Ruth Benzacar Art Gallery presents “Hypnophilia”, the fourth exhibition of Florencia Rodriguez Giles in our space.
The exhibition will be displayed in the main hall of the gallery and will be accompanied by a text by
Alfredo Aracil.
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I shoulder their filthy currents
So that they can have beautiful dreams
Alfredo Aracil
Hipnofilia is Florencia Rodríguez Giles’s fourth solo show at Ruth Benzacar gallery. In the previous one (Biodélica, 2018), a series of large-scale drawings documented the imagination’s most utopic streak and staged a natural history and the first gestures of a new race of mutants, a race as lewd as it is muscular. This time, the artist’s posthuman curiosity, which she explores as a mean to hallucinate dominant binary structures, begins with a process of crossing her dreams and life experiences with those of someone else: Marcia Farias de Lazzarini, a member of CAOs,[1] the community of practices and experimentation in art, mental health, and life forms where Florencia Rodríguez Giles has worked and lived since 2020.
Enveloped in a fragrance[1] at once beautiful and terrifying, Hipnofilia consists of an installation of drawings, objects, and soundtracks that dialogue with Mar de Río,[2] Marcia’s memoir, a text inhabited by ghastly stories and images. Emboldened by the impunity with which art mimics everything that sets it apart from life, Florencia Rodríguez Giles combines those stories and images with her own fears, fetishes, and dreamlike production.
The thing is, once the good intentions of medical reasoning and the logic of service have been eschewed, therapeutic care turns into mutual support and coproduction of the subject with healthy doses of Dioscuri-ness and symbi(p)oet(h)ic and Macumba synchronicity. In other words, the therapeutic process discovers other paths through contact with the power of the false. It is freed from the despotism of diagnostics and technicisms of service, from social treatments that individualize and punish collective ills. It embraces the power of the imagination to make any experience, regardless of whether physical or inphysical, sovereign, real, and true.
A psychoid gateway between fiction and documentary opens up, a passage through different stations and down different paths, through the forest of signs and signals that the exhibition posits as a means to bracket the discontinuity between soma and psyche, a means to negate the lethal rift modernity renders between body and mind.
The idea is to follow the songlines,[1] to wander lines that know no bounds, lines that do not divide the sky from the sea and the land, or the day from the night, or life from death, but rather cross between them. Drift on and on, as long as possible, and constantly take detours—I think of each one of Guadalupe Chirottarra’s soundtracks where the succession of environments immerses us in so many urban typologies and mental spaces—detours etched on the surfaces of a dream indistinguishable from a guided meditation.
Crossing images and sensations on a map of border zones. A network of hideouts and supply stations that are particularly indispensable if what you want to do is short-circuit the excessive and exclusive love we all harbor for our own biographies and the structures that govern our spirit. In the desert, like in life, everything is the same but different. And being equipped—or not being equipped—with navigational charts, compasses, and magic spells is what enables the deadly temptations and loneliness found along the way to be part of the path, rather than the final destination. In fact, any cartographic support is helpful to making it through desiring processes where the aim is not to overcome complexes or traumas. Suturing wounds, being more resilient—that is no longer the purpose. What is is being able to live in, to coexist with, exhaustion and cruelty without giving up pleasure and joy. Go forth per monstra ad astra,[1] venture into an artistic health encoded in the possibility of dissolving into the goo, and become part of the creation of the world.
More perverse than critical, Lyotard lays out the laws of the libidinal economy in his book of that title. He argues that no productive metamorphosis, whether artistic or poetic in nature, has ever been carried out by a unitary or totalized body, and none ever will. And in Hipnofilia, garbage, insects, hair, vomit exist alongside unscrupulous nurslings that suck from whatever they can, spiders, wounds, orientalist palm trees, military boots, mantic and mantric ritual masks, dissociative disorders, and multiple—even endless—personalities—all of that spun together in a contagious fever. After all, there is no time for contradiction in transformation, in becoming other, at the frenetic pace of drives that make us want more and more and more and want this and this and this. It never stops. And it is only possible through liquefaction—that is the price to be paid—like what happens when the fluids of consciousness collide with the dark currents of the unconscious.
And yet, no solace, no life that aspires to be lived as research, is free of threats. There is no place to hide from police, weapons, and potential aggressors dressed up as friends or parents—they represent a very real and very concrete metaphysical evil. It is not for nothing that, unlike in detective novels, here no matter how hard we look we will never find a trace of an everlasting or a single truth, no hints that show the way to any sort of salvation. The only thing missing is the solution to the enigma.
So what happens if there is no return to order? What is to be done when chaos is the only thing on the horizon, when it is patently clear that there is no damage control, indignation, or facile morality capable of putting a limit on everyday misery?
The way to bring a little piece of heaven into hell, then, is to produce new myths. More and more texts, images, and sounds, some of them in others of them, nightmares in a dream of anesthetic normalcy. Worship the remains of a psyche torn to bits and left on the curb. Along with a multidimensional collage that mixes surrealist methodologies with a dose of new-weird literature and the sense of hyperrealist terror palpable on the poor outskirts of Buenos Aires, those remains assemble some possible relations and displacements: a new life, a sort of Criollo cyborg, set in motion by the strings of a current that flows without dialectical mediations, a cyborg forged out of heteroclite bodies that intersect at a single point: CAOs, with its care networks and anti-ecological group subjectivation. They refuse to be identified as one thing or its opposite. They are at once heavenly forces and underworld powers. In them, fiction and reality are indistinguishable: an imperfect synthesis of art, politics, and therapy.
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[1] Launched in 2020, CAOs is a point of reference in artistic and mental-health practices that propose an alternative to medicalization and mental institutions. Located in a large house on the outskirts of the city of La Plata, CAOs provides spaces for creation and sociability that bring together artists, mental-health workers, as well as “psychiatrized” persons and others with no diagnosis but dealing with psychosocial afflictions.
[2] The Brugmansia arborea or the angel’s trumpet has a hypnotic-narcotic scent that is particularly intense in the evening and at night. A sacred plant, it is an integral part of the worldview of the Indigenous peoples of South America. It contains a number of psychotropic substances that produce significant systemic effects, as well as tropane alkaloids like atropine and scopolamine. Its medicinal uses include soothing pain of many sorts.
[3] Farias de Lazzarini, Marcia: Mar de Río. Ediciones CAOs, Villa Eliva, La Plata, 2021.
[4] According to the animist beliefs of the Aboriginal cultures of Australia, a songline, also called a dreaming track, is one of the paths across the land. Songlines mark the route followed by the “creator-beings” located in dreaming.
[5] “Through monsters to the stars” is an ascetic formula. A less ominous version offered by authors influenced by Warburg is astra per aspera, that is, through suffering to the stars.
