Thought Experiments and Living in Art

In Ofrenda, Eceiza is less concerned with merely stimulating the sense of sight than with creating a space of experience — a place where possibilities can be explored, much like a thought experiment in which individuals encounter one another. In an era marked by debates, conflicts, wars, economic crises, violence, famine, persecution, and inequality, the artist seeks to provide a calming, welcoming space of counterculture. She creates a situation in which visitors are permitted to reflect and find moments of rest, a space where they may linger, lie down, feel, and spend something that seems scarcely available: time.

According to Eceiza, this is an exhibition that is meant to be used. It is a space that offers many experiences to be made and nurtured. The arrangement and materiality of the space she has fabricated invites visitors to stay and spend time within it. It is also a place of reciprocity: it offers an experience for the senses but must be treated with respect and care, just like the other visitors. Against this backdrop, the site can also be understood as a space of experience: an immersive encounter that, within a microcosm, can be transferred to other situations and spaces — namely, a vision of a scenario that enables warmth, care, and respectful exchanges. With her immersive installation, Eceiza employs, much like Jorge Luis Borges in his texts that merge fiction and science, a fabulative speculation that may be capable of generating a reality that enables a gentler form of coexistence than what currently prevails.

In any case, as becomes clear in her reference to Marta Minujín’s La Menesunda, Eceiza’s aim is to create a place where visitors not only see the art but also experience it — and even live within it. It is not the aesthetics that bring her closer to Minujín, but the possibility of a true popular democratic art form. It is intended to simulate bodies within a body, inviting individuals to discover, within a situation of vita contemplativa, a space that enables a profoundly democratic gathering of the most diverse people. As Hannah Arendt argues, it is in the realm of the ​“in-between” where the potential to create something new can be realized, fulfilling the sense of politics as freedom. Arendt’s understanding of politics as a realm of the political is based on the plurality of people and must always be considered in light of her own devastating experiences with totalitarianism. From this very plurality, politics, according to her, thus takes place in this ​“in-between space” — between different and diverse individuals. And only in this way can there be a political response to the fragility of these affairs, that is, of all ​“human affairs,” by understanding politics as based on plurality and, consequently, as freedom.

Eceiza creates rooms that are to be inhabited and enjoyed by others, providing numerous cushions on the floor to rest and an invitation to reconsider idleness as a positive, uplifting activity. Her installations invite us to partake in pleasant, porous and expansive soft architectures. Constructed as if they were states of mind, these spaces yearn to be experienced by a body that forgets its rational nature and gives way to the pure will of sensitive knowledge. This intimate and, at the same time, collective experience displays its political power by presenting art as a living form that must be nurtured in order to reveal new possible links between humans, perhaps even developing new perspectives that are less divisive and more reconciliatory.