Textos

Interview with Tahíche Díaz

Regarding Memories of Paradise, Chapter 1: The Creatures’ Anger

Verónica Franco

Tahiche Díaz is ahead of his time. He is in the strictest sense of the word, even if he prefers the image of the astronaut. Across the uncertain terrain of reality he advances with his weapons in search of meaning. But to explain, to understand, he has to represent—and, as we all know, there is no representation without fable. His mythologies are born from his interaction with the world he believes he perceives and that he presents before us as guides and signals. But before drawing conclusions, he must investigate, discover, catalogue, and reveal. Show all of us his path, in the hope that it will serve as a guide in our own.

From 23 February to 30 March, the Tenerife-based visual artist Tahiche Díaz will be exhibiting in Bern (Switzerland) at the Muster-Meier gallery with Marianne Kapfer, who has already curated two previous shows of the artist in Berlin. Under the title Memories of Paradise, Chapter 1: The Creatures’ Anger, the exhibition brings together works from two earlier presentations such as Archaeologies of the Forgetful Astronaut and Sounds of Paradise (23 April to 28 August 2015 at TEA, Tenerife Espacio de las Artes, Santa Cruz de Tenerife) and Cavern Dwellers (from 6 November to 4 December 2015 at Sala Bronzo, La Laguna). The exhibition will continue its journey in Berlin in June and in Denmark next September.

-I’m very interested in your conception of the artist as explorer. What are you looking for?
The explorer metaphor is nothing new, and it concerns us all: we explore our surroundings and ourselves in search of evidence, of meaning. As an artist I would like to fulfill my commitment to creating metaphors that speak about the world and the human soul. My product, my bread, is my art (in that sense I’m not very different from the baker), only my metaphors seek meaning through images. There is a need to create a language, like a gateway to better know my identity—not only the individual one, but also that of the thinking and feeling of a moment in humanity. This involves a journey into the "desert of the real", with all its dangers. A "spatial" exploration. To give my point of view, in recent years I have focused on finding a free way to represent an open story, with audiovisual and installation-based strands, that activates, seduces, stimulates, and relativizes the way we look at and understand the world. I look for the right words and images to speak about different aspects of human existence—its values and wonders, and its concerns and fears.

-It seems you consider mapping necessary. Why are those maps necessary? To guide you? To guide others?
The geometry of suffering, mapping memory, making maps of emotions… I have always been fascinated by science and the creation of theorems, of schemes and diagrams that certify and verify. I need to verify the existence of the things I think I glimpse. There is a lot of beauty in the process, but how are emotions revealed? How are they defined or methodized? And the most important question: how do they contribute to knowledge of being? A work of art has the power, when it reaches an essential part of you, to clarify. It behaves like a beacon for reflection; it becomes petrified memory of thought and serves to evoke it later like a quotation that has been imprinted on the memory and gradually fills with meaning. These beacons guide me, and so do those of others, so I assume my commitment bears fruit. And what ends up happening is that we understand each other without words, through the work.

-Artistic work is a way of cataloguing reality through representation (your representation in particular, in this case). What is reality like for you?
Science, biology, literature and psychology increasingly inspire me in their ways of cataloguing. But art cannot be catalogued, fenced in, or methodized. This sensitive experience is free, and we must understand it in order to understand ourselves.
The world has become a field with borders through which money circulates, not people, and in this moment of change there is much to be said. Cataloguing, recording this experience, is one of the ways to avoid repeating sordid episodes of history and to try to learn so we can take appropriate and peaceful steps. We are many thinking heads, with many desires, in many directions. I’m interested in those heads that champion reason, empathy, and the respect and love for doing things with meaning. I feel like a multi-atomic multicellular organism with a "vibration" that defines directions and that interacts along a stretch of biological time, in this strange human world in constant creation, recreation, and search for meaning.

-So… are you creating an imaginary world to find an explanation for the real one?
Art operates through fiction; metaphor is fiction, but it speaks to us about reality. The way we understand the world is subject to many inertias and personal factors. We perceive reality by joining different senses, combining memory and experience at the same time. That is already quite fascinating—almost fictitious. We understand reality through fictions, from childhood. Good stories have accompanied us throughout human evolution to tell the world and explain our psychic unfolding, and they always come with a degree of metaphor, of fiction. I feel like a storyteller, and I am the product of a long tradition.

-You use the concept of memory as a constant motif in your work…
We are language and memory. We are also the memories of previous generations. We relate to them and are influenced by them; therefore we always leave something of ourselves in the chain. Among our contemporaries, collective memory is capable of generating encouragement, understanding, shaping attitudes and values that direct and guide this world or facilitate empathy and set it free. We have a great responsibility toward it: not to forget moments of history, so as to know more about our identity and to re-examine ourselves. But, on the other hand, the changes and new moments we are living demand a plasticity in how we conceive the world, and an evolution toward new ideas that require a certain forgetfulness. It is a double-edged game, and a tool.

-Your work is physical. There is a tendency toward the emphatic: not sketched or unfinished, not suggested or merely glimpsed, but shown, invented, complete, made. You can sense work of the body and the hands, intense work. What is your physical relationship with your work like?
Once the work has been conceived, I like to have a dialogue with the physical truth of the material and I invite and seduce it so that it merges with the idea. In that time the ideas are discovered and mutate; in that process a kind of assimilation and connection with the idea takes place, which I think adds a great deal to the message. I need body and mind at the same time. Paste, clay (my star material) remind me of the plasticity of the brain, and it is a direct and representative way of making the sensitive experience real and mapping what we share and what differentiates us at once.

-Why this summary now? Does it seem like you are considering a stage concluded? Is there a conscious need to put things in order (once again) and arrive at some kind of conclusion?
This story is an open story to which I have added two chapters that close the astronaut’s memories. I conceived it as a modular story and it folds back in order to move, carrying messages to other places. The astronaut invites a new way of looking at the nature of what surrounds us and of what is human. He aims, ironically, to create parallels with the creator’s mission. There is no conclusion. And it claims the following maxim: let us not forget the taste for the journey; let us not miss wonderful and necessary moments that will lead us to free thought and exploration in order to achieve knowledge. When a society does not value art, culture, and the sciences, it is not respecting itself; it is not investing. I believe it is a responsibility to add images and stories to the world. It is a responsibility to create culture.