Damiàn Navarro, Bouda Etemad

Mägendorf
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If the starting point of the exhibition initially consisted in the desire to bring together two research projects from very different disciplines – that of the artist Damiàn Navarro and that of the economic historian Bouda Etemad – it is The Promise, a novel by Friedrich Dürrenmatt, which imposed itself as the backdrop to these intertwined stories. This proposal proceeds by juxtapositions and stratifications, thus experimenting with the perspective of each of these approaches. The premise around which Dürrenmatt’s novel is built feels impossible to fulfill at first. However, this supposed failure (caused by a cocktail of randomness, time and misunderstanding) will take a rich and complex turn in the construction it will have generated. It is the discovery of a drawing that allows the plot to be partially unraveled: a shape that provokes a hypothesis and a multitude of interpretations.

Bouda Etemad (1949) is a professor of economic and social history at the universities of Lausanne and Geneva. His work focuses on the colonial expansion of Europe. Among his publications, we can mention: The Ambiguous Heritage of Colonization: Economies, populations, societies, Armand Colin, Paris, 2012.

Damiàn Navarro (1983) has been conducting uncertain experiments for years, often with absurdist and parodic undertones. The notions of accident, misunderstanding, randomness and contradiction are some of the artist’s favorite subjects. He uses them as a framework that conditions the results of his research towards an aesthetic of adaptation. The situations of exhibition and the formal realizations that he develops, associate speculations, constraints and anecdotes by analogies and junctions. The manipulated data comes from heterogeneous fields of knowledge arranged without hierarchy in a system of semantic and visual correspondences. From reading games and their interpretative ambiguities, Damiàn Navarro elaborates a polymorphic research that simulates the potential for abstraction of a coded or locked content.