2014 2013 2012 2011 2010 2009 2008 etc. Fermín Jiménez Landa
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Including works in video, drawing, photography and sculpture, as well as actions and public interventions, the practice of Fermín Jiménez Landa has embraced research into the Greek folk music Rebetiko, powering a rotary kebab grill with energy from lemons, staging a snowball fight in mid summer and filling cracks in a pavement with whipped cream. Operating like a wayward scientist and an exuberant storyteller, the artist invites us to see that the absurd and the profound, the tender and the iconoclastic are two sides of the same coin. He has often dealt with process of equivalence, reversal or exchange, such as a series of works in which the supposed weight of various historical figures and minor celebrities is converted into quotidian items which are grouped or stacked as if minimalist sculptures: Lenin in bottles of tropical juice, Brian de Palma in shampoo. Breaking the Deadlock in Altitude (2009) was inspired by a 14th-Century tale from Tuscany in which a family planted trees on the the top of their tower to make it the tallest in the town. Jiménez Landa placed an artificial Christmas tree on the helicopter deck of the 154m high Torre Mapfre in Barcelona, temporarily making it 2 metres higher than its neighbouring twin, the Hotel Arts. (Latitudes. Max Andrews & Mariana Cánepa)
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Everything’s Impossible
Everything’s Impossible, a genuine declaration of principles, is a video in wich the artist continues his investigation into the physicality and mass of household objects. Here he subjects them to the unyielding laws of gravity. Countless banal, practical everyday objects fall as a result of their own weight and instability and we witness the fleeting moment in which chairs, brooms, glasses and other such elements devoid of grandeur simply topple. It’s a simple act that probes life’s grandiloquence and ridiculousness in lower case.
Video, 2006 - ongoing.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3nOwPq1aBg&list=UUSp SCDtkYMcDhmnc4d61oGQ&index=9&feature=plcp
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Breaking the Deadlock in Altitude
The recording of an absurd yet attention-getting action performed on the roof terrace of Torre Mapfre, Barcelona’s highest building together with the Hotel Arts (154 m). Inspired by events that occurred in Lucca, in the Italian region of Tuscany in the early 14th century – when the Guinigi family placed elm trees on the highest part of their tower so as to make it taller than all of the town’s other buildings – Fermin Jimenez Landa updates the story and transfers it to the present (more specifically to Barcelona) by temporarily and ironically crowning the heliport of the Torre Mapfre with a plastic tree. Above and beyond the interests of the towers’ owners, and treating this property both ingeniously and maliciously, this fleeting action supposedly breaks the height deadlock between the towers thanks to the Christmas tree’s scant two metres. A simple gesture conceals an act of transgression and alteration of the rigid systems of authority, control and power that govern our society.
Performance. 2008.
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Official events
The exhibition presents a common thread – in this case the essay on different unusual and atypical displays of energy – only to fragment or expand into subprojects which are both independent and complementary. This is a multiple device in which the germ lies in pseudoscientiďŹ c research into the possibilities of extracting energy from banal things (which in theory do not possess it) so as to force absurd experiments that are apparently devoid of all logic or practicity.
Installation, 2008.
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Fill all gaps with whipped cream Cibachrome. 125 x 90 cms. 2008
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Soon is good but sooner is better
In winter we picked snow balls and keeped them in the freezer of my parents. In summer we made a war with them.
Performance, 2009.
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Now all the lads are crying
Ahora todos los chicos estan llorando (Now all the lads are crying), a project centred on Rebetiko music—a genre the artist has come to know during his regular sojourns in Athens and other parts of Greece, and Turkey—is a clear example of this method. An investigatory process has led him to studying its musical, popular and social identity in order to carry it over into his own line of action, apart from making a documentary or anthropological reading, and thus confront it with the aspects that define his work: sense of humour, ridiculed solemnity, fascination with the absurd, a parodying approach to everyday reality and irreverent respect for those spheres of knowledge he uses as initial seed; in this case the sordid and subversive Rebetiko underground and, in turn, the particularised reading of present-day Greek society.
Installation, 2009.
The hopeless and extreme condition of Rebetiko—of lost utopia as opposed to the idealism of the past— leads him to generate a dystopic and extreme vision of contemporary Greece. While not wanting in irony, parody or sense of humour, it tests formulas of empathy for and with us and the social, cultural and urban environments that define us. This is a reflexion so complex that it may only arise from a flexible realm such as art, supposedly of little use and hardly serious.
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Local
Local version of Kolouris with other bread and other Olympic games.
Bread, pin. 2010.
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L/V-S/D
L/V-S/D son un conjunto de fotografías que la amiga de un amigo me envió por mail a baja calidad ampliadas a formato descabellado respecto a su calidad. Se instaló una escultura de colchonetas en uno de los pueblos más secos de España para ver qué pasaba, provocando al paseante a practicar el robo o el vandalismo a pequeña escala con un objeto poco identificado. Las robaron todas y no se vio ninguna en el pueblo, no pude hacer una foto. Más adelante se colocó una escultura de colchonetas parecida en una calle cerca del mar en verano del 2007. Se desató un momento de euforia colectiva en el momento en que la primera persona se atrevió a coger una. Estas son las fotos que quedaron como documento, los restos desperdigados de la escultura, que se instaló como un bloque.
Impresión digital. 90 x 125 cm. c.u. 2010.
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El buen tiempo
Remake of the opening scene of “La Dolce Vita� (Fellini, 1960) with a toy helicopter and a figure of Christ made in China
DVD Pal. 2010.
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The North Pole
In The north pole we can see a frigde magnet with a menu of a Chinese restaurant that I placed in the Reina SofĂa museum. We focus in certain qualities of art and no others, in this case are the attraction forces that feel the metals of Richard Serra towards the magnet, an element with its electrons oriented in the same direction. The action is a small crossroad between physics, the infrastructure of contemporary art, museum security, surveillance and domestic habits. The pompous, the ceremonious, the important thing.
Digital print. 32,5 x 42,5 cms. 2010.
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Dead calm
A normal table crosses the space with a row of receptacles (carafes, cocacola bottles..) full of water in a way so that coincide all the water levels, drawing a continous plane. Dead calm (Calma chicha in spanish) means that the sea is calm and it’s applied to stillness situations but an unhealthy stillness.
Muscle relaxant, liquids and bottles, 2010.
It is underlined the rest of the water by this horizontal plane that keeps over the discontinuity of the receptacles but as well by the fact, advertised in the exhibition, that water contains a dissolving of Myolastan (Tetrazepan), a powerfull muscle relaxant difficult to acces and highly addictive.
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The Pyrenees
(a) Carton of cigarettes brought to the stand by a French gallery participant in ARCO’11. It has traveled hidden in the works of the gallery.
Smuggled tobacco and erotic cinema ticket, 2011.
(b) I went to France to see an erotic film The Pyrenees project consists of several trips to France to bring smuggling tobacco and to see an erotic film. A temporary jump -slip-. The word Estraperlo (smuggling), illegal trade of goods subject of some type of fee of the state, comes from a political scandal occurred during the Second Spanish Republic, due to the introduction of a roulette game powered by electricity called “Straperlo” (acronym for Strauss, Perel and Lowmaann). The consolidation of the Estraperlo is due to the long period of shortage experienced in the postwar Spain. Censorship ended in 1977. In 1972 many Spanish crossed the Pyrenees to Perpignan to see Last Tango in Paris at a relatively less restrictive time. In both cases an inevitable action is repeated but in incomparable circumstances. An act of deliberate anachronism that breaks with the logic of previous work in which the error appeared and was simply incorporated into a system of trial and error. Here we start from the error. We handle border economic rules, appearing certain geopolitical changes like opening and large scale economy, through the ridiculous and the use of the least. The physical presence is being reduced to a minimum as opposed to the magnitude of the range that really concerns us.
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The cold war
Frigopies, classic childhood ice cream, melted and re-cooled in molds shaped like Lenin. Using humor, we look for possible points of friction between the vibration of particles, international politics, states of matter -solid, liquid and gas-, history, holidays, continuing after the death of the physical and colloidal systems of ordinary ice cream.
Ice-cream, freezers, 2011.
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Cold drawings Pencil on paper. 50 x 70cms. 2011.
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The mass
Collection of pictures in which the force of gravity dominates, betrays or makes impossible a human action.
Colection of pictures. 2009-ongoing.
Every point mass in the universe attracts every other point mass with a force that is directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them.
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Autobiography
Biographies of famous people transformed in my own biographies crossing out word by word all the book.
Books, ink & tape, 2011.
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Amikejo
Amikejo is a series of four exhibitions by artist duos at MUSAC’s Laboratorio 987. Amikejo was a tiny state that existed from 1908–1920 between the Netherlands, Belgium and present day Germany and was founded on a desire to foster more effective international communication through the synthetic language Esperanto – Amikejo means ‘place of friendship’ in Esperanto. This episode-place was a unique synthesis of cartography, language, nationhood, politics, economics and subjectivity, and is entreated as a twin site to Laboratorio 987 by lending its name and conceptual borders to the exhibition series.
Installation with Lee Welch. 2011
Fermín Jiménez Landa (Pamplona, Spain, 1979) & Lee Welch (Louisville, USA, 1975) did not know each other before the invitation to participate in Amikejo. As if engaged in international diplomacy, the artists have had to understand each other personally and artistically before issuing what might be regarded as a joint statement based on what they have agreed and negotiated, in the form of an exhibition. Jiménez Landa and Welch have chosen to establish their collaboration in relation to the notion of the micronation and devices which delineate sovereignty – borders, stamps, anthems, and so on. Their project refers to other historical episodes in addition to Amikejo itself as well as taking inspiration from methodologies which combine fixed parameters with improvisation, such as the directing technique of filmmaker John Cassavetes. Their works in MUSAC comprise a constellation of diverse performative, discursive, interactive and displayed elements, some of which are directly apparent in the Laboratorio 987, while others document occurrances at remote locations, or exist only in the imagination. A platform-like structure and sculptures that take the form of portals or border markers constitute spaces and tools for assembly and discussion as well as hosting further two-dimensional and video works.
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National Anthem
National Anthem (2011) is split into several elements, stories and anecdotes. In the context of ‘Amikejo’ – an exhibition project on micro-nations, historical anomalies, common endeavours and optimism – the musical agrupation ‘La cena’, a León marching band, was invited to compose a new national anthem. In the most archaic tradition, markedly romantic, military and patriotic, the anthem enacts a parodic attempt to reach a futile objective: the conquering of a small island in the Aegean Sea through invasion-by-sound.
Performance, video and photographies, 2011.
With numerous problems due to the incessant wind and the very basis of working on a small island, we generated a public debate with the fishermen and friends about the best way to carry out, the best island to conquer, etc ... Finally a fisherman decided to break the law that prohibits to dedicate a fishing boat to non-professional duties. We left the harbour hidden. A sound system was placed on top of an uninhabited islet powered by a gasoline generator and the national anthem rang fading away at sea. The sound system was abandoned, lasting the conquest of those lands –only sonorous- only what the available energy lasted, contracting the epic idea of eternity to the duration of the resources. Some issues are tackled like the specific characteristics, geographical, political and symbolic of the islands -start from scratch, utopia ... – certain historical anomalies where the military and political are full of absurdity and comedy, as the Perejil island conflicto between the Government of Aznar and Morocco, at the expense of a military occupation of a tiny island or a similar case from another Greek island and Turkey in 1996. The most beautiful is the Republic of Rose Island, in 1968, when a micro-nation is proclaimed in the sea on a concrete platform, which mingled an leisure and tourism with the highest aspirations of political issues. I am interested in the nature of the national anthem and popular music as a social generator and the relationship between nation and energy or between the minimum and the grandiose. Forming a journey loop from León to the island and back again, during the exhibition opening, 65 musicians had parade through the streets of León in what could be seen as a playful, ceremonial or military action, and performed an anthem wich is familiar in its musical idiom and yet is completely unidentifiable.
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Pressure Fan & postcard, 2012.
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The doors
My intervention in La Casa Encendida consisted in arriving there from my home travelling with a single premise, do not touch doors.
Performance, video & photographies, 2012.
The habitable converted into a system that opens and closes under rules that depend on the interaction with elements like doors with sensors or human interactions (people who open doors, sliding doors, an opportune call to the waiter to open the door when bringing the breakfast ...). Just as in the practice of the Situationist dĂŠrive disorientation is proposed as a method of apprehension of urban environments, this work proposes another tactic for apprehending different, something unknown a priori. A ridiculous heroic deed, romantic but parodic, with the aim of establishing relationships between geographic, mapping, spatial, body, architecture, urban ... in the form of a story, of a narrated adventure. This idea was born many years ago from the head of Po Poy, artist and friend. One day I remembered his plan never carried out and asked permission to take it as my own, almost like a score. Or as a challenge, an alien bet .
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To lose balance very, very slowly. Photographies. 2012.
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Night sifht
An almost invisible piece covers the ceiling. It’s the star stickers that glow in the dark used by children to decorate their bedrooms. The intervention is situated at the same time in a discrete and excessive field. Night shift is charged with the light normally used to illuminate artworks. We only have a supposition that we won’t be able to verify. However, we know that the exhibition has extended its opening hours. The piece is presented with a note in the wall warning us of what is going on so that we raise our heads towards the ceiling. Beside the sentence, an image of an assembly line in the night shift tones down the romanticism of the stars.
Fluorescent stickers & photographies, 2012.
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The Palmist
Palmist starting point is a simply hand-dryer. It’s out of context twice; by one hand, the machine is placed in an atypical exhibition context, an occupied house witch construction is paralyzed indefinitely and that obviously doesn’t have electricity (neither water to wash the hands). There is an interest not only in creating a simply ready-made referring to the concept of hygienic, but in provoking a singular momento between the object, the context and the audience.
Hand-dryer and electricity material, 2012.
A piece-machine, placed as an artwork and, at the same time, as a hand-dryer uses to be. Artwork of a ridiculous interactivity, faraway from the virtuosity or high technology, air displacements. The need to provide eletricity obliges to steal electricity, amplifying the irregularity of the exhibition itself. The title forces the audience to think in something less mundane, more esoteric and mystic. A strong Boise that uneases, as it was an alien trick, the hands sensor. Part of the project “Jaula de oro” by Pablo Lag.
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Melodrama
Installation of popcorns exploding the spaces and devices of a site. The term melodrama is derived from Greek melos, music, and drama. It has the literal meaning of dramatic theatrical play in witch the sentimental passages are highlighted with instrumental music. As time goes by it’s use has extended covering any kind of theatrical, cinematographic or literary work whose sentimental, pathetic or tear-jerker aspect are exagerated with the intention of provoking emotions.
Popcorn, 2012.
During the Great Depression in the U.S. Americans began to take the habit of eating popcorn in cinemas as in this country is one of the most abundant raw materials.
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Guillotine Found photographies with framing errors. 2012.
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Altitude sickness
“Jiménez Landa always appeals to the daily experience, without avoiding an indirect contact with some of the premises of conceptual art. He presents small transformations of everyday life which have great semantic effects.” (Javier Hontoria).
Balls stucked and shelf (2012)
Altitude sickness is a shelf placed high up on a wall, with a group of balls of various nature on it. In principle we don’t know if there is some degree of random or they are meticulously placed, as it would be supposed in the context of an exhibition hall. Later on, we discover a video in which we see the artist throwing the balls from the ground, failing, succeeding, failing again, until he manages to get them all up on the shelf. Altitude sickness is a reminder of a situation that would be found typically outdoors, related to random, childhood, playful times, the law of gravity and architecture. It is presented as a finished piece, spatial, a sculpture, although we do feel in it some temporal, fleeting, accidental elements of a certain pop beauty, nearly, a sporty beauty.
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Four seasons
It is a glass of water with its surface tilted 23ยบ, which is the axial tilt of the rotation orbit of the Earth, with regards to the plane of its orbit around the Sun. The seasons of the title are the main consequence of this tilt. The piece is presented up on a shelf. It all looks almost thoroughly normal. Some attention is required to notice that the surface of the water is tilted, since a bit of jelly was added to it and it was allowed to cool down and set at a 23ยบ angle.
Glass of water and jelly, 2013.
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Attack of tedium
An outburst of tedium is confetti ordered by colours, minuciously arranged on the floor. Around it, the discreet remains of confetti in its natural state can be seen. This succint presentation displays in one take two different speeds that are opposed to each other. On the one hand, the hasty, fleeting and vertiginous normal use of confetti; on the other, that speed that has made it come to its present order; a slumbering, monotonous act. The current order is of great fragility, and it can be spoiled at any moment. Such fragility stresses the time factor. The duality contained in it can be thought in terms of chaos and order, work time and free time, party and hungover... In this piece we find that the hand of the artist has carried out a great effort, yet a talentless effort.
Confetti ordered, 2013.
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Minus times minus is plus
A medium that works with automatic writing is invited to speak with the nature documentaries director Félix Rodríguez de la Fuente about the supposed fake scenes in his Films. With a starting point of scepticism in all the paranormal phenomena, I create a fictional situation that talks about other fiction in order to, like in the math formula (- x - = +), from to fictions generate a truth: an observation about nature and cultural, documentary and fiction, staging, false as generator of truth, presentation and representation…
Performance, video & drawings, 2012.
Félix Rodríguez de la Fuente was an extremely famous naturalist and director of a TV series called “El hombre y la tierra”. During the 70’s, according to some surveys, was the most famous figure after Franco. Félix was a charismatic person and advanced defender of animals in Spain. In a nation that had moved from the country to the industrial peripheries of the cities and that considered country as a place to escape from, searching for a more comfortable life, he revaluated the beauty and the spirit of nature and rural life. He was our first ecologist. He was accused of shooting numerous scenes of his documentaries with domesticated animals and, even, like in the famous scene of the eagle and the Mouflon, with stuffed animals. Félix, the wolf defender, icon of the wildness, may had to appeal to semi-domesticated animals to spread his ideas.
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Untitled (personal belongings)
Edible sculptures that include almost imperceptible personal belongings. There is a dialogue of different ways of understanding what is personal.
Sponge, personal belongings. 2013.
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Condensation
Consists on an apparently ordinary car. The perception of the steam on the windows makes us have a feeling that a human body is inside the machine. It may remind us to furtive sex scenes, in a cold and distant way, presented with the minimum narrative means and at the same time with an excessive production. It can be observed as a dirty version of the Hans Haacke’s Condensed cube.
Car, condensation, 2012.
“Fermin does not deny the influence of conceptual art in his work, but he flees from its severe self-referentiality, placing himself, instead, in the voluble and capricious endeavour of seeking new meanings of art and new spaces, turning away from those within the norm. Presenting a car full of condensation in the middle of the gallery, Fermín is indicating Haacke and his Condensarion Cube, but gladly accepts that we take pleasure in imagining more mundane stories.”(Javier Hontoria).
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Untitled (Scrabble word finder)
Two newspapers of the year 2003 compose Untitled (Scrabble word finder) whose headlines are cut out and reorganised, to make the sentence, Shake out the crumbs from the tablecloth, love. Is made with the help of a word finder. It reminds us the insurmountable distance among news and the tranquillity of the domestic space. Scrabble, game, poetry and luck relate to the world, seen as a shifting and transformable place.
Newspapers. 2013.
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Acceleration, Cetacean and stolen thief.
I introduced three pieces making up a tryptic as a strategy that would allow them to contaminate each other but that would also keep some space between them. It is not one piece and it is not a recurring presentation of a great amount of small interventions, documented. A weird number. Three hidden narratives. In common, a certain way of doing things, of a minimal intervention of reality, of a playful analysis of daily rituals. Small, temporal situations condensed in objects. Work in which language is materialised and matter is verbalised, going from the particular to the universal and viceversa.
Speed (amphetamine), a soft toy, water and a stolen thief, 2013.
In Acceleration we see a line of speed that is set forming a circle. There is a certain prosaic idea of consumption as a loop, of alteration of the sense of time, of a race track. It causes a tension in the room, due to the presence of a product that cannot be legally had. The stolen thief (in Spanish ladr贸n, means both thief and multiple socket) goes back to the idea of a little crime coldly presented, without any criminal underworld connotations. A simple presentation of the result of an action that went undocumented but that effectively took place: I shoplifted a thief. It is presented connected to the wall socket, yet slightly helpless. In Moby Dick the subject matters are texture, attraction and repulsion, the perspective of nature from a human point of view, and time: the time of evaporation of water and the length of time of the exhibition (since when is that here?).
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180ยบ
A bathroom mirror in a bar was placed upside down. As expected, it reflected exactly the same image.
Performance, 2013.
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Water in vases
The water contained in a flower vase in Melilla flies across the strait of Gibraltar to replace that in the flower vase in the bar under my flat.
Performance, 2013.
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Unverifiable fact
A sofa split in two, shared by the homes of two neighbours who hardly know each other by sight, living in different appartment blocks, at either side of a wall. The sofa, in an unverifiable way, is as close as possible to its original form, we suppose it to be separated by just a few centimeters of wall.
Performance. 2013
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Royal
I stole a packet of baking powder pretending it was a cellphone, uttering descriptive phrases of what I was doing at the time such as, “I am now paying, dear”, or “I’m standing in the supermarket queue.”
Photographs and a packet of Royal baking powder, 2013.
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May water May water bill, 2013.
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The Swimmer
Inspired in Burt Lancaster’s film, I drew a perfect straight line of swimming pools with the help of Google Maps and a telephone with GPS and crossed Spain swimming a river of pools from Tarifa to my parent’s pool in Pamplona.
Performance. 2013.
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Narrow Sidewalk
In Narrow Sidewalk presents a series of small performances re-activating the sidewalk as a place of encounters, stressing width more than length. That is to say, a particular element of the city designed to transportation is now observed with the focus of all the other uses that it always had.
Photographs, cobblestones, marbles, wood, 2013.
A sidewalk is a place where chaos, weeds, public creativity, private gardens, playgrounds grow. We can learn very much of the organisation of a city by watching the narrow streets and the negotiation that happens there between pedestrians, cyclists, cars, government, neighbours and nature in terms of collective, respect, vandalism and popular inventiveness. But it is as well a negotiation with the past, with the previous urban designs of the cities. Through small interventions like replacing a paving stone of The Hague with one from Amsterdam, hiding marbles in another paving stone, fertilising a parallelogram of pavement, throwing LSD in a puddle or copying the pavement in the gallery we question ourselves on the assumed normalities of daily urban life and search the cracks, the splits of an apparently blocked organisation of the social space.
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Marbles
Tower of woods done wrong. In the gaps, the imperfections, some marbles stand.
Wood and marbles , 2013.
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The visit
The Visit is a machine that shoots violently tennis balls. Despite the courtesy and affability that suggests the title, the situation forces the audience to choose between an unsafe situation or the dissatisfaction of curiosity. The neutral white space remains almost empty, only with the presence of a tasteless and sportive readymade that makes another relation between artwork and viewer.
Tennis ball shooter, 2013.
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Good neighbours.
I exchanged some electricity with the neighbours of 1646, with whom they have a very good relation for years. By one hand they lighted us a lamp thanks to witch one could see the collages of one of the rooms and in return we lighted them the lamp of their living room.
Acci贸n, 2013.
The collages were cuttings of lamps of scenes of classical stage of power in an office. Many were personalities very well known but we could see only their utensil; the lamp of Hitler, for example. The rest are Ministers of energy or directors of hydroelectrics.
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Summerheat
In the middle of a storm in the North of Europe, the small toilet of 1646 in The Hague was transformed in a little warm summer, just when you where forced to place yourself right down an infrared heater and in front of a beach player with the sound of the cicada.
Heater, audio, 2013.
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Swan lake Sandpaper and Swan Lake (2h 7’), 2014.
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The palmist Colection of soap about to finish. 2013-on going.
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