PENETRATION / Valentina Jager, Rodrigo Hernández / Schirin Kretschmann's Studio, Berlin

Penetration

Don't dictate

Penetrating voices going through my head

I haven't listened to a thing they said

Always they removed the answers

I won't suffer the consequences




Torn between the two

Right or wrong there is no answer

Don't tell me what to do

It's my choice I'm taking a chance yeah

Don't dictate

Don't dictate

Don't dictate

dictate to me

(Music and lyrics, by Penetration, 1977)

What a common place: the idea of a needle entering my flesh, whatever the reason is, tends to be both appealing and fearing at the same time: remember ‘A perfect day’ song?. I like the feeling of some substance inflowing me, like when I got a tattoo, or when I was anemic and I needed lots of iron my blood lacked of. I went out of red corpuscles after a very aggressive stomach surgery –again something inside me: micro-robotic hands and knifes, fixing the disaster my entrails were for so many years. So they injected me iron every day, for two months without success, but my buttocks still have the bruises that commemorate unexercised needles. Then, they went into my veins; it was a sort of Coca-cola thick liquid that made my arteries greenish again, and my energy came back inside me, as an invader I almost forgot it was part of myself.

This sort of intruder experiences, having a strange presence that might produce odd feelings, generate consciousness on ourselves, about our individual identities, mainly those that come from our own minds and bodies. Entering a new house, conversation, seduction, opening our mouths to eat, putting our tongues in a mouth, having one in ours, is perfectly piercing our egos, making monsters out of chemical, physical, mental and emotional identity structures: they change us.

From all our imaginary friends, and from our conversations with ourselves (many times aloud and in public) we can track our own plurality, also our intolerance. Strange presences invading our comfort zones, endangering known structures, rituals, crazes, prejudices and stupidity, force us to negotiate, to accept, and to think we can make things work together. But: is this possible?

Nothing stronger than fear, then, possibly defense. That’s the very argument of borders, limits, security and safety policies around the world. Fear is perhaps the most powerful energy nowadays. People trespassing –penetrating- lines that separate are prosecuted by court-appointment, no matter the reasons of these persons to escape their lands, their life, their families and cultures. Penetrating borders, passing through them is the origin and the force transforming the world since ages, every day.

Material or symbolical fences or fortifications are to be trespassed, to jump on them, to face and to destroy them, when necessary; but many times only with our gaze, not breaking through, is possible to do so: inframince. My own borders are to be broken, to have things passing through, in and out; I hope my language might change, to be more unstable and fragile, so its borders can eventually weaken to become more affective, more contradictory and open: transparent. The very act of coming and going from one discipline to another one implies a destructive, aggressive, violent, amorous, sexual activity. Sometimes I think I’m my own profligate, dissolute old auntie.

Attempting to make things work, accepting diversity, and even looking for the perfect intruder, can be a life lasting enterprise: building an ever changing piece of time and space that measures exactly the same as our dreams and nightmares, inventing a game in which the checkers are permanently expanding and compressing, building something that has to be necessarily definitely unfinished, like accepting, as a desired task, someone caressing our bottom crack all day long, all night long, forever.

Valentina Jager (Puerto Vallarta, 1985) and Rodrigo Hernández (Mexico DF, 1983) present new works at artist Schirin Kretschmann’s studio in Berlin. Both of them studied in Mexico City, at La Esmeralda art school. Then she went to Braunschweig and him to Karlsruhe, both German cities. Friends for a while, both of them only-childs, they allow themselves to be the other intruder in this exercise of dialogue and generosity. Also, both of them have been into tracing particular missing parts of life and experience that ideally (or not) could exist in this universe. Both of them make drawings, videos, sculptures, and they are not partners.

Abraham Cruzvillegas

2010