Weaving a Blanket of Snow

The Forms of Making, the Making of Forms is a programme which orbits around methodologies, tools and techniques in artistic practice. The creation of string figures is the point of departure in this third edition: four summer evenings for which artist Eva Lootz suggests the name “tamo evenings”. In Spanish TAMO means lint, the fibres which separate from cloth or yarn, and in Chinese it refers to the patriarch of Zen Buddhism, Bodhidarma, a happy phonetic coincidence to encourage the whiling-away of an evening of reflection.       

Learning to make figures with string initiates experimentation with knots and weaves that interrelate the body, memory and language; figures that can also be taken apart to be started again in another way. Creating string figures thus interweaves moments of viewing, listening, conversing — for instance, about minimal existences — and pausing. 

The title Weaving a Blanket of Snow takes its name from a story by the Swampy Cree Native American indigenous people in an intimation that points to a fracturing of the framework of Western metaphysics with its hierarchy of reason, identity and text. Or, at the very least, the will to delve into a territory where meaning is forever postponed and never arrives; of roaming the field of uncertainty which would impede meaning in closing and establishing hegemony. Eroding dualities, finding channels of flight, initiating circulation. It links together an idea Lootz expressed in the 1970s: “What I could have to say doesn’t interest me in the slightest”. That not wanting to make statements from “I”. “Produce to be produced”, in the formulation of philosopher Patricio Bulnes. Acting from the non-acting act, to do something by not doing, to become distanced from a vision that is only able to see the subject matter in a similar fashion to the so-called “widow of life”.

Participants

Eva Lootz (Vienna, 1940) is an Austrian-born Spanish national who studied Philosophy and Plastic Arts and earned a degree in Film and Television Directing. At the end of the 1970s, she moved to Spain and from 1973 began to display her work. She has exhibited in art galleries in New York, Amsterdam, London and Cologne, among others, and institutions such as Museo Reina Sofia, Fundació Suñol, Casa Encendida and the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo, Burgos. Her most recent shows include Cut Through the Fog (Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea, CGAC, Santiago de Compostela, 2016–17), Binomio. Diálogos entre arte y ciencia (Centro Nacional de Investigaciones Oncológicas, CNIO, 2018) and El reverso de los monumentos y la agonía de las lenguas (Museo Patio Herreriano and Museo Nacional de Escultura, Valladolid, 2020). She has carried out ephemeral and permanent interventions in public space, for instance La Huella (The Footprint) in Vinya dels Artistes at the Blanch i Jové wineries in Pobla de Cérvoles, Lleida, in 2019.

Claudia Rodríguez-Ponga Linares (Madrid, 1982) holds a Fine Arts degree from the Complutense University of Madrid, Spain, and MFAs in Curating from Goldsmiths College, University of London (2006), and Art Theory from the Complutense University of Madrid (2009). She also received her PhD in the Arts from the University of São Paulo for her research Pequeno tratado sobre arte e magia (A Small Treatise on Art and Magic). Her curatorial practice comprises collaborations with artists who work with the discarded, the minimal and the invisible, such as Sara Ramo and Debora Bolsoni, among others.