum’ is very important. Barthes puts all the emotion in the ‘punctum’. I am interested in indicating that we not only attend to these “punctums”, there are also ‘zones’.— Theodor Adorno has a text titled ‘The essay as form’ and you have spoken of the exhibition as a ‘spielraum’ (a space of play). . In what sense can the samples you have curated be understood as purely ‘essayistic’?—Completely essayistic and also assumed to be modest devices. I do not proceed with an axiomatic method, from a generality that seeks ‘illustrations’. Mine is a heuristic method, everything flows from the logic of the essay. The Adornian text that he mentions is referential, so it also has a link with Benjamin. In short, the image has a capital importance in the essay. The dialectical image comes to the fore. Very close artists, in whom I absolutely recognize myself and with whom I have worked, like Harun Farocki, create works that are essays.— He held the exhibition ‘Atlas.’ at the Reina Sofía. How to carry the world on your back?’ (2010) and I ask myself how you currently see the issue of the atlas in relation to a world in which queries are made to Wikipedia or artificial intelligence. That exhibition was in this museum programmatic in relation to archival obsession. What do these ‘curatorial archives’ contribute today in the time of algorithmic driving and the stagnation of social networks?—This is a point of discussion that I have with Manolo Borja-Villel. Certainly, Wikipedia or the Internet are the great archives that, like all archives, are places of power, as Foucault said. But the atlas is not the archive. It is enough to think of Warburg to make this very clear. The atlas is a montage that raises theoretical problems, but it is also an extraordinary work of thought, what it creates is a constellation totally different from what the archive does.— It seems as if the archival compulsion, in the field of art, had derived in bureaucratization and the cataloging passion was a system of constriction, the space or domicile, as Derrida described it, of the archons.—We have to go beyond Derrida’s ‘archive evil’. I myself have worked in archives, among others those of Charcot, those of Benjamin or Brecht. We should consider archives as Foucauldian heterotopias. The archive is paradoxical because it also allows the generation of resistance.—His exhibition ‘Soulevemants’ at the Jeu de Paume (2017), later mounted in institutions such as the National Museum of Art of Catalonia and in institutions in Mexico, Brazil or Buenos Aires, closely related to the book ‘Desear disobey’ (published by the Abada publishing house in 2020), it leads me to ask you if in our world disobedience ends up being neutralized in the museum showcases. —We are, pardon the pun, between neutralization and brutalization. In the last book I published on the ‘critical gesture’ I point out that there are two coexisting regimes: one is that of neutralization or consensual and the other is strictly brutal: how we are, for example, forced to speak out if we are in favor of Israel or Gaza. We have to recover the ‘subtle gestures’, we need to have ‘tact’ in our ethically just critical gestures.— The theme of the exhibition that presents the moved gesture at the Reina Sofía or, as I would like to propose, playing with ideas of Franco ‘Bifo ‘ Berardi, breathing, inspiration and conspiracy. How can we understand emotions in a world like ours in which they are subject to systematic political manipulation, with a proliferation of melodrama and a rhetorical abuse of ’empathy’?—We cannot obsess over current events. Nor do I believe that our era is more ’emotional’ than that which, for example, Jesuit sermons controlled. We have to find, in the manner of Spinoza, the place in which emotion manifests itself without becoming a mechanism of domination, perhaps in what I call ‘gestures of bifurcation’. ‘Romance of the Moon, Moon’, from the ‘Gypsy Romance’ ‘, by Lorca ABC—He has a passionate and emotional bond with Spain. His books have been references for many researchers in our language. I would like to know how that relationship arose that now continues in the Reina Sofía exhibition under the pretext of Lorca and the ‘duende’.—My best friend was a gypsy, Miguel Calderón, a subproletarian who liked to play the guitar. His obsession was Sabicas. He transmitted to me his love for the flamenco guitar during the years when I was studying philosophy, tense so to speak between Spain and Germany. Years ago Aurora Fernández Polanco invited me to give a seminar in Cuenca, where I met Juan José Lahuerta, who is also a great flamenco fan. Then I met Pedro G. Romero and, in Seville, I was able to combine my intellectual status with my passion for flamenco. In Spain the question of emotion does not imply the denial of thought as, to a certain extent, happens in France. I also feel in tune with Latin America, where the issue of poetry is crucial. — In recent texts you have vindicated Ernst Bloch, indicating that we cannot live only by reciting ‘bitter truths’ and emphasizing that we need hope. —That is also a fundamental question. In ‘The Moved Air…’ I include Spinoza’s ‘Ethics’ to insist that we must escape from ‘sad passions’. We need joy and even bulerías. Bloch, in ‘The Hope Principle’, encouraged us to look for what is missing, articulating memory and political desire.— Enrique Vila-Matas in ‘Kassel does not invite logic’ found a strange “happy air” in contemporary art . When you think about the current art system, do you also breathe that hopeful air after having thought about the ‘survival of fireflies’?—In the catalog of the exhibition that we open next week I have written an introduction entitled ‘In the frozen air’ that It has to do with the horror that the world of art galleries, the commercial system, produces in me. I just saw in Paris an exhibition of arte povera, by artists that I adore, presented at the Stock Exchange by the Pinault Foundation as if they were ‘bibelots’, something simply horrible. It is difficult to find artists who go “against the grain” of the art market. Most of what we find in the market of ideas, emotions and art is terrible.— I greatly admire your study of ‘Balzac’s Unknown Masterpiece’ and I would like to relate ‘Embodied Painting’ with meditation by Pascal Quignard on the missing image.—An interesting image is one that proposes a desire, it is a movement or an energetic process that reveals that the lack is the origin of the image itself.
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