Unwilling Spectator

Carlos Irijalba
Pamplona
1979


Take the most usual spot in our everyday practice, the room, say, that one grew up in over the course of 14 years, observe the sparse experience that has been gleaned from it, and this will graphically reveal how limited our subjective spatial circuit is: from the door to the bed, from the bed to the wardrobe, from the wardrobe to the table… This sparsity becomes yet more evident if we transfer this exercise to the sphere of contemporary public space. The real experience of the Atlantic Ocean on a Madrid-New York flight is 8 hours of pressurised cabin, a long shout from any connotation associated with that huge mass of water.

On an intermediate scale, the circuit of interurban connections and spaces materialises in our everyday practice as a kind of distancing of the real, making adjacent spots ultradistant: like the simultaneous experiencing of the same point on a motorway, between a workman sweeping the hard shoulder and another person passing in a car at 120 Km/h.

Unwilling Spectator details these relative mechanisms of time and experience, with the support of parameters such as inertia or tempo. It takes the shape of an intervention upon one of those small gardened spaces set within a motorway ring road. A space that’s been encircled a thousand times by the circuit that defines it but has never been approached. A location whose experience is residual or null.

The first part of the intervention consisted of journeying every day over a number of weeks to the Laiguangying intersection on the 5th Ring Highway of Beijing in order to reconnoitre these spaces between roads and study how they are constructed so as not to be experienced. The incongruity of their scale in relation with one’s own, their layout, their tempo, etc. Having situated the subject dimensionally in relation to the place, it was decided as a second step to produce some spatial permutation by establishing a small bonsai forest within the isle the ring road encircles. A situation of synecdoche of the spot is thereby generated, where the radically contrasting tempos of both elements are dissolved and their absolute characters become more relative.

Through this presence and the accompanying documentation that took place over the next month, a new sense of the distance between the circumscribed element and its host was set in play.

Negative action over the next year and beyond opens up the object of this intervention to the degree of irrelevance that the place lends it and what happened in a location that is not its own gives way, unattended, to the previous continuum of excluding realities.

(Beijing 2010)


Carlos Irijalba is former resident at the Rijksakademie of Amsterdam 2013/2014, Graduated at the Basque Country University and UDK Berlin en 2004. Awarded with the Guggenheim Bilbao Photography Grant in 2003 and the Marcelino Botín Art Grant in 2007/08 also received the Shifting Foundation Grant and first Prize and the Revelation PhotoEspaña Prize among others.

Irijalba has exhibited at international Art Museums, including the CCCB Barcelona, MUMA Melbourne or LMCC New York.


Visit our online store


30y3 is an independent platform and archive devoted to spreading and supporting the work of contemporary photographers from Spain and beyond.

If you want to get in touch with us, please write at hola(at)30y3.com or follow us on facebooktwitter and instagram.We also send a newsletter to which you can subscribe.

Designing and coding this website was possible thanks to a grant of Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte. Web hosting is sponsored by Dinahosting.

Eng/Cas
Home
Store
Artists

Albert Gusi Alberto Feijoo Alberto Lizaralde Alberto Salván Aleix Plademunt Alejandro Marote Alfonso Almendros Ali Hanoon Ana Cuba Ana Galán Ana Nieto Ángel de la Rubia Anna Huix Antonio Guerra Antonio Xoubanova
Bego Antón Bubi Canal
Carla Andrade Carlos Albalá Carlos Chavarría Carlos Irijalba Carlos Sanva Cristina de Middel
Daniel Mayrit Daniel S. Álvarez Darío Martínez David Hornillos David Mocha Drew Nikonowicz
Eduardo Nave Elisa González Miralles Erik Von Frankenberg
Félix R. Cid Fosi Vegue Fran Herbello Francisco Reina
Gerardo Custance Gonzalo Puig
Ignacio Evangelista Ignacio Navas Ignasi López Íñigo Aragón Intimidad Romero Ixone Sádaba
Javier Izquierdo Javier Marquerie Thomas Jerónimo Álvarez Jesús Madriñán Jon Cazenave Jon Uriarte Jordi Ruiz Cirera Jorge Fuembuena Jorge Yeregui José Cendón José Guerrero Jose Ramón Ais Juan Carlos Martínez Juan de la Cruz Megías Juan Diego Valera Julián Barón
Laia Abril Linarejos Moreno
Manuel Fernández Manuel Fernández Marc Serra María Sánchez María Serrano Markel Redondo Marta Soul Mati Martí Matías Costa Miguel Ángel Tornero Miren Pastor
Nicolás Combarro Nophoto Nophoto
Olmo González Oscar Monzón
Pablo Castilla Paco Gómez Palíndromo Mészáros Patricia Bofill Paula Gortázar
Reinaldo Loureiro Ricardo Cases Rita Puig-Serra Costa Roc Herms Roger Guaus Román Yñán Rut Panusé
Salva López Salvi Danés
Tanit Plana Tatjana Schloer Toni Amengual Txema Salvans
Vari Caramés
Xabier Ribas
Yosigo
Zoé T. Vizcaíno