Prospecting Towards a New Territory

2014

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The object seems to have become the only place to store memories. It is the tangible proof of the existence of the past and it is around the object that we have built historical and scientific discourses, assigning symbolic values and inserting social agreements that support it. However, the object is simultaneously, the most manifest and the most latent thing: it presents itself as the proof of something that is yet to be defined.

Fritzia Irizar’s work takes into account that history and science are almost fictitious, built on tiny parts of knowledge, restrained by the decisions of a few individuals. Nonetheless, there are fictions that we wish to maintain: as acts of faith, belonging, will, or certainty.

 

Prospecting Towards a New Territory turns to the past and to fiction to explore remnants and discover new possibilities: Irizar defies the archeological object along with its symbolic values and the subjectivities built around it. Her artworks are based upon false findings, unlikely similarities, and absurd coincidences to demonstrate how the most insignificant acts built our most significant truths. She makes us accomplices in her fictions by inserting them in the scenery and language of scientific exhibitions. She reminds us that history and science are built over objects. Objects meant to disappear with the passage of time and nature acting upon them; objects that are ephemeral but turn eternal when they become the basis of our discourses.
 

In order to allude to the fragility of order, the social human organization and defy the reconstruction of the past, Fritzia Irizar confronts us with the discovery of six new planets trying to show how the burden of our beliefs depends on certain institutions, persons, or coincidences. As well, she makes a series of videos framing a detail of a landscape, where five objects appear and disappear alternately due to a simple and evident digital manipulation.By this, she also establishes the contradiction that exists in our present way to relate to objects and its historic value that oscillates between preservation, valorization and recognition and the accumulation and excessive replacement of them.
Through her artworks, Irizar encourages us to think about the exchange of symbolic values that objects acquire when put into another context. She analyzes the transformation of common objects into archeological, symbolic or artistic material. She questions the pile of vague knowledge regarding the construction of sciences, which are apparently stable, but ultimately uncertain. It is through this interrogation, that she also questions scientific information and its manipulation by political or economic means.
 

One by one, the pieces relate to each other in order to question the different layers on which we build truths: its materiality, its temporality, its meaning, but also the generalized desire to make sciences real and objective. Simultaneously, Fritzia Irizar aims to detonate the imagination of the viewer in order to create possibilities
that can be consolidated as truths. In turn, she proves how some of our certainties exist only because we imagined them.
 

Prospecting Towards a New Territory, suggests different questions in the form of new materials, mechanisms and contents in the work of Fritzia Irizar: why do we keep trusting in the promise that objects provide us as historical proofs? How can we ask objects to reconfigure the past that has vanished behind them? How can the subject get rid of the constructions and values that objects have acquired throughout time? Thus, every artwork bets on the multiplication of the histories of the past by changing the starting points upon they were built.

 

Helena Lugo