Enrique Ruiz Acosta, Mexico

Residency Period: 1 November 2014 - 31 October 2015


Bio

Mexican artist Enrique Ruiz Acosta studied at the Universidad Autonoma de Nuevo Leon, Facultad de Artes Visuales from 1979 to 1985 in Monterrey Mexico after which he spent time in Germany and Europe for two years, where he was exposed to various mainstream cultural movements. He then returned to Mexico and began his career as an artist while teaching at his University. He was part of a generation of artists who enjoyed a local prestige in Monterrey. In 2008 he began his PHD which has gradually brought him to this hiatus.

URL: enriqueruix.tumblr.com


On-hiatus Proposal Summary

Having worked and well-recognized as an artist in his community, in 2012, various factors in his personal and professional existence led to a re-evaluation of the way he had been conducting his life and career as an artist to this point. He gave up his teaching position at the university and began new pursuits such as meditation, random conversations, poetry workshops etc., as ways to assess where and who he is and where he would like to be. Enrique has reached a hyper-awareness of middle age and the corresponding time remaining for productivity and how exactly he should use it -- a mixture of thoughts and concerns about what to do just before he becomes too old or even perhaps senile. He plans to use his hiatus residency at RFAOH to make the best decisions for his remaining life.


Final Report

And now for something completely different
- Monty Python Flying Circus

No hay mucho que agregar a lo que ya he escrito durante un año. La residencia ha sido una estimulante oportunidad para resolver algunos aspectos de mi crisis, mientras que otros aspectos han permanecido aún a la deriva o irresueltos. Pero sobre todo encontré esta afortunada coincidencia (si es que existen las coincidencias) con un plan al que ahora me estoy impulsando para realizar a partir del 2016, algo que ya he comentado en estos últimos dos meses de residencia. Ha pasado un año y mi percepeción es que casi todo el tiempo de la residencia me sentí motivado a participar. Me hice preguntas necesarias y traté de responderlas. Escribí en español y traduje al inglés. A este complicado ejercicio se agregó el diálogo con los colegas (algunos de ellos, no todos) lo cual fue esencial para clarificar y para ubicar / desubicar las diferentes posiciones que tenemos frente al mundo del arte. Ha sido difícil al mismo tiempo que un poco extraño y otro poco cómico. Creo que las diferencias interculturales a veces dejaron huecos en las conversaciones imposibles de resolver.

There isn't much to add to what I already have written in one year. The residence has been an exciting opportunity to solve some aspects of my crisis, while other aspects have still remained unresolved or still drifting. But above all I found this lucky coincidence (if coincidences exist) with a plan that I'm pushing for, and that will start in 2016, something I have mentioned in the last two months of the residence. A year is gone, and my perception is that almost every moment I felt motivated to participate in this peculiar residence. I asked necessary questions and tried to answer them. I wrote in Spanish and translated it into English. In this complicated exercise, the dialogue with colleagues (some of them, not all of them) was essential to clarify and to locate/dislocate some of the different positions we have concerning the world of art. It was difficult but at the same time a little odd, and a little funny sometimes. I think cultural differences sometimes leave gaps behind impossible to solve.


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recent comments


10

 

Tres películas, seis horas (“Paraíso” de Ulrich Seidl). Trilogía en una tarde apacible en la Cineteca de Monterrey, Nuevo León: imágenes, narrativa, ideas que abren heridas, perforaciones, hiancias que nunca han cerrado, somos todos esos sujetos y esas circunstancias, globalidad rampante, dispositivos y regímenes de economía, y también somos objetos de otros sujetos, malestar (mal / estar) e incompletud, eso somos en-desde-por-entre-ante las circunstancias contemporáneas que, como virus, se ha extendido en todo el mundo. Somos la mezcla de huesos.carnes.órganos que no encuentra reposo, extraña lubricidad. Somos sujetos metafísicos al tiempo que sujetos racionales al tiempo que sujetos del inconsciente y del deseo obscuro, trasmutando sin cansancio.

Luego recordé las tardes en el Museo del Cine de Frankfurt Alemania a mediados de los ochenta, en una pequeña sala mirando absorto lo que hizo Fassbinder, atrapado entre las palabras y la expresión de un entorno que había colapsado y que no estaba dispuesto a reconocer su horror. En ese tiempo aún no comprendía el alcance del duelo de Fassbinder, su carga. Solamente intuía una semejanza, un delirio similar al de mis circunstancias, como una historia compartida o como el espejo de un dolor, ese derrumbe de Franz Biberkopf en las quince horas cinematográficas de Berlin Alexanderplatz (desde la novela de Alfred Döblin)

Ayer es hoy, doblez en el tiempo que nunca es lineal sino regreso y adelanto, simultaneidad, despliegue de hendiduras por entre las que podemos acceder momentáneamente al vacío, a la ausencia de lo que se ha ausentado. Todo vuelve como memorias pero también regresa como apetito de algo que siempre es suculento, lo que nos habita, un moustro coptado, atarantado, lo que todos nos decimos y sin embargo llega apenas como un murmullo de estrellas. Es el enigma perenne de la existencia en la forma de narrativas. Para eso hay artes, para nombrar lo que se resiste a ser nombrado, para ver lo que se niega a ser visto.

Nunca se deja de atisbar lo que se ha perseguido siempre, pero no todo es igual. Hay estadíos donde se recibe un fuego intenso que quema las entrañas (un hiatus en dolor), luego hay momentos donde se anhela en solitario inundado de nostalgia y melancolía (un hiatus reflexivo), y después hay instantes en que “eso” se presenta como una urgencia implacable, una energía aplicada a las cosas de la vida, masa y sustancia, trabajo y esfuerzo para tratar de atrapar el humo bailarían con la punta de los dedos. Entonces se hace arte. Pero no siempre sucede.

Gira, regresa, da vuelta, se detiene, se adelanta. Habita en el caos original de los griegos, ese lugar olvidado que existe desde mucho tiempo antes de que los Dioses se sentaran en el Olimpo, y hablaran de las pasiones humanas con las palabras claras, y las leyes para gobernarlos. El caos.

 

• • • • •

 

Three movies, a six hours trilogy (Paradise by Ulrich Seidl) in a quiet afternoon at the Cineteca de Monterrey, Nuevo León: images, narratives, ideas that open my wounds, punctures that have never closed. We are these people and these circumstances, rampant globalization, devices and Economy regimes, so we became objects from other subjects, malaise and incompleteness, in-from-between-to contemporary circumstances, like a viruses that has spread around the world. We are bones.flesh.organs, a restless mixture, a strange lubricity. We are metaphysical subjects while being rational subjects while being unconscious subjets, obscure desire, transmuting tirelessly from one to another.

Then I remembered evenings at the Film Museum in Frankfurt Germany in the mid-eighties, lost looking at what Fassbinder has done, trapped between words and expressions of a context that had collapsed and didn’t want to recognize their horror. At that time I didn’t understand the magnitude of the sorrowing of Fassbinder, I just sensed a similarity to my circumstances, a delirium or a shared history, like a mirror in pain. The collapse of Franz Biberkopf in a fifteen hours movie, Berlin Alexanderplatz (from the novel by Alfred Doblin).

Yesterday is today, folded; time is never linear, it returns and advance, concurrency, deployment of clefts among which we can access (momentarily) emptyness, the absence of what is absent. Everything becomes memories but also returns as an appetite for something that is always succulent, which inhabits us as a tied monster, dazed, what we all say and yet comes only as a murmur of stars. Is the perennial enigma of existence in the form of narratives. That is what arts are for, to name what refuses to be named, to see what refuses to be seen.

We never cease to glimpse at what we always have pursued, but it is not the same all the time. There are stages in where an intense fire that burns the bowels is received by us (a hiatus in pain), then there are times where it floats with nostalgia and melancholy (a thinking hiatus), and then there are moments that “it” is presented to us as a relentless urgency, an energy applied to the things of life, mass and substance, work and effort to try to catch with the tips of our fingers the smoke that dances in the air. Then art becomes art. But it doesn’t always happens.

It spins, returns, stop, advance. It dwells in the original chaos of the Greeks, that existed long before the gods sat on the Olympus and talked about the human passions with clear words and about the laws to govern them. Chaos.

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