Lúa Coderch: "No Yo"

Wednesday, 18 December at 22.20
The programme Pantalles on Betevé

No Yo 
Lúa Coderch
2018
Digital video, 16:9, monochannel, colour, stereo,
21ʹ
Writing and direction: Lúa Coderch
Videography: Adrià Sunyol Estadella
Editing: Adrià Sunyol Estadella, Lúa Coderch
Mouth: Ikram Bouloum
Voice: Lúa Coderch
Courtesy of the artist and the gallery àngels barcelona

The title and starting point of this work is the play and film piece by Samuel Beckett Not I (1972), a monologue where a mouth explains fragments of a painful story that, he says, is not his. The video also ties in with a series of works that revolve around a character invented by Coderch in 2012, La noia sense porta a la boca, modelled on a text by Canadian poet Anne Carson about the nymph Echo, who, according to Greek mythology, can only repeat things meaninglessly, endlessly. The artist uses these references to explore different issues related to the voice as a physical phenomenon, with speech and discourse.

We say that through talking we understand one another, by repeating this so often we have come to believe it. The imprecision of language reveals its inefficiency, at the same time as underlining its versatility. Speech has occupied a privileged place in Western tradition, claimed as the most direct way of expressing what we think and feel. But talking does not mean having one’s own voice. Isn’t it true that we obediently and obsessively repeat what we have been taught? Beyond this mouth and what it says, however open, frank and profound, within and outside a language, everything is malleable and that means it is also worn out, superficial. 

In the verbal incontinence of this impersonal mouth, it is difficult to discern a sustainable story and to know who is talking through it. Without identity, sincerity falls into the hole of rhetoric, whilst subjectivity dissolves in a community that is both impenetrable as well as welcoming. What is it doing, who is talking? Our in/ability to communicate, to capture this narrative drift, is, paradoxically, the only thing we have.

Lúa Coderch (Maynas, Peru, 1982) is an artist who combines object and narrative practices in videos, performances and installations that are configured as research devices. Her work focuses on the superficial, aesthetic and phenomenological dimension of our common life and its philosophical and latent political implications.