TIKKERTJE
TIKKERTJE #0 Laura Peña - To Come Down
This piece involves an action carried out in different projects such as "Souvenir" and "De Paso" (Passing Through). The project “De paso” was selected to participate in the Colombian cultural ministry’s curatorial
project “15 Salón Regional de Artistas –Zona Centro”. Later, the project was also selected to be part of the “8 Young Art Hall” from El Nogal,
Bogotá, Colombia.
Souvenir:
Object that helps to remember the visit to a specific place. Memory. From the Latin sub- (down) and venire (come, go), go down.
Scrape:
To slightly scratch a surface. To have a rough touch. To almost pass. To steal, take out (sth). To lightly fray a surface. To rub a surface with a rough one or with a cutting object in order to take a part off. (…)
Every place has its own story. Its architecture, institutions and individual characteristics speak about that history. The tourist or traveller makes an attempt to capture the experience, to take it as prisoner, to conserve or retain a memory from that specific geographic space. Through that appropriation gesture of the objects and/or memories - through the subtraction of a part from that place - the subject is also trying to impose to that place and experience his own point of view. The process of acquiring and preserving memory can be: a melancholic symptom, an expression of admiration, an authoritarian action and/or a dialogue with an experience. The memory as a tragedy: a heroic attempt whose foregone denouncement is that it is an illusion.
The one who arrogates to himself a souvenir, as a visitor or an intruder, begins a firm and service oriented process, which is a self-serving gesture It tries to take something from a place to another one to remember it. An enthusiastic performance which consequence is also a new space to be filled. A nothing. An action that is at the same time the effort’s futility, the self-involved being.
That space and its history survive the authoritarian and enthusiastic act. Despite that, the act itself tries to be a goal (a “keeping of something”). Through its appropriation, it concludes a consummated act that reveals an individual time owned by space: a time that goes beyond the act. The sacrifice of a reality for the development of an effort whose result is fiction.
The appropriation act is also the defiance and resistance to say goodbye to a temporal and spatial reality, to an experience, to a visit, to some people, to a fragment of life. An act that tries to resist time but that inevitably ends in a saying good bye. The being as a temporal being.
