The Creatures' Anger

"With all eyes the creature sees
the Open. Only our eyes are
as it were turned upside down and set all around it, like traps around its free exit.
What is outside we know
only
from the countenance
of the animal; because
we already turn the
early child upside down
and force it to look back at the forms, not at the Open, which
is so deep in the face of the animal. Free from death..."

Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino's Elegies

Tahiche Díaz is an animal. This is what one might think at first glance when one sees the way he works. And to present him in this way is not a euphemism about his person, nor does it mean that he works like an animal, it has nothing to do with that. This artist has the capacity to become an animal. As Emanuele Coccia states in his book Metamorphosis "Our bodies are recycled... We transport in ourselves our parents, the pre-human apes, the fish, the bacteria, down to the smallest atoms of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen". Tahiche, even before he could remember, was able to see the invisible animals in the garden of his beach house. He was able to draw an elephant, in fact, I think it was the first animal he drew and modelled in clay, which he still has. So his true nature is this ability to hyperlink himself to certain beings and objects in his environment. There is no other way of expressing a form than by being that form, than by dissolving into it. But to achieve this also requires knowledge, an understanding of its processes, its dynamics, its rituals, its time, its language, only in this way are we able to feel the other, only in this way are we also able to make flesh from knowledge.

Tahiche not only has the ability to become an animal, he also has the ability to become a baby animal, he has not lost the intelligence to do so.

This is part of his ability to seduce and he shows it through what he does.

Through the drawings that the artist presents in this installation, through his hand, through his continuous mimicry, through his surprising capacity to become, he shows us the way, without further ado.

This installation presented at the Espacio Cultural El Tanque is a circus, but a circus in which the roles have been reversed, a circus in which the clown actors are us, the humans, and the angry and expectant spectators are the animals, all of them, of all types and conditions: wild, domestic, invisible. They are all there. There is a radical break with anthropocentrism here, a complaint, a howl, a snort, roar, a chirp, a whistle, a whistle, a snap, ... new languages and forms of communication, not inconsiderable, that challenge us and point at us. They make us feel stupid and arrogant, unintelligent; they stare us in the face, directly, in an orderly, baroque, overwhelming chaos.

The only human beings that appear in some of these drawings are the children, accompanying these animals that look at us, like the lost children of Peter Pan. Perhaps childhood is the place where there is no distance from others.

Let us delve a little deeper into all this:

The term "animal" derives from the Latin anima, meaning "breath, life".

Plotinus thought of the universe as a great animal, a living being, like the earth and the stars. This prehistoric animal (the Other) looks at us even before our arrival in the world. But "animal" is also the human (rational animal, fabulous animal, talking animal, vertebro-machined animal). The animal gaze contains both the animal and the human, in a single abstract animal.

The relation of the animal gaze to the world is for Rilke an innocent and open relation, as is the relation of the child's gaze to the world, as in the innocence and openness of the experience of love; the spontaneity of the animal gaze, the infancy of the gaze and the birth of love, are brought together in Rilke in the notion of the Open. The Open is what Rilke also calls the other side or the pure relation, the animal is outside itself, in the thing itself, not in a representation of the thing. We are shown here a certain impossibility of access to the Open on the part of man, who is excluded, except in certain moments, as in love, death or birth. The Open becomes, then, that continuity, the indiscernible zone between animal and man, where the animal gaze dwells.

To offer oneself to the other as (living) corporeality is the condition of every encounter, to open oneself to the experience of pathos (to the passion of the animal) to the hospitality of the other. During the encounter, it is not intended to involve the animal in a humanised or anthropomorphised consideration, but to bare man in the sphere of vulnerability that he shares with the animal (love, suffering and death).

An extreme example would be the experience of being able to be devoured (literally) by the other, which offers an unprecedented opening to the unknown world of the human-animal indistinction. The opposite would be, for example, the overexposure of the animal in the zoo, which causes its disappearance (disappearance of the animal gaze). The experience in the zoo and the laboratory animal does not make possible the internalisation of the other, the relationship with the other, the com-passion.

Thus we see, in conclusion, what Tahiche Diaz offers us in this installation at the Espacio Cultura El Tanque. With her presentation we open ourselves to the gaze, from art, of that animal that challenges each one of us and reminds us that all is not lost, that we can still try to open the animal gaze that we all carry within us. Art thus appears as the purpose not only of philosophy but also of existence.

Like the aforementioned Coccia, Tahiche subscribes to Coccia's defence of the need to build ecosystems of multi-species cohabitation, halfway between the city, the garden, the plantation and the farm. An "interspecies urbanism" where "the practice of a collective Metamorphosis" is possible.

Cristina Gámez

On the biography of Tahiche Diaz:

(Bajamar, Tenerife, 1977)

A graduate in Fine Arts from the ULL, he is taking doctoral courses at the same university in the interdisciplinary "Theory of the Arts" programme. Tahiche Diaz is a multidisciplinary artist whose creative research is mainly focused on volumetry but who projects in all possible formats: sculpture, architecture, design, installation, audiovisual, scenic space. He is particularly interested in the synergies between art, technology and ecology.

He has had numerous international exhibitions: at Kühlhaus, Berlin "Preparing for Darkness", 2017 and "Berlinartweek", "Strucktion", 2016; "Memories of Paradise, at Muster Meier Gallery, Bern Switzerland, 2017; "Unimaginable Images", Sal Bad Rappenau, Berlin, 2018; "PlanetArt" at Artweek Berlin (Nabu International), 2019; Herzliche Einladung zu den "PlanetArt Dialogen" in der Freien Akademie der Künste, Hamburg, 2022.

In the Canary Islands there are several solo exhibitions in Tenerife: "Habitáculos de la voluntad" in Ateneo de La Laguna, 2004; "Rimas y Muecas" Galería Artizar, 2009; "Parábolas y Retablos" Fuerteventura, Casa de los Coroneles, 2008; in Tea (Tenerife Espacio de las Artes, 2015) with the title Arqueologías del astronauta desmemoriado y sonidos del paraíso "reflects on the condition of the creator as explorer and the process of artistic creation as a form-as a model-of knowledge. This process of enquiry develops on multiple levels, defining a cognitive, philosophical, symbolic, poetic and political space". "The conception of the artistic process as an exploration, as an odyssey, translates into a particular interest in fable-making, in narrative, (...) This narrative logic is expressed in the exhibition space by referring to the concept of the museum, in particular the museum of natural sciences, as a rhetorical framework for presenting the results of knowledge" (Ramiro Carrillo, text from the catalogue of the exhibition).

"It then occurs to me that Tahiche is a hare: restless, shrewd, curious and light; elegant and nervous, covering territory by dint of speed. But he quickly contradicts my filigree: he looks more like an elephant. It is said to be the only mammal incapable of jumping.

Elephants, he explains, have powerful legs, like heavy columns that sit firmly on the ground and keep them in touch with the order of matter as the principle of reality. But at the same time, the limbs of these animals are very subtle receptors, capable of perceiving low-frequency sounds emitted by others of their species from very far away. This mixture of power and delicacy, this perception of the invisible and the solid, like a sensitive monster, like a subtle steamroller, makes the elephant, in Tahiche's eyes, a fascinating animal". (Ramiro Carrillo)

About the Canarina Foundation:

Commissioner of this project

The Canarina Foundation is an independent, non-profit organisation that operates with its own financial resources thanks to the patronage of Janosch (Horst Eckert), a writer, painter, cartoonist, illustrator and winner of the German Prize for Children's Literature, among other distinctions, who has lived in Tenerife for more than 40 years.

In 2021, Janosch decided to donate a large part of his private wealth and dedicate it to creating a foundation for environmental and animal protection purposes, issues with which he has always been very sensitive. The foundation is committed to a necessary change in the way humanity relates to nature and all life within it, including people.

Its scope of action is the entire Canary Islands archipelago and its work is focused on fighting for the eco-social transition of the Canary Islands territory through the promotion and development of projects aimed at the conservation of nature and the environment, the protection of animals and the promotion of food, energy and economic sovereignty of the islands. The aim is to create a more self-contained, healthy, ecological, supportive, egalitarian and equitable model, whose priority is to care for life (human and non-human) in the Canary Islands.