Agony: You Can Go Whenever You Want (adversorecto, 2021)
[video documentation: Maellyn Macintosh]
The feeling of agony always starts with two points in a weird calculus of time. The first point plots the location at which you’re moving irreversibly forward, and the second where it will all finally come to an end. You face the first point as excessive, a surplus, “too much”; you look ahead to the second as a decisive void, a lack, a point of relief. A person falling from a skyscraper. Strangers falling in love.
But while you move facing forward, fall facing downward, you do so only by looking back in your imagination from a permanently blind future. You cannot definitively experience the end that releases you. The scene of agony resembles a mathematical asymptote: a limit that is infinitely approachable but unreachable. The free fall of agony in this way opens its paradoxical space of enjoyment.
«Agony: You Can Go Whenever You Want» was produced by two artists (Adversorecto: Peter Freund + Werner Thöni) both working between two stipulated points during a five-month period. In making the two main components of the piece – five translucent painted panels and two video/sound projections – the artists collaborated deliberately with minimal contact other than sharing the start and end dates, the physical dimensions, and the theme of agony for the project.
The resulting work is an installation intended for viewers to walk through and to step back, stroll around, and experience as an ensemble.
Video documentation of installation
Still from video documentation of «Agony: You Can Go Whenever You Want» (adversorecto, 2021).
A thank you to Eloi Puig, Montse Lopez, Natalia (assistant) et al of the Department of Fine Arts, University of Barcelona, for inviting adversorecto to exhibit this project in their gallery.