2024
Centre d’Art la Panera · Església romànica de Sant Martí
ACOUSTIC SENTENCES BY VICENS VACCA.
Eeeeeoooooooooh!!
Like the man in Beckett who, raising his arm in the dark, altogether alone in the presence of a voice coming from nowhere to keep him company, reanimates himself (and all of us inside of him) in the extreme solitude that the experience of FLY instills into us. Because the acoustic experience of this piece has concluded the very moment it begins, inasmuch as everything that might be said or that we are likely to hear in its presence has already been manifestly stated in any of the fragments it is composed of, although none of them arise from a basis of any sort of authority or moral standpoint that could set limits to our reality as individual subjects. This is the reason that FLY, in its autism, can be conceived as a location from which any access that could bring us closer to a form of truth is utterly barred, and it is through the use of acoustic space that the construction of such a location is achieved, in which we are left trapped in a state of utter dispossession.
Thus, from the unavoidable repetition designed by Vacca, we are to confront FLY by activating in our conscience a long sequence of solitudes that can ultimately be condensed into one single solitude. To do so, to become involved in the construction of a single solitude, in the condensation of all the solitudes into one, one single extreme solitude, would allow us to accept the cosmic dimension of the silences, of the hiatus within the temporal structure of the piece. Because it is the congenital self-reference of silence which stretches like a woven cloth covering this work, putting its arms around us and submitting us to a cohabitation with all those other «selves» contained inside us, establishing it in a place that is defined by the absence of sense, a place that is far from any possibility of achieving sense. If there is anything very intense in the experience of FLY, this is precisely the fact that it demands to be approached with no intention of seeking for a primary cause which, should there be any, would draw it tragically close to the conditions of something created, made by the hand of God, whereas FLY is very much of a human construct.
In this way FLY becomes the embodiment of one of our «selves», the most outcast of them, marginal even to itself. However, it is not merely an excrescence, it is the schizophrenic fly that produces it. The sentences recited in it like an ejaculatory prayer cannot change this fact. FLY occupies the space of the flight of this bothersome insect, the erratic, multi-directional flight of which awakens in us the desire to fly and finally places us in a tautology that amounts to us wanting to want: he wants to want. And it is the apparition of this elliptic subject, the «he», it is through the voice of this «he» that we hear (Vacca), that the statements in FLY appear as the resonance of a memory which has remained entirely concealed within our desire to want to listen, whatever the price, even the absurd, the utterly absurd, the absolutely absurd. Listening to the absurd is somewhat akin to wanting to fly in the space of a sound that has not arisen from reality but from the territory of absolute fiction, inhabited by the embodiments of «others» who also want to fly from their own way of being, white or black. We are left halfway, as if suspended in a place that is «nowhere», drenched in cold sweat like a color-drained grisaille, inhabiting the heaviness that overcomes us when we have had too much to drink.
So, inebriated with the whites and with the blacks, we confront the dire task demanded by our approach to a seductive work that voids us of sense just as it empties itself of sense at the same time. We listen to the sententious voice in FLY, we introvert it, we remain bereft in its «non-place» and we adhere to this loss: there is no longer any aesthetic or philosophical edge that could lift us in a flight no less than vertiginous. The lilt of Vacca’s voice is the only refuge available to us to mitigate the damage of the fall that we are bound for. We will be trapped between the whites and the blacks and the capricious combinations that will prevent us from taking root in any of the situations they infer. We will be trapped as casualties among the scrap-pile of words and notes, crushed like a fly assassinated by a sharp swat of the daily newspaper and spinning to the ground in another short flight marked by the senseless unconsciousness typical of corpses.
Now we have to give some more thought to this model of death because we previously stated that the event did not arise from reality but from fiction. Which amounts to saying that it is an extremely solid model inasmuch as all the characters in the theater of the world (we have known it since the baroque era)are dressed in white or in black, all of them participate in some kind of brotherhood the aim of which is the will to utter that which cannot be said in any form of language. They are mute chatterboxes, motionless actors, survivors of the drama of representation. Indeed, Vacca’s entire litany makes us uncomfortable because it is a vociferous silence, like those verses of René Char’s saying «I don’t know how to shut up, I don’t know how to scream». Though we must admit that Vacca’s recitation is performed with great coldness and equanimity, we cannot avoid the tremor of incomprehension, the incomprehension that whatever reaches us is invading our space and pulling us towards a partial, one-sided position, which is the position sought by all good works of art and which allows us to make them into a genuine space of experience.
But what happens is that we only wanted to fly because someone told us that someone else was doing it. It is a paradox and a mystery that works of art generate inside us, a feeling similar to faith, which is always naturally a form of deception. The belief that someone is speaking to you to state that somebody else, white or black, wants, flies or wants to fly is an essential decision in the context of the reception of this work. It must be believed in order to survive the demise that has taken shape and to have the opportunity to think that we are no longer part of the space of representation, that we will remain alive in the interior of ourselves, in that dark place from which someone shouts over and over again that whites and blacks want to fly.
Pep Agut
March, 2019
(Translator’s note: in the Catalan language the terms «want» and «fly» are homonyms)
