Jimmie Durham inagurates the Dominó Caníbal in the PAC MURCIA 2010
Jimmie Durham will begin the exhibition by taking over the old church of Veronicas in Murcia, Spain, where it will take place. The installation questions “the division between the inside and the outside of sacred places in western society: both religious temples and exhibition rooms.”
Durham filled the interior of the former church with a collection of various objects that defy the usual classifications and function as a type of “residual map of the world”. His proposal is to introduce “the profane” in religious and/or aesthetic temples, according to the etymology of this term. That is to say, what is left “before the temple” – that which is excluded from it to preserve its spatial purity. In this way, chunks of concrete, wire, refrigerators, barrels, and glass form part of what is announced as the “extraordinary attempt to connect the interior of the temple with all that it rejected in order to become sacred; to convert it into a kind of “temple of confusion”.
The result, according to CAP, breaks the western notion of a sacred space which “separates itself from chaos, from the living and the pollution of the world”. The project is the result of an investigation of the material of reality, realized in the form of an inventory of things that Durhman collected over a month from the city of Murcia and its surroundings. This contemporary archaeology shows industrial detritus and objects that reflect “the superposition of cultural levels and violence that compose the urban environment”, and establishes a dialogue with its inhabitants. The objective is to include “everything” that is excluded from the temple. In short, Jimmie Durham’s proposal is an “enormous metonymical feast” in which the parts (the objects) contain the totality of urbanity.
As part of the Dominó Caníbal project, another six artists will work intervening, destroying, and devouring the installation that Durham has created as a banquet that takes place in the temple contaminated by the mundane. Cristina Lucas, The Bruce High Quality Foundation , Kendell Geers, Tania Bruguera, Rivane Neueschwander and Francis Alÿs will intervene the Sala Veronicas of Murcia throughout 2010 as a response to an invitation which can be summarized by the expression: "Bring that stuff in Here!", in other words, continue contaminating the false Paradise.
