January 2021 – NÚRIA GÓMEZ GABRIEL

NÚRIA GÓMEZ GABRIEL

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MOURNING PEDAGOGIES. A REFLECTION ON THE INTIMATE EXPERIENCE OF DEATH, ITS IMAGINARIES AND THE RECOVERY OF THE SYMBOLIC FRAMEWORKS OF GRIEF AND LOSS

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All Undead Futures of Paco Chanivet by Núria Gómez Gabriel When I set foot inside the room it was almost completely dark. I couldn’t make out if there were seats or benches, so I remained standing, still, until my eyes adjusted to the darkness. After a few long minutes waiting in unabated silence, I decided to sit on the floor of the black box, and, as I rested my hands on its surface, I could perceive it was acorn-shaped, a thin and opaque velvet. I was sure of it because velvet has a very distinctive odour to it, perhaps the smell of the passage of time, a build-up of dust. Time smells something like childhood film theatres, not unlike the odour of crypts or subterranean caves where the dead were buried in the 10th century to hide the graves of martyrs from the eyes of the profane. The atmosphere was wet, uncomfortable, like a typical December day in Barcelona. From the first minute I noticed that I wasn’t alone, although I couldn’t clearly discern what or who was with me, or the distance between us. Suddenly I heard a strange sound that came from the outside; it seemed strange because it was like a slapping sound, although on the skin of my wrist I felt a breeze more similar to the brush of a caress, or like a knot being untied. Gradually, I felt the limits of the black box were inching closer to my body until the space became still and a small and tenuous pink light started to shine at a distance that was incomprehensible in relation to where I was still sitting. I moved towards that light, arching my back slightly and leaning a little to the left. It was a tiny quartzite sculpted in a shape that looked like the Eye of Horus or Udjat, that symbol with apotropaic characteristics — magic, protective, purifying, healing — which in ancient times embodied the order of the imperturbable and was used to invoke cosmic-state stability. In fact, in Ancient Egypt it was one of the most powerful amulets because of its sight-enhancing qualities and an ancestral remedy for ocular diseases, counteracting “eye hunting” or the evil eye and protecting the dead in the afterlife. Upon inspecting the red quartzite up close, something halfway between my ears and Adam’s apple began to vibrate. Red quartzite is a metamorphic rock, semi-transparent or translucid, producing a shine known as aventurescence. Aventurine stones produce an optical effect similar to glitter, with hundreds of small dots that glisten and, depending on the position of the stone, or whether you change your angle of vision, the reflection makes the shiny points move and sparkle. While I was lost in that minute landscape, the Udjat contours became warped and the eye now looked more like an orifice with clenched and viscous teeth that moved with a physical momentum that was not easily recognised. It was then, observing that seemingly disfigured, twisted and incomplete thing that my tongue started to produce salty saliva. I don’t remember seeing anything else, nor do I recall the time I spent inside the exhibition in terms of minutes, hours or seconds. Yet I do remember dream sequences outside of time. And I also remember their colour: from orangey red to violet pink to black-yellow. A dream within a dream within a memory outside my eyes and field of vision. They were not my dreams. Or maybe they were. They were the memories of all undead futures afforded by Paco Chanivet’s La prótesis prometeica (Promethean Prosthesis). The question lies in how, in each one, I could partly recognise what was happening. For example, I recognised my friends but was unaware of their lives. They were underground lives, lived together inside a volcano called Ennneés. And they would sing beautiful songs. And it was always night-time. And they drank a kind of bluish tequila they kept buried in ash. And they slept for days on end. Even asleep they kept on singing. But they didn’t have children. They told me that reproduction belonged to another time and since maternity remained trapped there, they were the family. Later, in a second vision, just the opposite happened. I couldn’t recognise any of the forms I was interacting with. They were like masses with a consistency similar to spiderwebs, light and sticky. Or no, they were more like clumps of vaporous clothing which, when fused together, wailed a hardcore polyphony. Their movements brought to mind certain mechanics in our world, syncopated, fast, voracious. And every time they advanced towards a place my body became lighter, and lighter. First a finger, then the lower abdomen, then my jaw. What I recall with absolute clarity was the last of the sequences because it seemed very much like the present day. A Dubai blaze, Pope Francis in Rome, the dance of US soldiers in Afghanistan, sandstorms, Hurricane Katrina, glacier collapses, the Statue of Liberty, Twitter. It was all the same apart from the words. The words, said and written, all had the same meaning. And when there was any attempt at communication time stopped dead. Something said to me: Weeglcoommm tru dde moderkn agxge xekkk. And in the room a sharp tap again on my left shoulder. That tap still hurts, although I like to take pleasure from it. My encounters with Paco Chanivet’s last work were a kind of threshold experience, but encounters in which, despite their skewed logics, I felt good and could cope with life, manage stress. Something akin to the effects on the body when ketamine is taken, or the hallucinations caused by a good hit of noradrenaline. However, beyond my personal journey and recollections of those dreams, Chanivet’s work brings us closer to two geopsychological approaches — or perhaps it would be more accurate to say gemopsychologcal — at which I think it might be a good idea to stop. When I left the room, still in darkness, I decided to take the green line on the underground and change at Plaza España, on the next train bound for Hospitalet. I couldn’t help thinking about the approaches Mark Fisher wrote about the hauntological dimension of current time. Reflections in which the English critic speaks of a certain formal nostalgia for everything that could exist and which, nevertheless, is shoddily buried by the phantasmagorical end of Capitalism Realism. Having said that, I feel that hauntology, exactly as it functions in Chanivet’s work, doesn’t deal with nostalgia at all. What his latest intervention speaks of is that every present situation is tied to a series of possible futures, some of which can be carried out but the majority of which aren’t. As the situation changes, these future possibilities become rigid, brittle, inert and finally impossible and unable to be realised. In hindsight, it seems that some have not been viable futures at all, but they don’t turn into nothing. Instead, they give form to meaning in a future that really happens, its symbolic traces lingering within us. And that is precisely where the magic of Chanivet lies: in creating possible conditions to be able to see these traces and get to know the way in which they continue to affect our sense of still-possible futures, or ones that are perhaps still possible. And here it is important to emphasise that the world-views his work sets forth are always unique and non-transferrable, joined to the incomplete memories and moods of all those people who have witnessed his recently unveiled exhibition. Paco Chanivet’s hauntology talks to us at once of delirium, illness, synaesthesia, a state of ecstasy, allowing us to explore beyond the normative limits of our body. That which occurs when imagination goes crazy, becomes disturbed, unhinged and unkempt when we can understand that in expanding the limit of the capacity of a body, we broaden everyone’s potential. Thus, the English writer and photographer Matt Colquhoun, influenced by Fisher, influenced by Bataille, influenced by Nietzsche, recently wrote on his blog xenogothic.com, how “mankind cannot remain indifferent to its monsters, given they cannot escape the constitution of the perfect type”. Colquhoun, who on different occasions has thought about today’s ontologies of body horror, also speaks of gothic not being an aesthetic genre but a prosthetic sensibility, “It is a mode of addition, extension and attachment and one that has taken on many different forms, from ‘hook hands’ to new technologies that allow a body to exceed its own limits”. The prosthetic is not then simply a medical adjective but an ontological one. In other words, Paco Chanivet’s gothic prosthesis gives speculative form to that which today would seem not to take it. Yet in gothic literature it is the past and present that are seriously confused, and the characters appear forced to relive certain past dramas with their own bodies; here something similar occurs but moves in the other direction. Our own projections and future desires journey across us to remind us that we are trapped in the framework we have configured on our idea of ourselves. We will desecrate the fictitious eye of Udjat to which we obey, Chanivet tells us. We eye ourselves. But to desecrate there is a need to fashion a tactic or collusion — an artwork — capable of demystifying objects, people and things separated and captured by theological devices from all religions that have us shut in celestial caves as if we were the martyrs of their rotten cause. We eye ourselves with our clenched and viscous teeth. We eye ourselves as if it were a sacrilege of our permanent disability. We eye ourselves to abandon the blind logics of automated reproduction. We eye ourselves dirty and desensitised. We eye ourselves to feel the flesh of this world and the trace of all undead futures to come. — All Undead Futures of Paco Chanivet by Núria Gómez Gabriel When I set foot inside the room it was almost completely dark. I couldn’t make out if there were seats or benches, so I remained standing, still, until my eyes adjusted to the darkness. After a few long minutes waiting in unabated silence, I decided to sit on the floor of the black box, and, as I rested my hands on its surface, I could perceive it was acorn-shaped, a thin and opaque velvet. I was sure of it because velvet has a very distinctive odour to it, perhaps the smell of the passage of time, a build-up of dust. Time smells something like childhood film theatres, not unlike the odour of crypts or subterranean caves where the dead were buried in the 10th century to hide the graves of martyrs from the eyes of the profane. The atmosphere was wet, uncomfortable, like a typical December day in Barcelona. From the first minute I noticed that I wasn’t alone, although I couldn’t clearly discern what or who was with me, or the distance between us. Suddenly I heard a strange sound that came from the outside; it seemed strange because it was like a slapping sound, although on the skin of my wrist I felt a breeze more similar to the brush of a caress, or like a knot being untied. Gradually, I felt the limits of the black box were inching closer to my body until the space became still and a small and tenuous pink light started to shine at a distance that was incomprehensible in relation to where I was still sitting. I moved towards that light, arching my back slightly and leaning a little to the left. It was a tiny quartzite sculpted in a shape that looked like the Eye of Horus or Udjat, that symbol with apotropaic characteristics — magic, protective, purifying, healing — which in ancient times embodied the order of the imperturbable and was used to invoke cosmic-state stability. In fact, in Ancient Egypt it was one of the most powerful amulets because of its sight-enhancing qualities and an ancestral remedy for ocular diseases, counteracting “eye hunting” or the evil eye and protecting the dead in the afterlife. Upon inspecting the red quartzite up close, something halfway between my ears and Adam’s apple began to vibrate. Red quartzite is a metamorphic rock, semi-transparent or translucid, producing a shine known as aventurescence. Aventurine stones produce an optical effect similar to glitter, with hundreds of small dots that glisten and, depending on the position of the stone, or whether you change your angle of vision, the reflection makes the shiny points move and sparkle. While I was lost in that minute landscape, the Udjat contours became warped and the eye now looked more like an orifice with clenched and viscous teeth that moved with a physical momentum that was not easily recognised. It was then, observing that seemingly disfigured, twisted and incomplete thing that my tongue started to produce salty saliva. I don’t remember seeing anything else, nor do I recall the time I spent inside the exhibition in terms of minutes, hours or seconds. Yet I do remember dream sequences outside of time. And I also remember their colour: from orangey red to violet pink to black-yellow. A dream within a dream within a memory outside my eyes and field of vision. They were not my dreams. Or maybe they were. They were the memories of all undead futures afforded by Paco Chanivet’s La prótesis prometeica (Promethean Prosthesis). The question lies in how, in each one, I could partly recognise what was happening. For example, I recognised my friends but was unaware of their lives. They were underground lives, lived together inside a volcano called Ennneés. And they would sing beautiful songs. And it was always night-time. And they drank a kind of bluish tequila they kept buried in ash. And they slept for days on end. Even asleep they kept on singing. But they didn’t have children. They told me that reproduction belonged to another time and since maternity remained trapped there, they were the family. Later, in a second vision, just the opposite happened. I couldn’t recognise any of the forms I was interacting with. They were like masses with a consistency similar to spiderwebs, light and sticky. Or no, they were more like clumps of vaporous clothing which, when fused together, wailed a hardcore polyphony. Their movements brought to mind certain mechanics in our world, syncopated, fast, voracious. And every time they advanced towards a place my body became lighter, and lighter. First a finger, then the lower abdomen, then my jaw. What I recall with absolute clarity was the last of the sequences because it seemed very much like the present day. A Dubai blaze, Pope Francis in Rome, the dance of US soldiers in Afghanistan, sandstorms, Hurricane Katrina, glacier collapses, the Statue of Liberty, Twitter. It was all the same apart from the words. The words, said and written, all had the same meaning. And when there was any attempt at communication time stopped dead. Something said to me: Weeglcoommm tru dde moderkn agxge xekkk. And in the room a sharp tap again on my left shoulder. That tap still hurts, although I like to take pleasure from it. My encounters with Paco Chanivet’s last work were a kind of threshold experience, but encounters in which, despite their skewed logics, I felt good and could cope with life, manage stress. Something akin to the effects on the body when ketamine is taken, or the hallucinations caused by a good hit of noradrenaline. However, beyond my personal journey and recollections of those dreams, Chanivet’s work brings us closer to two geopsychological approaches — or perhaps it would be more accurate to say gemopsychologcal — at which I think it might be a good idea to stop. When I left the room, still in darkness, I decided to take the green line on the underground and change at Plaza España, on the next train bound for Hospitalet. I couldn’t help thinking about the approaches Mark Fisher wrote about the hauntological dimension of current time. Reflections in which the English critic speaks of a certain formal nostalgia for everything that could exist and which, nevertheless, is shoddily buried by the phantasmagorical end of Capitalism Realism. Having said that, I feel that hauntology, exactly as it functions in Chanivet’s work, doesn’t deal with nostalgia at all. What his latest intervention speaks of is that every present situation is tied to a series of possible futures, some of which can be carried out but the majority of which aren’t. As the situation changes, these future possibilities become rigid, brittle, inert and finally impossible and unable to be realised. In hindsight, it seems that some have not been viable futures at all, but they don’t turn into nothing. Instead, they give form to meaning in a future that really happens, its symbolic traces lingering within us. And that is precisely where the magic of Chanivet lies: in creating possible conditions to be able to see these traces and get to know the way in which they continue to affect our sense of still-possible futures, or ones that are perhaps still possible. And here it is important to emphasise that the world-views his work sets forth are always unique and non-transferrable, joined to the incomplete memories and moods of all those people who have witnessed his recently unveiled exhibition. Paco Chanivet’s hauntology talks to us at once of delirium, illness, synaesthesia, a state of ecstasy, allowing us to explore beyond the normative limits of our body. That which occurs when imagination goes crazy, becomes disturbed, unhinged and unkempt when we can understand that in expanding the limit of the capacity of a body, we broaden everyone’s potential. Thus, the English writer and photographer Matt Colquhoun, influenced by Fisher, influenced by Bataille, influenced by Nietzsche, recently wrote on his blog xenogothic.com, how “mankind cannot remain indifferent to its monsters, given they cannot escape the constitution of the perfect type”. Colquhoun, who on different occasions has thought about today’s ontologies of body horror, also speaks of gothic not being an aesthetic genre but a prosthetic sensibility, “It is a mode of addition, extension and attachment and one that has taken on many different forms, from ‘hook hands’ to new technologies that allow a body to exceed its own limits”. The prosthetic is not then simply a medical adjective but an ontological one. In other words, Paco Chanivet’s gothic prosthesis gives speculative form to that which today would seem not to take it. Yet in gothic literature it is the past and present that are seriously confused, and the characters appear forced to relive certain past dramas with their own bodies; here something similar occurs but moves in the other direction. Our own projections and future desires journey across us to remind us that we are trapped in the framework we have configured on our idea of ourselves. We will desecrate the fictitious eye of Udjat to which we obey, Chanivet tells us. We eye ourselves. But to desecrate there is a need to fashion a tactic or collusion — an artwork — capable of demystifying objects, people and things separated and captured by theological devices from all religions that have us shut in celestial caves as if we were the martyrs of their rotten cause. We eye ourselves with our clenched and viscous teeth. We eye ourselves as if it were a sacrilege of our permanent disability. We eye ourselves to abandon the blind logics of automated reproduction. We eye ourselves dirty and desensitised. We eye ourselves to feel the flesh of this world and the trace of all undead futures to come. — All Undead Futures of Paco Chanivet by Núria Gómez Gabriel When I set foot inside the room it was almost completely dark. I couldn’t make out if there were seats or benches, so I remained standing, still, until my eyes adjusted to the darkness. After a few long minutes waiting in unabated silence, I decided to sit on the floor of the black box, and, as I rested my hands on its surface, I could perceive it was acorn-shaped, a thin and opaque velvet. I was sure of it because velvet has a very distinctive odour to it, perhaps the smell of the passage of time, a build-up of dust. Time smells something like childhood film theatres, not unlike the odour of crypts or subterranean caves where the dead were buried in the 10th century to hide the graves of martyrs from the eyes of the profane. The atmosphere was wet, uncomfortable, like a typical December day in Barcelona. From the first minute I noticed that I wasn’t alone, although I couldn’t clearly discern what or who was with me, or the distance between us. Suddenly I heard a strange sound that came from the outside; it seemed strange because it was like a slapping sound, although on the skin of my wrist I felt a breeze more similar to the brush of a caress, or like a knot being untied. Gradually, I felt the limits of the black box were inching closer to my body until the space became still and a small and tenuous pink light started to shine at a distance that was incomprehensible in relation to where I was still sitting. I moved towards that light, arching my back slightly and leaning a little to the left. It was a tiny quartzite sculpted in a shape that looked like the Eye of Horus or Udjat, that symbol with apotropaic characteristics — magic, protective, purifying, healing — which in ancient times embodied the order of the imperturbable and was used to invoke cosmic-state stability. In fact, in Ancient Egypt it was one of the most powerful amulets because of its sight-enhancing qualities and an ancestral remedy for ocular diseases, counteracting “eye hunting” or the evil eye and protecting the dead in the afterlife. Upon inspecting the red quartzite up close, something halfway between my ears and Adam’s apple began to vibrate. Red quartzite is a metamorphic rock, semi-transparent or translucid, producing a shine known as aventurescence. Aventurine stones produce an optical effect similar to glitter, with hundreds of small dots that glisten and, depending on the position of the stone, or whether you change your angle of vision, the reflection makes the shiny points move and sparkle. While I was lost in that minute landscape, the Udjat contours became warped and the eye now looked more like an orifice with clenched and viscous teeth that moved with a physical momentum that was not easily recognised. It was then, observing that seemingly disfigured, twisted and incomplete thing that my tongue started to produce salty saliva. I don’t remember seeing anything else, nor do I recall the time I spent inside the exhibition in terms of minutes, hours or seconds. Yet I do remember dream sequences outside of time. And I also remember their colour: from orangey red to violet pink to black-yellow. A dream within a dream within a memory outside my eyes and field of vision. They were not my dreams. Or maybe they were. They were the memories of all undead futures afforded by Paco Chanivet’s La prótesis prometeica (Promethean Prosthesis). The question lies in how, in each one, I could partly recognise what was happening. For example, I recognised my friends but was unaware of their lives. They were underground lives, lived together inside a volcano called Ennneés. And they would sing beautiful songs. And it was always night-time. And they drank a kind of bluish tequila they kept buried in ash. And they slept for days on end. Even asleep they kept on singing. But they didn’t have children. They told me that reproduction belonged to another time and since maternity remained trapped there, they were the family. Later, in a second vision, just the opposite happened. I couldn’t recognise any of the forms I was interacting with. They were like masses with a consistency similar to spiderwebs, light and sticky. Or no, they were more like clumps of vaporous clothing which, when fused together, wailed a hardcore polyphony. Their movements brought to mind certain mechanics in our world, syncopated, fast, voracious. And every time they advanced towards a place my body became lighter, and lighter. First a finger, then the lower abdomen, then my jaw. What I recall with absolute clarity was the last of the sequences because it seemed very much like the present day. A Dubai blaze, Pope Francis in Rome, the dance of US soldiers in Afghanistan, sandstorms, Hurricane Katrina, glacier collapses, the Statue of Liberty, Twitter. It was all the same apart from the words. The words, said and written, all had the same meaning. And when there was any attempt at communication time stopped dead. Something said to me: Weeglcoommm tru dde moderkn agxge xekkk. And in the room a sharp tap again on my left shoulder. That tap still hurts, although I like to take pleasure from it. My encounters with Paco Chanivet’s last work were a kind of threshold experience, but encounters in which, despite their skewed logics, I felt good and could cope with life, manage stress. Something akin to the effects on the body when ketamine is taken, or the hallucinations caused by a good hit of noradrenaline. However, beyond my personal journey and recollections of those dreams, Chanivet’s work brings us closer to two geopsychological approaches — or perhaps it would be more accurate to say gemopsychologcal — at which I think it might be a good idea to stop. When I left the room, still in darkness, I decided to take the green line on the underground and change at Plaza España, on the next train bound for Hospitalet. I couldn’t help thinking about the approaches Mark Fisher wrote about the hauntological dimension of current time. Reflections in which the English critic speaks of a certain formal nostalgia for everything that could exist and which, nevertheless, is shoddily buried by the phantasmagorical end of Capitalism Realism. Having said that, I feel that hauntology, exactly as it functions in Chanivet’s work, doesn’t deal with nostalgia at all. What his latest intervention speaks of is that every present situation is tied to a series of possible futures, some of which can be carried out but the majority of which aren’t. As the situation changes, these future possibilities become rigid, brittle, inert and finally impossible and unable to be realised. In hindsight, it seems that some have not been viable futures at all, but they don’t turn into nothing. Instead, they give form to meaning in a future that really happens, its symbolic traces lingering within us. And that is precisely where the magic of Chanivet lies: in creating possible conditions to be able to see these traces and get to know the way in which they continue to affect our sense of still-possible futures, or ones that are perhaps still possible. And here it is important to emphasise that the world-views his work sets forth are always unique and non-transferrable, joined to the incomplete memories and moods of all those people who have witnessed his recently unveiled exhibition. Paco Chanivet’s hauntology talks to us at once of delirium, illness, synaesthesia, a state of ecstasy, allowing us to explore beyond the normative limits of our body. That which occurs when imagination goes crazy, becomes disturbed, unhinged and unkempt when we can understand that in expanding the limit of the capacity of a body, we broaden everyone’s potential. Thus, the English writer and photographer Matt Colquhoun, influenced by Fisher, influenced by Bataille, influenced by Nietzsche, recently wrote on his blog xenogothic.com, how “mankind cannot remain indifferent to its monsters, given they cannot escape the constitution of the perfect type”. Colquhoun, who on different occasions has thought about today’s ontologies of body horror, also speaks of gothic not being an aesthetic genre but a prosthetic sensibility, “It is a mode of addition, extension and attachment and one that has taken on many different forms, from ‘hook hands’ to new technologies that allow a body to exceed its own limits”. The prosthetic is not then simply a medical adjective but an ontological one. In other words, Paco Chanivet’s gothic prosthesis gives speculative form to that which today would seem not to take it. Yet in gothic literature it is the past and present that are seriously confused, and the characters appear forced to relive certain past dramas with their own bodies; here something similar occurs but moves in the other direction. Our own projections and future desires journey across us to remind us that we are trapped in the framework we have configured on our idea of ourselves. We will desecrate the fictitious eye of Udjat to which we obey, Chanivet tells us. We eye ourselves. But to desecrate there is a need to fashion a tactic or collusion — an artwork — capable of demystifying objects, people and things separated and captured by theological devices from all religions that have us shut in celestial caves as if we were the martyrs of their rotten cause. We eye ourselves with our clenched and viscous teeth. We eye ourselves as if it were a sacrilege of our permanent disability. We eye ourselves to abandon the blind logics of automated reproduction. We eye ourselves dirty and desensitised. We eye ourselves to feel the flesh of this world and the trace of all undead futures to come. — All Undead Futures of Paco Chanivet by Núria Gómez Gabriel When I set foot inside the room it was almost completely dark. I couldn’t make out if there were seats or benches, so I remained standing, still, until my eyes adjusted to the darkness. After a few long minutes waiting in unabated silence, I decided to sit on the floor of the black box, and, as I rested my hands on its surface, I could perceive it was acorn-shaped, a thin and opaque velvet. I was sure of it because velvet has a very distinctive odour to it, perhaps the smell of the passage of time, a build-up of dust. Time smells something like childhood film theatres, not unlike the odour of crypts or subterranean caves where the dead were buried in the 10th century to hide the graves of martyrs from the eyes of the profane. The atmosphere was wet, uncomfortable, like a typical December day in Barcelona. From the first minute I noticed that I wasn’t alone, although I couldn’t clearly discern what or who was with me, or the distance between us. Suddenly I heard a strange sound that came from the outside; it seemed strange because it was like a slapping sound, although on the skin of my wrist I felt a breeze more similar to the brush of a caress, or like a knot being untied. Gradually, I felt the limits of the black box were inching closer to my body until the space became still and a small and tenuous pink light started to shine at a distance that was incomprehensible in relation to where I was still sitting. I moved towards that light, arching my back slightly and leaning a little to the left. It was a tiny quartzite sculpted in a shape that looked like the Eye of Horus or Udjat, that symbol with apotropaic characteristics — magic, protective, purifying, healing — which in ancient times embodied the order of the imperturbable and was used to invoke cosmic-state stability. In fact, in Ancient Egypt it was one of the most powerful amulets because of its sight-enhancing qualities and an ancestral remedy for ocular diseases, counteracting “eye hunting” or the evil eye and protecting the dead in the afterlife. Upon inspecting the red quartzite up close, something halfway between my ears and Adam’s apple began to vibrate. Red quartzite is a metamorphic rock, semi-transparent or translucid, producing a shine known as aventurescence. Aventurine stones produce an optical effect similar to glitter, with hundreds of small dots that glisten and, depending on the position of the stone, or whether you change your angle of vision, the reflection makes the shiny points move and sparkle. While I was lost in that minute landscape, the Udjat contours became warped and the eye now looked more like an orifice with clenched and viscous teeth that moved with a physical momentum that was not easily recognised. It was then, observing that seemingly disfigured, twisted and incomplete thing that my tongue started to produce salty saliva. I don’t remember seeing anything else, nor do I recall the time I spent inside the exhibition in terms of minutes, hours or seconds. Yet I do remember dream sequences outside of time. And I also remember their colour: from orangey red to violet pink to black-yellow. A dream within a dream within a memory outside my eyes and field of vision. They were not my dreams. Or maybe they were. They were the memories of all undead futures afforded by Paco Chanivet’s La prótesis prometeica (Promethean Prosthesis). The question lies in how, in each one, I could partly recognise what was happening. For example, I recognised my friends but was unaware of their lives. They were underground lives, lived together inside a volcano called Ennneés. And they would sing beautiful songs. And it was always night-time. And they drank a kind of bluish tequila they kept buried in ash. And they slept for days on end. Even asleep they kept on singing. But they didn’t have children. They told me that reproduction belonged to another time and since maternity remained trapped there, they were the family. Later, in a second vision, just the opposite happened. I couldn’t recognise any of the forms I was interacting with. They were like masses with a consistency similar to spiderwebs, light and sticky. Or no, they were more like clumps of vaporous clothing which, when fused together, wailed a hardcore polyphony. Their movements brought to mind certain mechanics in our world, syncopated, fast, voracious. And every time they advanced towards a place my body became lighter, and lighter. First a finger, then the lower abdomen, then my jaw. What I recall with absolute clarity was the last of the sequences because it seemed very much like the present day. A Dubai blaze, Pope Francis in Rome, the dance of US soldiers in Afghanistan, sandstorms, Hurricane Katrina, glacier collapses, the Statue of Liberty, Twitter. It was all the same apart from the words. The words, said and written, all had the same meaning. And when there was any attempt at communication time stopped dead. Something said to me: Weeglcoommm tru dde moderkn agxge xekkk. And in the room a sharp tap again on my left shoulder. That tap still hurts, although I like to take pleasure from it. My encounters with Paco Chanivet’s last work were a kind of threshold experience, but encounters in which, despite their skewed logics, I felt good and could cope with life, manage stress. Something akin to the effects on the body when ketamine is taken, or the hallucinations caused by a good hit of noradrenaline. However, beyond my personal journey and recollections of those dreams, Chanivet’s work brings us closer to two geopsychological approaches — or perhaps it would be more accurate to say gemopsychologcal — at which I think it might be a good idea to stop. When I left the room, still in darkness, I decided to take the green line on the underground and change at Plaza España, on the next train bound for Hospitalet. I couldn’t help thinking about the approaches Mark Fisher wrote about the hauntological dimension of current time. Reflections in which the English critic speaks of a certain formal nostalgia for everything that could exist and which, nevertheless, is shoddily buried by the phantasmagorical end of Capitalism Realism. Having said that, I feel that hauntology, exactly as it functions in Chanivet’s work, doesn’t deal with nostalgia at all. What his latest intervention speaks of is that every present situation is tied to a series of possible futures, some of which can be carried out but the majority of which aren’t. As the situation changes, these future possibilities become rigid, brittle, inert and finally impossible and unable to be realised. In hindsight, it seems that some have not been viable futures at all, but they don’t turn into nothing. Instead, they give form to meaning in a future that really happens, its symbolic traces lingering within us. And that is precisely where the magic of Chanivet lies: in creating possible conditions to be able to see these traces and get to know the way in which they continue to affect our sense of still-possible futures, or ones that are perhaps still possible. And here it is important to emphasise that the world-views his work sets forth are always unique and non-transferrable, joined to the incomplete memories and moods of all those people who have witnessed his recently unveiled exhibition. Paco Chanivet’s hauntology talks to us at once of delirium, illness, synaesthesia, a state of ecstasy, allowing us to explore beyond the normative limits of our body. That which occurs when imagination goes crazy, becomes disturbed, unhinged and unkempt when we can understand that in expanding the limit of the capacity of a body, we broaden everyone’s potential. Thus, the English writer and photographer Matt Colquhoun, influenced by Fisher, influenced by Bataille, influenced by Nietzsche, recently wrote on his blog xenogothic.com, how “mankind cannot remain indifferent to its monsters, given they cannot escape the constitution of the perfect type”. Colquhoun, who on different occasions has thought about today’s ontologies of body horror, also speaks of gothic not being an aesthetic genre but a prosthetic sensibility, “It is a mode of addition, extension and attachment and one that has taken on many different forms, from ‘hook hands’ to new technologies that allow a body to exceed its own limits”. The prosthetic is not then simply a medical adjective but an ontological one. In other words, Paco Chanivet’s gothic prosthesis gives speculative form to that which today would seem not to take it. Yet in gothic literature it is the past and present that are seriously confused, and the characters appear forced to relive certain past dramas with their own bodies; here something similar occurs but moves in the other direction. Our own projections and future desires journey across us to remind us that we are trapped in the framework we have configured on our idea of ourselves. We will desecrate the fictitious eye of Udjat to which we obey, Chanivet tells us. We eye ourselves. But to desecrate there is a need to fashion a tactic or collusion — an artwork — capable of demystifying objects, people and things separated and captured by theological devices from all religions that have us shut in celestial caves as if we were the martyrs of their rotten cause. We eye ourselves with our clenched and viscous teeth. We eye ourselves as if it were a sacrilege of our permanent disability. We eye ourselves to abandon the blind logics of automated reproduction. We eye ourselves dirty and desensitised. We eye ourselves to feel the flesh of this world and the trace of all undead futures to come. — All Undead Futures of Paco Chanivet by Núria Gómez Gabriel When I set foot inside the room it was almost completely dark. I couldn’t make out if there were seats or benches, so I remained standing, still, until my eyes adjusted to the darkness. After a few long minutes waiting in unabated silence, I decided to sit on the floor of the black box, and, as I rested my hands on its surface, I could perceive it was acorn-shaped, a thin and opaque velvet. I was sure of it because velvet has a very distinctive odour to it, perhaps the smell of the passage of time, a build-up of dust. Time smells something like childhood film theatres, not unlike the odour of crypts or subterranean caves where the dead were buried in the 10th century to hide the graves of martyrs from the eyes of the profane. The atmosphere was wet, uncomfortable, like a typical December day in Barcelona. From the first minute I noticed that I wasn’t alone, although I couldn’t clearly discern what or who was with me, or the distance between us. Suddenly I heard a strange sound that came from the outside; it seemed strange because it was like a slapping sound, although on the skin of my wrist I felt a breeze more similar to the brush of a caress, or like a knot being untied. Gradually, I felt the limits of the black box were inching closer to my body until the space became still and a small and tenuous pink light started to shine at a distance that was incomprehensible in relation to where I was still sitting. I moved towards that light, arching my back slightly and leaning a little to the left. It was a tiny quartzite sculpted in a shape that looked like the Eye of Horus or Udjat, that symbol with apotropaic characteristics — magic, protective, purifying, healing — which in ancient times embodied the order of the imperturbable and was used to invoke cosmic-state stability. In fact, in Ancient Egypt it was one of the most powerful amulets because of its sight-enhancing qualities and an ancestral remedy for ocular diseases, counteracting “eye hunting” or the evil eye and protecting the dead in the afterlife. Upon inspecting the red quartzite up close, something halfway between my ears and Adam’s apple began to vibrate. Red quartzite is a metamorphic rock, semi-transparent or translucid, producing a shine known as aventurescence. Aventurine stones produce an optical effect similar to glitter, with hundreds of small dots that glisten and, depending on the position of the stone, or whether you change your angle of vision, the reflection makes the shiny points move and sparkle. While I was lost in that minute landscape, the Udjat contours became warped and the eye now looked more like an orifice with clenched and viscous teeth that moved with a physical momentum that was not easily recognised. It was then, observing that seemingly disfigured, twisted and incomplete thing that my tongue started to produce salty saliva. I don’t remember seeing anything else, nor do I recall the time I spent inside the exhibition in terms of minutes, hours or seconds. Yet I do remember dream sequences outside of time. And I also remember their colour: from orangey red to violet pink to black-yellow. A dream within a dream within a memory outside my eyes and field of vision. They were not my dreams. Or maybe they were. They were the memories of all undead futures afforded by Paco Chanivet’s La prótesis prometeica (Promethean Prosthesis). The question lies in how, in each one, I could partly recognise what was happening. For example, I recognised my friends but was unaware of their lives. They were underground lives, lived together inside a volcano called Ennneés. And they would sing beautiful songs. And it was always night-time. And they drank a kind of bluish tequila they kept buried in ash. And they slept for days on end. Even asleep they kept on singing. But they didn’t have children. They told me that reproduction belonged to another time and since maternity remained trapped there, they were the family. Later, in a second vision, just the opposite happened. I couldn’t recognise any of the forms I was interacting with. They were like masses with a consistency similar to spiderwebs, light and sticky. Or no, they were more like clumps of vaporous clothing which, when fused together, wailed a hardcore polyphony. Their movements brought to mind certain mechanics in our world, syncopated, fast, voracious. And every time they advanced towards a place my body became lighter, and lighter. First a finger, then the lower abdomen, then my jaw. What I recall with absolute clarity was the last of the sequences because it seemed very much like the present day. A Dubai blaze, Pope Francis in Rome, the dance of US soldiers in Afghanistan, sandstorms, Hurricane Katrina, glacier collapses, the Statue of Liberty, Twitter. It was all the same apart from the words. The words, said and written, all had the same meaning. And when there was any attempt at communication time stopped dead. Something said to me: Weeglcoommm tru dde moderkn agxge xekkk. And in the room a sharp tap again on my left shoulder. That tap still hurts, although I like to take pleasure from it. My encounters with Paco Chanivet’s last work were a kind of threshold experience, but encounters in which, despite their skewed logics, I felt good and could cope with life, manage stress. Something akin to the effects on the body when ketamine is taken, or the hallucinations caused by a good hit of noradrenaline. However, beyond my personal journey and recollections of those dreams, Chanivet’s work brings us closer to two geopsychological approaches — or perhaps it would be more accurate to say gemopsychologcal — at which I think it might be a good idea to stop. When I left the room, still in darkness, I decided to take the green line on the underground and change at Plaza España, on the next train bound for Hospitalet. I couldn’t help thinking about the approaches Mark Fisher wrote about the hauntological dimension of current time. Reflections in which the English critic speaks of a certain formal nostalgia for everything that could exist and which, nevertheless, is shoddily buried by the phantasmagorical end of Capitalism Realism. Having said that, I feel that hauntology, exactly as it functions in Chanivet’s work, doesn’t deal with nostalgia at all. What his latest intervention speaks of is that every present situation is tied to a series of possible futures, some of which can be carried out but the majority of which aren’t. As the situation changes, these future possibilities become rigid, brittle, inert and finally impossible and unable to be realised. In hindsight, it seems that some have not been viable futures at all, but they don’t turn into nothing. Instead, they give form to meaning in a future that really happens, its symbolic traces lingering within us. And that is precisely where the magic of Chanivet lies: in creating possible conditions to be able to see these traces and get to know the way in which they continue to affect our sense of still-possible futures, or ones that are perhaps still possible. And here it is important to emphasise that the world-views his work sets forth are always unique and non-transferrable, joined to the incomplete memories and moods of all those people who have witnessed his recently unveiled exhibition. Paco Chanivet’s hauntology talks to us at once of delirium, illness, synaesthesia, a state of ecstasy, allowing us to explore beyond the normative limits of our body. That which occurs when imagination goes crazy, becomes disturbed, unhinged and unkempt when we can understand that in expanding the limit of the capacity of a body, we broaden everyone’s potential. Thus, the English writer and photographer Matt Colquhoun, influenced by Fisher, influenced by Bataille, influenced by Nietzsche, recently wrote on his blog xenogothic.com, how “mankind cannot remain indifferent to its monsters, given they cannot escape the constitution of the perfect type”. Colquhoun, who on different occasions has thought about today’s ontologies of body horror, also speaks of gothic not being an aesthetic genre but a prosthetic sensibility, “It is a mode of addition, extension and attachment and one that has taken on many different forms, from ‘hook hands’ to new technologies that allow a body to exceed its own limits”. The prosthetic is not then simply a medical adjective but an ontological one. In other words, Paco Chanivet’s gothic prosthesis gives speculative form to that which today would seem not to take it. Yet in gothic literature it is the past and present that are seriously confused, and the characters appear forced to relive certain past dramas with their own bodies; here something similar occurs but moves in the other direction. Our own projections and future desires journey across us to remind us that we are trapped in the framework we have configured on our idea of ourselves. We will desecrate the fictitious eye of Udjat to which we obey, Chanivet tells us. We eye ourselves. But to desecrate there is a need to fashion a tactic or collusion — an artwork — capable of demystifying objects, people and things separated and captured by theological devices from all religions that have us shut in celestial caves as if we were the martyrs of their rotten cause. We eye ourselves with our clenched and viscous teeth. We eye ourselves as if it were a sacrilege of our permanent disability. We eye ourselves to abandon the blind logics of automated reproduction. We eye ourselves dirty and desensitised. We eye ourselves to feel the flesh of this world and the trace of all undead futures to come. — All Undead Futures of Paco Chanivet by Núria Gómez Gabriel When I set foot inside the room it was almost completely dark. I couldn’t make out if there were seats or benches, so I remained standing, still, until my eyes adjusted to the darkness. After a few long minutes waiting in unabated silence, I decided to sit on the floor of the black box, and, as I rested my hands on its surface, I could perceive it was acorn-shaped, a thin and opaque velvet. I was sure of it because velvet has a very distinctive odour to it, perhaps the smell of the passage of time, a build-up of dust. Time smells something like childhood film theatres, not unlike the odour of crypts or subterranean caves where the dead were buried in the 10th century to hide the graves of martyrs from the eyes of the profane. The atmosphere was wet, uncomfortable, like a typical December day in Barcelona. From the first minute I noticed that I wasn’t alone, although I couldn’t clearly discern what or who was with me, or the distance between us. Suddenly I heard a strange sound that came from the outside; it seemed strange because it was like a slapping sound, although on the skin of my wrist I felt a breeze more similar to the brush of a caress, or like a knot being untied. Gradually, I felt the limits of the black box were inching closer to my body until the space became still and a small and tenuous pink light started to shine at a distance that was incomprehensible in relation to where I was still sitting. I moved towards that light, arching my back slightly and leaning a little to the left. It was a tiny quartzite sculpted in a shape that looked like the Eye of Horus or Udjat, that symbol with apotropaic characteristics — magic, protective, purifying, healing — which in ancient times embodied the order of the imperturbable and was used to invoke cosmic-state stability. In fact, in Ancient Egypt it was one of the most powerful amulets because of its sight-enhancing qualities and an ancestral remedy for ocular diseases, counteracting “eye hunting” or the evil eye and protecting the dead in the afterlife. Upon inspecting the red quartzite up close, something halfway between my ears and Adam’s apple began to vibrate. Red quartzite is a metamorphic rock, semi-transparent or translucid, producing a shine known as aventurescence. Aventurine stones produce an optical effect similar to glitter, with hundreds of small dots that glisten and, depending on the position of the stone, or whether you change your angle of vision, the reflection makes the shiny points move and sparkle. While I was lost in that minute landscape, the Udjat contours became warped and the eye now looked more like an orifice with clenched and viscous teeth that moved with a physical momentum that was not easily recognised. It was then, observing that seemingly disfigured, twisted and incomplete thing that my tongue started to produce salty saliva. I don’t remember seeing anything else, nor do I recall the time I spent inside the exhibition in terms of minutes, hours or seconds. Yet I do remember dream sequences outside of time. And I also remember their colour: from orangey red to violet pink to black-yellow. A dream within a dream within a memory outside my eyes and field of vision. They were not my dreams. Or maybe they were. They were the memories of all undead futures afforded by Paco Chanivet’s La prótesis prometeica (Promethean Prosthesis). The question lies in how, in each one, I could partly recognise what was happening. For example, I recognised my friends but was unaware of their lives. They were underground lives, lived together inside a volcano called Ennneés. And they would sing beautiful songs. And it was always night-time. And they drank a kind of bluish tequila they kept buried in ash. And they slept for days on end. Even asleep they kept on singing. But they didn’t have children. They told me that reproduction belonged to another time and since maternity remained trapped there, they were the family. Later, in a second vision, just the opposite happened. I couldn’t recognise any of the forms I was interacting with. They were like masses with a consistency similar to spiderwebs, light and sticky. Or no, they were more like clumps of vaporous clothing which, when fused together, wailed a hardcore polyphony. Their movements brought to mind certain mechanics in our world, syncopated, fast, voracious. And every time they advanced towards a place my body became lighter, and lighter. First a finger, then the lower abdomen, then my jaw. What I recall with absolute clarity was the last of the sequences because it seemed very much like the present day. A Dubai blaze, Pope Francis in Rome, the dance of US soldiers in Afghanistan, sandstorms, Hurricane Katrina, glacier collapses, the Statue of Liberty, Twitter. It was all the same apart from the words. The words, said and written, all had the same meaning. And when there was any attempt at communication time stopped dead. Something said to me: Weeglcoommm tru dde moderkn agxge xekkk. And in the room a sharp tap again on my left shoulder. That tap still hurts, although I like to take pleasure from it. My encounters with Paco Chanivet’s last work were a kind of threshold experience, but encounters in which, despite their skewed logics, I felt good and could cope with life, manage stress. Something akin to the effects on the body when ketamine is taken, or the hallucinations caused by a good hit of noradrenaline. However, beyond my personal journey and recollections of those dreams, Chanivet’s work brings us closer to two geopsychological approaches — or perhaps it would be more accurate to say gemopsychologcal — at which I think it might be a good idea to stop. When I left the room, still in darkness, I decided to take the green line on the underground and change at Plaza España, on the next train bound for Hospitalet. I couldn’t help thinking about the approaches Mark Fisher wrote about the hauntological dimension of current time. Reflections in which the English critic speaks of a certain formal nostalgia for everything that could exist and which, nevertheless, is shoddily buried by the phantasmagorical end of Capitalism Realism. Having said that, I feel that hauntology, exactly as it functions in Chanivet’s work, doesn’t deal with nostalgia at all. What his latest intervention speaks of is that every present situation is tied to a series of possible futures, some of which can be carried out but the majority of which aren’t. As the situation changes, these future possibilities become rigid, brittle, inert and finally impossible and unable to be realised. In hindsight, it seems that some have not been viable futures at all, but they don’t turn into nothing. Instead, they give form to meaning in a future that really happens, its symbolic traces lingering within us. And that is precisely where the magic of Chanivet lies: in creating possible conditions to be able to see these traces and get to know the way in which they continue to affect our sense of still-possible futures, or ones that are perhaps still possible. And here it is important to emphasise that the world-views his work sets forth are always unique and non-transferrable, joined to the incomplete memories and moods of all those people who have witnessed his recently unveiled exhibition. Paco Chanivet’s hauntology talks to us at once of delirium, illness, synaesthesia, a state of ecstasy, allowing us to explore beyond the normative limits of our body. That which occurs when imagination goes crazy, becomes disturbed, unhinged and unkempt when we can understand that in expanding the limit of the capacity of a body, we broaden everyone’s potential. Thus, the English writer and photographer Matt Colquhoun, influenced by Fisher, influenced by Bataille, influenced by Nietzsche, recently wrote on his blog xenogothic.com, how “mankind cannot remain indifferent to its monsters, given they cannot escape the constitution of the perfect type”. Colquhoun, who on different occasions has thought about today’s ontologies of body horror, also speaks of gothic not being an aesthetic genre but a prosthetic sensibility, “It is a mode of addition, extension and attachment and one that has taken on many different forms, from ‘hook hands’ to new technologies that allow a body to exceed its own limits”. The prosthetic is not then simply a medical adjective but an ontological one. In other words, Paco Chanivet’s gothic prosthesis gives speculative form to that which today would seem not to take it. Yet in gothic literature it is the past and present that are seriously confused, and the characters appear forced to relive certain past dramas with their own bodies; here something similar occurs but moves in the other direction. Our own projections and future desires journey across us to remind us that we are trapped in the framework we have configured on our idea of ourselves. We will desecrate the fictitious eye of Udjat to which we obey, Chanivet tells us. We eye ourselves. But to desecrate there is a need to fashion a tactic or collusion — an artwork — capable of demystifying objects, people and things separated and captured by theological devices from all religions that have us shut in celestial caves as if we were the martyrs of their rotten cause. We eye ourselves with our clenched and viscous teeth. We eye ourselves as if it were a sacrilege of our permanent disability. We eye ourselves to abandon the blind logics of automated reproduction. We eye ourselves dirty and desensitised. We eye ourselves to feel the flesh of this world and the trace of all undead futures to come. — All Undead Futures of Paco Chanivet by Núria Gómez Gabriel When I set foot inside the room it was almost completely dark. I couldn’t make out if there were seats or benches, so I remained standing, still, until my eyes adjusted to the darkness. After a few long minutes waiting in unabated silence, I decided to sit on the floor of the black box, and, as I rested my hands on its surface, I could perceive it was acorn-shaped, a thin and opaque velvet. I was sure of it because velvet has a very distinctive odour to it, perhaps the smell of the passage of time, a build-up of dust. Time smells something like childhood film theatres, not unlike the odour of crypts or subterranean caves where the dead were buried in the 10th century to hide the graves of martyrs from the eyes of the profane. The atmosphere was wet, uncomfortable, like a typical December day in Barcelona. From the first minute I noticed that I wasn’t alone, although I couldn’t clearly discern what or who was with me, or the distance between us. Suddenly I heard a strange sound that came from the outside; it seemed strange because it was like a slapping sound, although on the skin of my wrist I felt a breeze more similar to the brush of a caress, or like a knot being untied. Gradually, I felt the limits of the black box were inching closer to my body until the space became still and a small and tenuous pink light started to shine at a distance that was incomprehensible in relation to where I was still sitting. I moved towards that light, arching my back slightly and leaning a little to the left. It was a tiny quartzite sculpted in a shape that looked like the Eye of Horus or Udjat, that symbol with apotropaic characteristics — magic, protective, purifying, healing — which in ancient times embodied the order of the imperturbable and was used to invoke cosmic-state stability. In fact, in Ancient Egypt it was one of the most powerful amulets because of its sight-enhancing qualities and an ancestral remedy for ocular diseases, counteracting “eye hunting” or the evil eye and protecting the dead in the afterlife. Upon inspecting the red quartzite up close, something halfway between my ears and Adam’s apple began to vibrate. Red quartzite is a metamorphic rock, semi-transparent or translucid, producing a shine known as aventurescence. Aventurine stones produce an optical effect similar to glitter, with hundreds of small dots that glisten and, depending on the position of the stone, or whether you change your angle of vision, the reflection makes the shiny points move and sparkle. While I was lost in that minute landscape, the Udjat contours became warped and the eye now looked more like an orifice with clenched and viscous teeth that moved with a physical momentum that was not easily recognised. It was then, observing that seemingly disfigured, twisted and incomplete thing that my tongue started to produce salty saliva. I don’t remember seeing anything else, nor do I recall the time I spent inside the exhibition in terms of minutes, hours or seconds. Yet I do remember dream sequences outside of time. And I also remember their colour: from orangey red to violet pink to black-yellow. A dream within a dream within a memory outside my eyes and field of vision. They were not my dreams. Or maybe they were. They were the memories of all undead futures afforded by Paco Chanivet’s La prótesis prometeica (Promethean Prosthesis). The question lies in how, in each one, I could partly recognise what was happening. For example, I recognised my friends but was unaware of their lives. They were underground lives, lived together inside a volcano called Ennneés. And they would sing beautiful songs. And it was always night-time. And they drank a kind of bluish tequila they kept buried in ash. And they slept for days on end. Even asleep they kept on singing. But they didn’t have children. They told me that reproduction belonged to another time and since maternity remained trapped there, they were the family. Later, in a second vision, just the opposite happened. I couldn’t recognise any of the forms I was interacting with. They were like masses with a consistency similar to spiderwebs, light and sticky. Or no, they were more like clumps of vaporous clothing which, when fused together, wailed a hardcore polyphony. Their movements brought to mind certain mechanics in our world, syncopated, fast, voracious. And every time they advanced towards a place my body became lighter, and lighter. First a finger, then the lower abdomen, then my jaw. What I recall with absolute clarity was the last of the sequences because it seemed very much like the present day. A Dubai blaze, Pope Francis in Rome, the dance of US soldiers in Afghanistan, sandstorms, Hurricane Katrina, glacier collapses, the Statue of Liberty, Twitter. It was all the same apart from the words. The words, said and written, all had the same meaning. And when there was any attempt at communication time stopped dead. Something said to me: Weeglcoommm tru dde moderkn agxge xekkk. And in the room a sharp tap again on my left shoulder. That tap still hurts, although I like to take pleasure from it. My encounters with Paco Chanivet’s last work were a kind of threshold experience, but encounters in which, despite their skewed logics, I felt good and could cope with life, manage stress. Something akin to the effects on the body when ketamine is taken, or the hallucinations caused by a good hit of noradrenaline. However, beyond my personal journey and recollections of those dreams, Chanivet’s work brings us closer to two geopsychological approaches — or perhaps it would be more accurate to say gemopsychologcal — at which I think it might be a good idea to stop. When I left the room, still in darkness, I decided to take the green line on the underground and change at Plaza España, on the next train bound for Hospitalet. I couldn’t help thinking about the approaches Mark Fisher wrote about the hauntological dimension of current time. Reflections in which the English critic speaks of a certain formal nostalgia for everything that could exist and which, nevertheless, is shoddily buried by the phantasmagorical end of Capitalism Realism. Having said that, I feel that hauntology, exactly as it functions in Chanivet’s work, doesn’t deal with nostalgia at all. What his latest intervention speaks of is that every present situation is tied to a series of possible futures, some of which can be carried out but the majority of which aren’t. As the situation changes, these future possibilities become rigid, brittle, inert and finally impossible and unable to be realised. In hindsight, it seems that some have not been viable futures at all, but they don’t turn into nothing. Instead, they give form to meaning in a future that really happens, its symbolic traces lingering within us. And that is precisely where the magic of Chanivet lies: in creating possible conditions to be able to see these traces and get to know the way in which they continue to affect our sense of still-possible futures, or ones that are perhaps still possible. And here it is important to emphasise that the world-views his work sets forth are always unique and non-transferrable, joined to the incomplete memories and moods of all those people who have witnessed his recently unveiled exhibition. Paco Chanivet’s hauntology talks to us at once of delirium, illness, synaesthesia, a state of ecstasy, allowing us to explore beyond the normative limits of our body. That which occurs when imagination goes crazy, becomes disturbed, unhinged and unkempt when we can understand that in expanding the limit of the capacity of a body, we broaden everyone’s potential. Thus, the English writer and photographer Matt Colquhoun, influenced by Fisher, influenced by Bataille, influenced by Nietzsche, recently wrote on his blog xenogothic.com, how “mankind cannot remain indifferent to its monsters, given they cannot escape the constitution of the perfect type”. Colquhoun, who on different occasions has thought about today’s ontologies of body horror, also speaks of gothic not being an aesthetic genre but a prosthetic sensibility, “It is a mode of addition, extension and attachment and one that has taken on many different forms, from ‘hook hands’ to new technologies that allow a body to exceed its own limits”. The prosthetic is not then simply a medical adjective but an ontological one. In other words, Paco Chanivet’s gothic prosthesis gives speculative form to that which today would seem not to take it. Yet in gothic literature it is the past and present that are seriously confused, and the characters appear forced to relive certain past dramas with their own bodies; here something similar occurs but moves in the other direction. Our own projections and future desires journey across us to remind us that we are trapped in the framework we have configured on our idea of ourselves. We will desecrate the fictitious eye of Udjat to which we obey, Chanivet tells us. We eye ourselves. But to desecrate there is a need to fashion a tactic or collusion — an artwork — capable of demystifying objects, people and things separated and captured by theological devices from all religions that have us shut in celestial caves as if we were the martyrs of their rotten cause. We eye ourselves with our clenched and viscous teeth. We eye ourselves as if it were a sacrilege of our permanent disability. We eye ourselves to abandon the blind logics of automated reproduction. We eye ourselves dirty and desensitised. We eye ourselves to feel the flesh of this world and the trace of all undead futures to come. — All Undead Futures of Paco Chanivet by Núria Gómez Gabriel When I set foot inside the room it was almost completely dark. I couldn’t make out if there were seats or benches, so I remained standing, still, until my eyes adjusted to the darkness. After a few long minutes waiting in unabated silence, I decided to sit on the floor of the black box, and, as I rested my hands on its surface, I could perceive it was acorn-shaped, a thin and opaque velvet. I was sure of it because velvet has a very distinctive odour to it, perhaps the smell of the passage of time, a build-up of dust. Time smells something like childhood film theatres, not unlike the odour of crypts or subterranean caves where the dead were buried in the 10th century to hide the graves of martyrs from the eyes of the profane. The atmosphere was wet, uncomfortable, like a typical December day in Barcelona. From the first minute I noticed that I wasn’t alone, although I couldn’t clearly discern what or who was with me, or the distance between us. Suddenly I heard a strange sound that came from the outside; it seemed strange because it was like a slapping sound, although on the skin of my wrist I felt a breeze more similar to the brush of a caress, or like a knot being untied. Gradually, I felt the limits of the black box were inching closer to my body until the space became still and a small and tenuous pink light started to shine at a distance that was incomprehensible in relation to where I was still sitting. I moved towards that light, arching my back slightly and leaning a little to the left. It was a tiny quartzite sculpted in a shape that looked like the Eye of Horus or Udjat, that symbol with apotropaic characteristics — magic, protective, purifying, healing — which in ancient times embodied the order of the imperturbable and was used to invoke cosmic-state stability. In fact, in Ancient Egypt it was one of the most powerful amulets because of its sight-enhancing qualities and an ancestral remedy for ocular diseases, counteracting “eye hunting” or the evil eye and protecting the dead in the afterlife. Upon inspecting the red quartzite up close, something halfway between my ears and Adam’s apple began to vibrate. Red quartzite is a metamorphic rock, semi-transparent or translucid, producing a shine known as aventurescence. Aventurine stones produce an optical effect similar to glitter, with hundreds of small dots that glisten and, depending on the position of the stone, or whether you change your angle of vision, the reflection makes the shiny points move and sparkle. While I was lost in that minute landscape, the Udjat contours became warped and the eye now looked more like an orifice with clenched and viscous teeth that moved with a physical momentum that was not easily recognised. It was then, observing that seemingly disfigured, twisted and incomplete thing that my tongue started to produce salty saliva. I don’t remember seeing anything else, nor do I recall the time I spent inside the exhibition in terms of minutes, hours or seconds. Yet I do remember dream sequences outside of time. And I also remember their colour: from orangey red to violet pink to black-yellow. A dream within a dream within a memory outside my eyes and field of vision. They were not my dreams. Or maybe they were. They were the memories of all undead futures afforded by Paco Chanivet’s La prótesis prometeica (Promethean Prosthesis). The question lies in how, in each one, I could partly recognise what was happening. For example, I recognised my friends but was unaware of their lives. They were underground lives, lived together inside a volcano called Ennneés. And they would sing beautiful songs. And it was always night-time. And they drank a kind of bluish tequila they kept buried in ash. And they slept for days on end. Even asleep they kept on singing. But they didn’t have children. They told me that reproduction belonged to another time and since maternity remained trapped there, they were the family. Later, in a second vision, just the opposite happened. I couldn’t recognise any of the forms I was interacting with. They were like masses with a consistency similar to spiderwebs, light and sticky. Or no, they were more like clumps of vaporous clothing which, when fused together, wailed a hardcore polyphony. Their movements brought to mind certain mechanics in our world, syncopated, fast, voracious. And every time they advanced towards a place my body became lighter, and lighter. First a finger, then the lower abdomen, then my jaw. What I recall with absolute clarity was the last of the sequences because it seemed very much like the present day. A Dubai blaze, Pope Francis in Rome, the dance of US soldiers in Afghanistan, sandstorms, Hurricane Katrina, glacier collapses, the Statue of Liberty, Twitter. It was all the same apart from the words. The words, said and written, all had the same meaning. And when there was any attempt at communication time stopped dead. Something said to me: Weeglcoommm tru dde moderkn agxge xekkk. And in the room a sharp tap again on my left shoulder. That tap still hurts, although I like to take pleasure from it. My encounters with Paco Chanivet’s last work were a kind of threshold experience, but encounters in which, despite their skewed logics, I felt good and could cope with life, manage stress. Something akin to the effects on the body when ketamine is taken, or the hallucinations caused by a good hit of noradrenaline. However, beyond my personal journey and recollections of those dreams, Chanivet’s work brings us closer to two geopsychological approaches — or perhaps it would be more accurate to say gemopsychologcal — at which I think it might be a good idea to stop. When I left the room, still in darkness, I decided to take the green line on the underground and change at Plaza España, on the next train bound for Hospitalet. I couldn’t help thinking about the approaches Mark Fisher wrote about the hauntological dimension of current time. Reflections in which the English critic speaks of a certain formal nostalgia for everything that could exist and which, nevertheless, is shoddily buried by the phantasmagorical end of Capitalism Realism. Having said that, I feel that hauntology, exactly as it functions in Chanivet’s work, doesn’t deal with nostalgia at all. What his latest intervention speaks of is that every present situation is tied to a series of possible futures, some of which can be carried out but the majority of which aren’t. As the situation changes, these future possibilities become rigid, brittle, inert and finally impossible and unable to be realised. In hindsight, it seems that some have not been viable futures at all, but they don’t turn into nothing. Instead, they give form to meaning in a future that really happens, its symbolic traces lingering within us. And that is precisely where the magic of Chanivet lies: in creating possible conditions to be able to see these traces and get to know the way in which they continue to affect our sense of still-possible futures, or ones that are perhaps still possible. And here it is important to emphasise that the world-views his work sets forth are always unique and non-transferrable, joined to the incomplete memories and moods of all those people who have witnessed his recently unveiled exhibition. Paco Chanivet’s hauntology talks to us at once of delirium, illness, synaesthesia, a state of ecstasy, allowing us to explore beyond the normative limits of our body. That which occurs when imagination goes crazy, becomes disturbed, unhinged and unkempt when we can understand that in expanding the limit of the capacity of a body, we broaden everyone’s potential. Thus, the English writer and photographer Matt Colquhoun, influenced by Fisher, influenced by Bataille, influenced by Nietzsche, recently wrote on his blog xenogothic.com, how “mankind cannot remain indifferent to its monsters, given they cannot escape the constitution of the perfect type”. Colquhoun, who on different occasions has thought about today’s ontologies of body horror, also speaks of gothic not being an aesthetic genre but a prosthetic sensibility, “It is a mode of addition, extension and attachment and one that has taken on many different forms, from ‘hook hands’ to new technologies that allow a body to exceed its own limits”. The prosthetic is not then simply a medical adjective but an ontological one. In other words, Paco Chanivet’s gothic prosthesis gives speculative form to that which today would seem not to take it. Yet in gothic literature it is the past and present that are seriously confused, and the characters appear forced to relive certain past dramas with their own bodies; here something similar occurs but moves in the other direction. Our own projections and future desires journey across us to remind us that we are trapped in the framework we have configured on our idea of ourselves. We will desecrate the fictitious eye of Udjat to which we obey, Chanivet tells us. We eye ourselves. But to desecrate there is a need to fashion a tactic or collusion — an artwork — capable of demystifying objects, people and things separated and captured by theological devices from all religions that have us shut in celestial caves as if we were the martyrs of their rotten cause. We eye ourselves with our clenched and viscous teeth. We eye ourselves as if it were a sacrilege of our permanent disability. We eye ourselves to abandon the blind logics of automated reproduction. We eye ourselves dirty and desensitised. We eye ourselves to feel the flesh of this world and the trace of all undead futures to come. — All Undead Futures of Paco Chanivet by Núria Gómez Gabriel When I set foot inside the room it was almost completely dark. I couldn’t make out if there were seats or benches, so I remained standing, still, until my eyes adjusted to the darkness. After a few long minutes waiting in unabated silence, I decided to sit on the floor of the black box, and, as I rested my hands on its surface, I could perceive it was acorn-shaped, a thin and opaque velvet. I was sure of it because velvet has a very distinctive odour to it, perhaps the smell of the passage of time, a build-up of dust. Time smells something like childhood film theatres, not unlike the odour of crypts or subterranean caves where the dead were buried in the 10th century to hide the graves of martyrs from the eyes of the profane. The atmosphere was wet, uncomfortable, like a typical December day in Barcelona. From the first minute I noticed that I wasn’t alone, although I couldn’t clearly discern what or who was with me, or the distance between us. Suddenly I heard a strange sound that came from the outside; it seemed strange because it was like a slapping sound, although on the skin of my wrist I felt a breeze more similar to the brush of a caress, or like a knot being untied. Gradually, I felt the limits of the black box were inching closer to my body until the space became still and a small and tenuous pink light started to shine at a distance that was incomprehensible in relation to where I was still sitting. I moved towards that light, arching my back slightly and leaning a little to the left. It was a tiny quartzite sculpted in a shape that looked like the Eye of Horus or Udjat, that symbol with apotropaic characteristics — magic, protective, purifying, healing — which in ancient times embodied the order of the imperturbable and was used to invoke cosmic-state stability. In fact, in Ancient Egypt it was one of the most powerful amulets because of its sight-enhancing qualities and an ancestral remedy for ocular diseases, counteracting “eye hunting” or the evil eye and protecting the dead in the afterlife. Upon inspecting the red quartzite up close, something halfway between my ears and Adam’s apple began to vibrate. Red quartzite is a metamorphic rock, semi-transparent or translucid, producing a shine known as aventurescence. Aventurine stones produce an optical effect similar to glitter, with hundreds of small dots that glisten and, depending on the position of the stone, or whether you change your angle of vision, the reflection makes the shiny points move and sparkle. While I was lost in that minute landscape, the Udjat contours became warped and the eye now looked more like an orifice with clenched and viscous teeth that moved with a physical momentum that was not easily recognised. It was then, observing that seemingly disfigured, twisted and incomplete thing that my tongue started to produce salty saliva. I don’t remember seeing anything else, nor do I recall the time I spent inside the exhibition in terms of minutes, hours or seconds. Yet I do remember dream sequences outside of time. And I also remember their colour: from orangey red to violet pink to black-yellow. A dream within a dream within a memory outside my eyes and field of vision. They were not my dreams. Or maybe they were. They were the memories of all undead futures afforded by Paco Chanivet’s La prótesis prometeica (Promethean Prosthesis). The question lies in how, in each one, I could partly recognise what was happening. For example, I recognised my friends but was unaware of their lives. They were underground lives, lived together inside a volcano called Ennneés. And they would sing beautiful songs. And it was always night-time. And they drank a kind of bluish tequila they kept buried in ash. And they slept for days on end. Even asleep they kept on singing. But they didn’t have children. They told me that reproduction belonged to another time and since maternity remained trapped there, they were the family. Later, in a second vision, just the opposite happened. I couldn’t recognise any of the forms I was interacting with. They were like masses with a consistency similar to spiderwebs, light and sticky. Or no, they were more like clumps of vaporous clothing which, when fused together, wailed a hardcore polyphony. Their movements brought to mind certain mechanics in our world, syncopated, fast, voracious. And every time they advanced towards a place my body became lighter, and lighter. First a finger, then the lower abdomen, then my jaw. What I recall with absolute clarity was the last of the sequences because it seemed very much like the present day. A Dubai blaze, Pope Francis in Rome, the dance of US soldiers in Afghanistan, sandstorms, Hurricane Katrina, glacier collapses, the Statue of Liberty, Twitter. It was all the same apart from the words. The words, said and written, all had the same meaning. And when there was any attempt at communication time stopped dead. Something said to me: Weeglcoommm tru dde moderkn agxge xekkk. And in the room a sharp tap again on my left shoulder. That tap still hurts, although I like to take pleasure from it. My encounters with Paco Chanivet’s last work were a kind of threshold experience, but encounters in which, despite their skewed logics, I felt good and could cope with life, manage stress. Something akin to the effects on the body when ketamine is taken, or the hallucinations caused by a good hit of noradrenaline. However, beyond my personal journey and recollections of those dreams, Chanivet’s work brings us closer to two geopsychological approaches — or perhaps it would be more accurate to say gemopsychologcal — at which I think it might be a good idea to stop. When I left the room, still in darkness, I decided to take the green line on the underground and change at Plaza España, on the next train bound for Hospitalet. I couldn’t help thinking about the approaches Mark Fisher wrote about the hauntological dimension of current time. Reflections in which the English critic speaks of a certain formal nostalgia for everything that could exist and which, nevertheless, is shoddily buried by the phantasmagorical end of Capitalism Realism. Having said that, I feel that hauntology, exactly as it functions in Chanivet’s work, doesn’t deal with nostalgia at all. What his latest intervention speaks of is that every present situation is tied to a series of possible futures, some of which can be carried out but the majority of which aren’t. As the situation changes, these future possibilities become rigid, brittle, inert and finally impossible and unable to be realised. In hindsight, it seems that some have not been viable futures at all, but they don’t turn into nothing. Instead, they give form to meaning in a future that really happens, its symbolic traces lingering within us. And that is precisely where the magic of Chanivet lies: in creating possible conditions to be able to see these traces and get to know the way in which they continue to affect our sense of still-possible futures, or ones that are perhaps still possible. And here it is important to emphasise that the world-views his work sets forth are always unique and non-transferrable, joined to the incomplete memories and moods of all those people who have witnessed his recently unveiled exhibition. Paco Chanivet’s hauntology talks to us at once of delirium, illness, synaesthesia, a state of ecstasy, allowing us to explore beyond the normative limits of our body. That which occurs when imagination goes crazy, becomes disturbed, unhinged and unkempt when we can understand that in expanding the limit of the capacity of a body, we broaden everyone’s potential. Thus, the English writer and photographer Matt Colquhoun, influenced by Fisher, influenced by Bataille, influenced by Nietzsche, recently wrote on his blog xenogothic.com, how “mankind cannot remain indifferent to its monsters, given they cannot escape the constitution of the perfect type”. Colquhoun, who on different occasions has thought about today’s ontologies of body horror, also speaks of gothic not being an aesthetic genre but a prosthetic sensibility, “It is a mode of addition, extension and attachment and one that has taken on many different forms, from ‘hook hands’ to new technologies that allow a body to exceed its own limits”. The prosthetic is not then simply a medical adjective but an ontological one. In other words, Paco Chanivet’s gothic prosthesis gives speculative form to that which today would seem not to take it. Yet in gothic literature it is the past and present that are seriously confused, and the characters appear forced to relive certain past dramas with their own bodies; here something similar occurs but moves in the other direction. Our own projections and future desires journey across us to remind us that we are trapped in the framework we have configured on our idea of ourselves. We will desecrate the fictitious eye of Udjat to which we obey, Chanivet tells us. We eye ourselves. But to desecrate there is a need to fashion a tactic or collusion — an artwork — capable of demystifying objects, people and things separated and captured by theological devices from all religions that have us shut in celestial caves as if we were the martyrs of their rotten cause. We eye ourselves with our clenched and viscous teeth. We eye ourselves as if it were a sacrilege of our permanent disability. We eye ourselves to abandon the blind logics of automated reproduction. We eye ourselves dirty and desensitised. We eye ourselves to feel the flesh of this world and the trace of all undead futures to come. — All Undead Futures of Paco Chanivet by Núria Gómez Gabriel When I set foot inside the room it was almost completely dark. I couldn’t make out if there were seats or benches, so I remained standing, still, until my eyes adjusted to the darkness. After a few long minutes waiting in unabated silence, I decided to sit on the floor of the black box, and, as I rested my hands on its surface, I could perceive it was acorn-shaped, a thin and opaque velvet. I was sure of it because velvet has a very distinctive odour to it, perhaps the smell of the passage of time, a build-up of dust. Time smells something like childhood film theatres, not unlike the odour of crypts or subterranean caves where the dead were buried in the 10th century to hide the graves of martyrs from the eyes of the profane. The atmosphere was wet, uncomfortable, like a typical December day in Barcelona. From the first minute I noticed that I wasn’t alone, although I couldn’t clearly discern what or who was with me, or the distance between us. Suddenly I heard a strange sound that came from the outside; it seemed strange because it was like a slapping sound, although on the skin of my wrist I felt a breeze more similar to the brush of a caress, or like a knot being untied. Gradually, I felt the limits of the black box were inching closer to my body until the space became still and a small and tenuous pink light started to shine at a distance that was incomprehensible in relation to where I was still sitting. I moved towards that light, arching my back slightly and leaning a little to the left. It was a tiny quartzite sculpted in a shape that looked like the Eye of Horus or Udjat, that symbol with apotropaic characteristics — magic, protective, purifying, healing — which in ancient times embodied the order of the imperturbable and was used to invoke cosmic-state stability. In fact, in Ancient Egypt it was one of the most powerful amulets because of its sight-enhancing qualities and an ancestral remedy for ocular diseases, counteracting “eye hunting” or the evil eye and protecting the dead in the afterlife. Upon inspecting the red quartzite up close, something halfway between my ears and Adam’s apple began to vibrate. Red quartzite is a metamorphic rock, semi-transparent or translucid, producing a shine known as aventurescence. Aventurine stones produce an optical effect similar to glitter, with hundreds of small dots that glisten and, depending on the position of the stone, or whether you change your angle of vision, the reflection makes the shiny points move and sparkle. While I was lost in that minute landscape, the Udjat contours became warped and the eye now looked more like an orifice with clenched and viscous teeth that moved with a physical momentum that was not easily recognised. It was then, observing that seemingly disfigured, twisted and incomplete thing that my tongue started to produce salty saliva. I don’t remember seeing anything else, nor do I recall the time I spent inside the exhibition in terms of minutes, hours or seconds. Yet I do remember dream sequences outside of time. And I also remember their colour: from orangey red to violet pink to black-yellow. A dream within a dream within a memory outside my eyes and field of vision. They were not my dreams. Or maybe they were. They were the memories of all undead futures afforded by Paco Chanivet’s La prótesis prometeica (Promethean Prosthesis). The question lies in how, in each one, I could partly recognise what was happening. For example, I recognised my friends but was unaware of their lives. They were underground lives, lived together inside a volcano called Ennneés. And they would sing beautiful songs. And it was always night-time. And they drank a kind of bluish tequila they kept buried in ash. And they slept for days on end. Even asleep they kept on singing. But they didn’t have children. They told me that reproduction belonged to another time and since maternity remained trapped there, they were the family. Later, in a second vision, just the opposite happened. I couldn’t recognise any of the forms I was interacting with. They were like masses with a consistency similar to spiderwebs, light and sticky. Or no, they were more like clumps of vaporous clothing which, when fused together, wailed a hardcore polyphony. Their movements brought to mind certain mechanics in our world, syncopated, fast, voracious. And every time they advanced towards a place my body became lighter, and lighter. First a finger, then the lower abdomen, then my jaw. What I recall with absolute clarity was the last of the sequences because it seemed very much like the present day. A Dubai blaze, Pope Francis in Rome, the dance of US soldiers in Afghanistan, sandstorms, Hurricane Katrina, glacier collapses, the Statue of Liberty, Twitter. It was all the same apart from the words. The words, said and written, all had the same meaning. And when there was any attempt at communication time stopped dead. Something said to me: Weeglcoommm tru dde moderkn agxge xekkk. And in the room a sharp tap again on my left shoulder. That tap still hurts, although I like to take pleasure from it. My encounters with Paco Chanivet’s last work were a kind of threshold experience, but encounters in which, despite their skewed logics, I felt good and could cope with life, manage stress. Something akin to the effects on the body when ketamine is taken, or the hallucinations caused by a good hit of noradrenaline. However, beyond my personal journey and recollections of those dreams, Chanivet’s work brings us closer to two geopsychological approaches — or perhaps it would be more accurate to say gemopsychologcal — at which I think it might be a good idea to stop. When I left the room, still in darkness, I decided to take the green line on the underground and change at Plaza España, on the next train bound for Hospitalet. I couldn’t help thinking about the approaches Mark Fisher wrote about the hauntological dimension of current time. Reflections in which the English critic speaks of a certain formal nostalgia for everything that could exist and which, nevertheless, is shoddily buried by the phantasmagorical end of Capitalism Realism. Having said that, I feel that hauntology, exactly as it functions in Chanivet’s work, doesn’t deal with nostalgia at all. What his latest intervention speaks of is that every present situation is tied to a series of possible futures, some of which can be carried out but the majority of which aren’t. As the situation changes, these future possibilities become rigid, brittle, inert and finally impossible and unable to be realised. In hindsight, it seems that some have not been viable futures at all, but they don’t turn into nothing. Instead, they give form to meaning in a future that really happens, its symbolic traces lingering within us. And that is precisely where the magic of Chanivet lies: in creating possible conditions to be able to see these traces and get to know the way in which they continue to affect our sense of still-possible futures, or ones that are perhaps still possible. And here it is important to emphasise that the world-views his work sets forth are always unique and non-transferrable, joined to the incomplete memories and moods of all those people who have witnessed his recently unveiled exhibition. Paco Chanivet’s hauntology talks to us at once of delirium, illness, synaesthesia, a state of ecstasy, allowing us to explore beyond the normative limits of our body. That which occurs when imagination goes crazy, becomes disturbed, unhinged and unkempt when we can understand that in expanding the limit of the capacity of a body, we broaden everyone’s potential. Thus, the English writer and photographer Matt Colquhoun, influenced by Fisher, influenced by Bataille, influenced by Nietzsche, recently wrote on his blog xenogothic.com, how “mankind cannot remain indifferent to its monsters, given they cannot escape the constitution of the perfect type”. Colquhoun, who on different occasions has thought about today’s ontologies of body horror, also speaks of gothic not being an aesthetic genre but a prosthetic sensibility, “It is a mode of addition, extension and attachment and one that has taken on many different forms, from ‘hook hands’ to new technologies that allow a body to exceed its own limits”. The prosthetic is not then simply a medical adjective but an ontological one. In other words, Paco Chanivet’s gothic prosthesis gives speculative form to that which today would seem not to take it. Yet in gothic literature it is the past and present that are seriously confused, and the characters appear forced to relive certain past dramas with their own bodies; here something similar occurs but moves in the other direction. Our own projections and future desires journey across us to remind us that we are trapped in the framework we have configured on our idea of ourselves. We will desecrate the fictitious eye of Udjat to which we obey, Chanivet tells us. We eye ourselves. But to desecrate there is a need to fashion a tactic or collusion — an artwork — capable of demystifying objects, people and things separated and captured by theological devices from all religions that have us shut in celestial caves as if we were the martyrs of their rotten cause. We eye ourselves with our clenched and viscous teeth. We eye ourselves as if it were a sacrilege of our permanent disability. We eye ourselves to abandon the blind logics of automated reproduction. We eye ourselves dirty and desensitised. We eye ourselves to feel the flesh of this world and the trace of all undead futures to come. — All Undead Futures of Paco Chanivet by Núria Gómez Gabriel When I set foot inside the room it was almost completely dark. I couldn’t make out if there were seats or benches, so I remained standing, still, until my eyes adjusted to the darkness. After a few long minutes waiting in unabated silence, I decided to sit on the floor of the black box, and, as I rested my hands on its surface, I could perceive it was acorn-shaped, a thin and opaque velvet. I was sure of it because velvet has a very distinctive odour to it, perhaps the smell of the passage of time, a build-up of dust. Time smells something like childhood film theatres, not unlike the odour of crypts or subterranean caves where the dead were buried in the 10th century to hide the graves of martyrs from the eyes of the profane. The atmosphere was wet, uncomfortable, like a typical December day in Barcelona. From the first minute I noticed that I wasn’t alone, although I couldn’t clearly discern what or who was with me, or the distance between us. Suddenly I heard a strange sound that came from the outside; it seemed strange because it was like a slapping sound, although on the skin of my wrist I felt a breeze more similar to the brush of a caress, or like a knot being untied. Gradually, I felt the limits of the black box were inching closer to my body until the space became still and a small and tenuous pink light started to shine at a distance that was incomprehensible in relation to where I was still sitting. I moved towards that light, arching my back slightly and leaning a little to the left. It was a tiny quartzite sculpted in a shape that looked like the Eye of Horus or Udjat, that symbol with apotropaic characteristics — magic, protective, purifying, healing — which in ancient times embodied the order of the imperturbable and was used to invoke cosmic-state stability. In fact, in Ancient Egypt it was one of the most powerful amulets because of its sight-enhancing qualities and an ancestral remedy for ocular diseases, counteracting “eye hunting” or the evil eye and protecting the dead in the afterlife. Upon inspecting the red quartzite up close, something halfway between my ears and Adam’s apple began to vibrate. Red quartzite is a metamorphic rock, semi-transparent or translucid, producing a shine known as aventurescence. Aventurine stones produce an optical effect similar to glitter, with hundreds of small dots that glisten and, depending on the position of the stone, or whether you change your angle of vision, the reflection makes the shiny points move and sparkle. While I was lost in that minute landscape, the Udjat contours became warped and the eye now looked more like an orifice with clenched and viscous teeth that moved with a physical momentum that was not easily recognised. It was then, observing that seemingly disfigured, twisted and incomplete thing that my tongue started to produce salty saliva. I don’t remember seeing anything else, nor do I recall the time I spent inside the exhibition in terms of minutes, hours or seconds. Yet I do remember dream sequences outside of time. And I also remember their colour: from orangey red to violet pink to black-yellow. A dream within a dream within a memory outside my eyes and field of vision. They were not my dreams. Or maybe they were. They were the memories of all undead futures afforded by Paco Chanivet’s La prótesis prometeica (Promethean Prosthesis). The question lies in how, in each one, I could partly recognise what was happening. For example, I recognised my friends but was unaware of their lives. They were underground lives, lived together inside a volcano called Ennneés. And they would sing beautiful songs. And it was always night-time. And they drank a kind of bluish tequila they kept buried in ash. And they slept for days on end. Even asleep they kept on singing. But they didn’t have children. They told me that reproduction belonged to another time and since maternity remained trapped there, they were the family. Later, in a second vision, just the opposite happened. I couldn’t recognise any of the forms I was interacting with. They were like masses with a consistency similar to spiderwebs, light and sticky. Or no, they were more like clumps of vaporous clothing which, when fused together, wailed a hardcore polyphony. Their movements brought to mind certain mechanics in our world, syncopated, fast, voracious. And every time they advanced towards a place my body became lighter, and lighter. First a finger, then the lower abdomen, then my jaw. What I recall with absolute clarity was the last of the sequences because it seemed very much like the present day. A Dubai blaze, Pope Francis in Rome, the dance of US soldiers in Afghanistan, sandstorms, Hurricane Katrina, glacier collapses, the Statue of Liberty, Twitter. It was all the same apart from the words. The words, said and written, all had the same meaning. And when there was any attempt at communication time stopped dead. Something said to me: Weeglcoommm tru dde moderkn agxge xekkk. And in the room a sharp tap again on my left shoulder. That tap still hurts, although I like to take pleasure from it. My encounters with Paco Chanivet’s last work were a kind of threshold experience, but encounters in which, despite their skewed logics, I felt good and could cope with life, manage stress. Something akin to the effects on the body when ketamine is taken, or the hallucinations caused by a good hit of noradrenaline. However, beyond my personal journey and recollections of those dreams, Chanivet’s work brings us closer to two geopsychological approaches — or perhaps it would be more accurate to say gemopsychologcal — at which I think it might be a good idea to stop. When I left the room, still in darkness, I decided to take the green line on the underground and change at Plaza España, on the next train bound for Hospitalet. I couldn’t help thinking about the approaches Mark Fisher wrote about the hauntological dimension of current time. Reflections in which the English critic speaks of a certain formal nostalgia for everything that could exist and which, nevertheless, is shoddily buried by the phantasmagorical end of Capitalism Realism. Having said that, I feel that hauntology, exactly as it functions in Chanivet’s work, doesn’t deal with nostalgia at all. What his latest intervention speaks of is that every present situation is tied to a series of possible futures, some of which can be carried out but the majority of which aren’t. As the situation changes, these future possibilities become rigid, brittle, inert and finally impossible and unable to be realised. In hindsight, it seems that some have not been viable futures at all, but they don’t turn into nothing. Instead, they give form to meaning in a future that really happens, its symbolic traces lingering within us. And that is precisely where the magic of Chanivet lies: in creating possible conditions to be able to see these traces and get to know the way in which they continue to affect our sense of still-possible futures, or ones that are perhaps still possible. And here it is important to emphasise that the world-views his work sets forth are always unique and non-transferrable, joined to the incomplete memories and moods of all those people who have witnessed his recently unveiled exhibition. Paco Chanivet’s hauntology talks to us at once of delirium, illness, synaesthesia, a state of ecstasy, allowing us to explore beyond the normative limits of our body. That which occurs when imagination goes crazy, becomes disturbed, unhinged and unkempt when we can understand that in expanding the limit of the capacity of a body, we broaden everyone’s potential. Thus, the English writer and photographer Matt Colquhoun, influenced by Fisher, influenced by Bataille, influenced by Nietzsche, recently wrote on his blog xenogothic.com, how “mankind cannot remain indifferent to its monsters, given they cannot escape the constitution of the perfect type”. Colquhoun, who on different occasions has thought about today’s ontologies of body horror, also speaks of gothic not being an aesthetic genre but a prosthetic sensibility, “It is a mode of addition, extension and attachment and one that has taken on many different forms, from ‘hook hands’ to new technologies that allow a body to exceed its own limits”. The prosthetic is not then simply a medical adjective but an ontological one. In other words, Paco Chanivet’s gothic prosthesis gives speculative form to that which today would seem not to take it. Yet in gothic literature it is the past and present that are seriously confused, and the characters appear forced to relive certain past dramas with their own bodies; here something similar occurs but moves in the other direction. Our own projections and future desires journey across us to remind us that we are trapped in the framework we have configured on our idea of ourselves. We will desecrate the fictitious eye of Udjat to which we obey, Chanivet tells us. We eye ourselves. But to desecrate there is a need to fashion a tactic or collusion — an artwork — capable of demystifying objects, people and things separated and captured by theological devices from all religions that have us shut in celestial caves as if we were the martyrs of their rotten cause. We eye ourselves with our clenched and viscous teeth. We eye ourselves as if it were a sacrilege of our permanent disability. We eye ourselves to abandon the blind logics of automated reproduction. We eye ourselves dirty and desensitised. We eye ourselves to feel the flesh of this world and the trace of all undead futures to come. — All Undead Futures of Paco Chanivet by Núria Gómez Gabriel When I set foot inside the room it was almost completely dark. I couldn’t make out if there were seats or benches, so I remained standing, still, until my eyes adjusted to the darkness. After a few long minutes waiting in unabated silence, I decided to sit on the floor of the black box, and, as I rested my hands on its surface, I could perceive it was acorn-shaped, a thin and opaque velvet. I was sure of it because velvet has a very distinctive odour to it, perhaps the smell of the passage of time, a build-up of dust. Time smells something like childhood film theatres, not unlike the odour of crypts or subterranean caves where the dead were buried in the 10th century to hide the graves of martyrs from the eyes of the profane. The atmosphere was wet, uncomfortable, like a typical December day in Barcelona. From the first minute I noticed that I wasn’t alone, although I couldn’t clearly discern what or who was with me, or the distance between us. Suddenly I heard a strange sound that came from the outside; it seemed strange because it was like a slapping sound, although on the skin of my wrist I felt a breeze more similar to the brush of a caress, or like a knot being untied. Gradually, I felt the limits of the black box were inching closer to my body until the space became still and a small and tenuous pink light started to shine at a distance that was incomprehensible in relation to where I was still sitting. I moved towards that light, arching my back slightly and leaning a little to the left. It was a tiny quartzite sculpted in a shape that looked like the Eye of Horus or Udjat, that symbol with apotropaic characteristics — magic, protective, purifying, healing — which in ancient times embodied the order of the imperturbable and was used to invoke cosmic-state stability. In fact, in Ancient Egypt it was one of the most powerful amulets because of its sight-enhancing qualities and an ancestral remedy for ocular diseases, counteracting “eye hunting” or the evil eye and protecting the dead in the afterlife. Upon inspecting the red quartzite up close, something halfway between my ears and Adam’s apple began to vibrate. Red quartzite is a metamorphic rock, semi-transparent or translucid, producing a shine known as aventurescence. Aventurine stones produce an optical effect similar to glitter, with hundreds of small dots that glisten and, depending on the position of the stone, or whether you change your angle of vision, the reflection makes the shiny points move and sparkle. While I was lost in that minute landscape, the Udjat contours became warped and the eye now looked more like an orifice with clenched and viscous teeth that moved with a physical momentum that was not easily recognised. It was then, observing that seemingly disfigured, twisted and incomplete thing that my tongue started to produce salty saliva. I don’t remember seeing anything else, nor do I recall the time I spent inside the exhibition in terms of minutes, hours or seconds. Yet I do remember dream sequences outside of time. And I also remember their colour: from orangey red to violet pink to black-yellow. A dream within a dream within a memory outside my eyes and field of vision. They were not my dreams. Or maybe they were. They were the memories of all undead futures afforded by Paco Chanivet’s La prótesis prometeica (Promethean Prosthesis). The question lies in how, in each one, I could partly recognise what was happening. For example, I recognised my friends but was unaware of their lives. They were underground lives, lived together inside a volcano called Ennneés. And they would sing beautiful songs. And it was always night-time. And they drank a kind of bluish tequila they kept buried in ash. And they slept for days on end. Even asleep they kept on singing. But they didn’t have children. They told me that reproduction belonged to another time and since maternity remained trapped there, they were the family. Later, in a second vision, just the opposite happened. I couldn’t recognise any of the forms I was interacting with. They were like masses with a consistency similar to spiderwebs, light and sticky. Or no, they were more like clumps of vaporous clothing which, when fused together, wailed a hardcore polyphony. Their movements brought to mind certain mechanics in our world, syncopated, fast, voracious. And every time they advanced towards a place my body became lighter, and lighter. First a finger, then the lower abdomen, then my jaw. What I recall with absolute clarity was the last of the sequences because it seemed very much like the present day. A Dubai blaze, Pope Francis in Rome, the dance of US soldiers in Afghanistan, sandstorms, Hurricane Katrina, glacier collapses, the Statue of Liberty, Twitter. It was all the same apart from the words. The words, said and written, all had the same meaning. And when there was any attempt at communication time stopped dead. Something said to me: Weeglcoommm tru dde moderkn agxge xekkk. And in the room a sharp tap again on my left shoulder. That tap still hurts, although I like to take pleasure from it. My encounters with Paco Chanivet’s last work were a kind of threshold experience, but encounters in which, despite their skewed logics, I felt good and could cope with life, manage stress. Something akin to the effects on the body when ketamine is taken, or the hallucinations caused by a good hit of noradrenaline. However, beyond my personal journey and recollections of those dreams, Chanivet’s work brings us closer to two geopsychological approaches — or perhaps it would be more accurate to say gemopsychologcal — at which I think it might be a good idea to stop. When I left the room, still in darkness, I decided to take the green line on the underground and change at Plaza España, on the next train bound for Hospitalet. I couldn’t help thinking about the approaches Mark Fisher wrote about the hauntological dimension of current time. Reflections in which the English critic speaks of a certain formal nostalgia for everything that could exist and which, nevertheless, is shoddily buried by the phantasmagorical end of Capitalism Realism. Having said that, I feel that hauntology, exactly as it functions in Chanivet’s work, doesn’t deal with nostalgia at all. What his latest intervention speaks of is that every present situation is tied to a series of possible futures, some of which can be carried out but the majority of which aren’t. As the situation changes, these future possibilities become rigid, brittle, inert and finally impossible and unable to be realised. In hindsight, it seems that some have not been viable futures at all, but they don’t turn into nothing. Instead, they give form to meaning in a future that really happens, its symbolic traces lingering within us. And that is precisely where the magic of Chanivet lies: in creating possible conditions to be able to see these traces and get to know the way in which they continue to affect our sense of still-possible futures, or ones that are perhaps still possible. And here it is important to emphasise that the world-views his work sets forth are always unique and non-transferrable, joined to the incomplete memories and moods of all those people who have witnessed his recently unveiled exhibition. Paco Chanivet’s hauntology talks to us at once of delirium, illness, synaesthesia, a state of ecstasy, allowing us to explore beyond the normative limits of our body. That which occurs when imagination goes crazy, becomes disturbed, unhinged and unkempt when we can understand that in expanding the limit of the capacity of a body, we broaden everyone’s potential. Thus, the English writer and photographer Matt Colquhoun, influenced by Fisher, influenced by Bataille, influenced by Nietzsche, recently wrote on his blog xenogothic.com, how “mankind cannot remain indifferent to its monsters, given they cannot escape the constitution of the perfect type”. Colquhoun, who on different occasions has thought about today’s ontologies of body horror, also speaks of gothic not being an aesthetic genre but a prosthetic sensibility, “It is a mode of addition, extension and attachment and one that has taken on many different forms, from ‘hook hands’ to new technologies that allow a body to exceed its own limits”. The prosthetic is not then simply a medical adjective but an ontological one. In other words, Paco Chanivet’s gothic prosthesis gives speculative form to that which today would seem not to take it. Yet in gothic literature it is the past and present that are seriously confused, and the characters appear forced to relive certain past dramas with their own bodies; here something similar occurs but moves in the other direction. Our own projections and future desires journey across us to remind us that we are trapped in the framework we have configured on our idea of ourselves. We will desecrate the fictitious eye of Udjat to which we obey, Chanivet tells us. We eye ourselves. But to desecrate there is a need to fashion a tactic or collusion — an artwork — capable of demystifying objects, people and things separated and captured by theological devices from all religions that have us shut in celestial caves as if we were the martyrs of their rotten cause. We eye ourselves with our clenched and viscous teeth. We eye ourselves as if it were a sacrilege of our permanent disability. We eye ourselves to abandon the blind logics of automated reproduction. We eye ourselves dirty and desensitised. We eye ourselves to feel the flesh of this world and the trace of all undead futures to come. — All Undead Futures of Paco Chanivet by Núria Gómez Gabriel When I set foot inside the room it was almost completely dark. I couldn’t make out if there were seats or benches, so I remained standing, still, until my eyes adjusted to the darkness. After a few long minutes waiting in unabated silence, I decided to sit on the floor of the black box, and, as I rested my hands on its surface, I could perceive it was acorn-shaped, a thin and opaque velvet. I was sure of it because velvet has a very distinctive odour to it, perhaps the smell of the passage of time, a build-up of dust. Time smells something like childhood film theatres, not unlike the odour of crypts or subterranean caves where the dead were buried in the 10th century to hide the graves of martyrs from the eyes of the profane. The atmosphere was wet, uncomfortable, like a typical December day in Barcelona. From the first minute I noticed that I wasn’t alone, although I couldn’t clearly discern what or who was with me, or the distance between us. Suddenly I heard a strange sound that came from the outside; it seemed strange because it was like a slapping sound, although on the skin of my wrist I felt a breeze more similar to the brush of a caress, or like a knot being untied. Gradually, I felt the limits of the black box were inching closer to my body until the space became still and a small and tenuous pink light started to shine at a distance that was incomprehensible in relation to where I was still sitting. I moved towards that light, arching my back slightly and leaning a little to the left. It was a tiny quartzite sculpted in a shape that looked like the Eye of Horus or Udjat, that symbol with apotropaic characteristics — magic, protective, purifying, healing — which in ancient times embodied the order of the imperturbable and was used to invoke cosmic-state stability. In fact, in Ancient Egypt it was one of the most powerful amulets because of its sight-enhancing qualities and an ancestral remedy for ocular diseases, counteracting “eye hunting” or the evil eye and protecting the dead in the afterlife. Upon inspecting the red quartzite up close, something halfway between my ears and Adam’s apple began to vibrate. Red quartzite is a metamorphic rock, semi-transparent or translucid, producing a shine known as aventurescence. Aventurine stones produce an optical effect similar to glitter, with hundreds of small dots that glisten and, depending on the position of the stone, or whether you change your angle of vision, the reflection makes the shiny points move and sparkle. While I was lost in that minute landscape, the Udjat contours became warped and the eye now looked more like an orifice with clenched and viscous teeth that moved with a physical momentum that was not easily recognised. It was then, observing that seemingly disfigured, twisted and incomplete thing that my tongue started to produce salty saliva. I don’t remember seeing anything else, nor do I recall the time I spent inside the exhibition in terms of minutes, hours or seconds. Yet I do remember dream sequences outside of time. And I also remember their colour: from orangey red to violet pink to black-yellow. A dream within a dream within a memory outside my eyes and field of vision. They were not my dreams. Or maybe they were. They were the memories of all undead futures afforded by Paco Chanivet’s La prótesis prometeica (Promethean Prosthesis). The question lies in how, in each one, I could partly recognise what was happening. For example, I recognised my friends but was unaware of their lives. They were underground lives, lived together inside a volcano called Ennneés. And they would sing beautiful songs. And it was always night-time. And they drank a kind of bluish tequila they kept buried in ash. And they slept for days on end. Even asleep they kept on singing. But they didn’t have children. They told me that reproduction belonged to another time and since maternity remained trapped there, they were the family. Later, in a second vision, just the opposite happened. I couldn’t recognise any of the forms I was interacting with. They were like masses with a consistency similar to spiderwebs, light and sticky. Or no, they were more like clumps of vaporous clothing which, when fused together, wailed a hardcore polyphony. Their movements brought to mind certain mechanics in our world, syncopated, fast, voracious. And every time they advanced towards a place my body became lighter, and lighter. First a finger, then the lower abdomen, then my jaw. What I recall with absolute clarity was the last of the sequences because it seemed very much like the present day. A Dubai blaze, Pope Francis in Rome, the dance of US soldiers in Afghanistan, sandstorms, Hurricane Katrina, glacier collapses, the Statue of Liberty, Twitter. It was all the same apart from the words. The words, said and written, all had the same meaning. And when there was any attempt at communication time stopped dead. Something said to me: Weeglcoommm tru dde moderkn agxge xekkk. And in the room a sharp tap again on my left shoulder. That tap still hurts, although I like to take pleasure from it. My encounters with Paco Chanivet’s last work were a kind of threshold experience, but encounters in which, despite their skewed logics, I felt good and could cope with life, manage stress. Something akin to the effects on the body when ketamine is taken, or the hallucinations caused by a good hit of noradrenaline. However, beyond my personal journey and recollections of those dreams, Chanivet’s work brings us closer to two geopsychological approaches — or perhaps it would be more accurate to say gemopsychologcal — at which I think it might be a good idea to stop. When I left the room, still in darkness, I decided to take the green line on the underground and change at Plaza España, on the next train bound for Hospitalet. I couldn’t help thinking about the approaches Mark Fisher wrote about the hauntological dimension of current time. Reflections in which the English critic speaks of a certain formal nostalgia for everything that could exist and which, nevertheless, is shoddily buried by the phantasmagorical end of Capitalism Realism. Having said that, I feel that hauntology, exactly as it functions in Chanivet’s work, doesn’t deal with nostalgia at all. What his latest intervention speaks of is that every present situation is tied to a series of possible futures, some of which can be carried out but the majority of which aren’t. As the situation changes, these future possibilities become rigid, brittle, inert and finally impossible and unable to be realised. In hindsight, it seems that some have not been viable futures at all, but they don’t turn into nothing. Instead, they give form to meaning in a future that really happens, its symbolic traces lingering within us. And that is precisely where the magic of Chanivet lies: in creating possible conditions to be able to see these traces and get to know the way in which they continue to affect our sense of still-possible futures, or ones that are perhaps still possible. And here it is important to emphasise that the world-views his work sets forth are always unique and non-transferrable, joined to the incomplete memories and moods of all those people who have witnessed his recently unveiled exhibition. Paco Chanivet’s hauntology talks to us at once of delirium, illness, synaesthesia, a state of ecstasy, allowing us to explore beyond the normative limits of our body. That which occurs when imagination goes crazy, becomes disturbed, unhinged and unkempt when we can understand that in expanding the limit of the capacity of a body, we broaden everyone’s potential. Thus, the English writer and photographer Matt Colquhoun, influenced by Fisher, influenced by Bataille, influenced by Nietzsche, recently wrote on his blog xenogothic.com, how “mankind cannot remain indifferent to its monsters, given they cannot escape the constitution of the perfect type”. Colquhoun, who on different occasions has thought about today’s ontologies of body horror, also speaks of gothic not being an aesthetic genre but a prosthetic sensibility, “It is a mode of addition, extension and attachment and one that has taken on many different forms, from ‘hook hands’ to new technologies that allow a body to exceed its own limits”. The prosthetic is not then simply a medical adjective but an ontological one. In other words, Paco Chanivet’s gothic prosthesis gives speculative form to that which today would seem not to take it. Yet in gothic literature it is the past and present that are seriously confused, and the characters appear forced to relive certain past dramas with their own bodies; here something similar occurs but moves in the other direction. Our own projections and future desires journey across us to remind us that we are trapped in the framework we have configured on our idea of ourselves. We will desecrate the fictitious eye of Udjat to which we obey, Chanivet tells us. We eye ourselves. But to desecrate there is a need to fashion a tactic or collusion — an artwork — capable of demystifying objects, people and things separated and captured by theological devices from all religions that have us shut in celestial caves as if we were the martyrs of their rotten cause. We eye ourselves with our clenched and viscous teeth. We eye ourselves as if it were a sacrilege of our permanent disability. We eye ourselves to abandon the blind logics of automated reproduction. We eye ourselves dirty and desensitised. We eye ourselves to feel the flesh of this world and the trace of all undead futures to come. — All Undead Futures of Paco Chanivet by Núria Gómez Gabriel When I set foot inside the room it was almost completely dark. I couldn’t make out if there were seats or benches, so I remained standing, still, until my eyes adjusted to the darkness. After a few long minutes waiting in unabated silence, I decided to sit on the floor of the black box, and, as I rested my hands on its surface, I could perceive it was acorn-shaped, a thin and opaque velvet. I was sure of it because velvet has a very distinctive odour to it, perhaps the smell of the passage of time, a build-up of dust. Time smells something like childhood film theatres, not unlike the odour of crypts or subterranean caves where the dead were buried in the 10th century to hide the graves of martyrs from the eyes of the profane. The atmosphere was wet, uncomfortable, like a typical December day in Barcelona. From the first minute I noticed that I wasn’t alone, although I couldn’t clearly discern what or who was with me, or the distance between us. Suddenly I heard a strange sound that came from the outside; it seemed strange because it was like a slapping sound, although on the skin of my wrist I felt a breeze more similar to the brush of a caress, or like a knot being untied. Gradually, I felt the limits of the black box were inching closer to my body until the space became still and a small and tenuous pink light started to shine at a distance that was incomprehensible in relation to where I was still sitting. I moved towards that light, arching my back slightly and leaning a little to the left. It was a tiny quartzite sculpted in a shape that looked like the Eye of Horus or Udjat, that symbol with apotropaic characteristics — magic, protective, purifying, healing — which in ancient times embodied the order of the imperturbable and was used to invoke cosmic-state stability. In fact, in Ancient Egypt it was one of the most powerful amulets because of its sight-enhancing qualities and an ancestral remedy for ocular diseases, counteracting “eye hunting” or the evil eye and protecting the dead in the afterlife. Upon inspecting the red quartzite up close, something halfway between my ears and Adam’s apple began to vibrate. Red quartzite is a metamorphic rock, semi-transparent or translucid, producing a shine known as aventurescence. Aventurine stones produce an optical effect similar to glitter, with hundreds of small dots that glisten and, depending on the position of the stone, or whether you change your angle of vision, the reflection makes the shiny points move and sparkle. While I was lost in that minute landscape, the Udjat contours became warped and the eye now looked more like an orifice with clenched and viscous teeth that moved with a physical momentum that was not easily recognised. It was then, observing that seemingly disfigured, twisted and incomplete thing that my tongue started to produce salty saliva. I don’t remember seeing anything else, nor do I recall the time I spent inside the exhibition in terms of minutes, hours or seconds. Yet I do remember dream sequences outside of time. And I also remember their colour: from orangey red to violet pink to black-yellow. A dream within a dream within a memory outside my eyes and field of vision. They were not my dreams. Or maybe they were. They were the memories of all undead futures afforded by Paco Chanivet’s La prótesis prometeica (Promethean Prosthesis). The question lies in how, in each one, I could partly recognise what was happening. For example, I recognised my friends but was unaware of their lives. They were underground lives, lived together inside a volcano called Ennneés. And they would sing beautiful songs. And it was always night-time. And they drank a kind of bluish tequila they kept buried in ash. And they slept for days on end. Even asleep they kept on singing. But they didn’t have children. They told me that reproduction belonged to another time and since maternity remained trapped there, they were the family. Later, in a second vision, just the opposite happened. I couldn’t recognise any of the forms I was interacting with. They were like masses with a consistency similar to spiderwebs, light and sticky. Or no, they were more like clumps of vaporous clothing which, when fused together, wailed a hardcore polyphony. Their movements brought to mind certain mechanics in our world, syncopated, fast, voracious. And every time they advanced towards a place my body became lighter, and lighter. First a finger, then the lower abdomen, then my jaw. What I recall with absolute clarity was the last of the sequences because it seemed very much like the present day. A Dubai blaze, Pope Francis in Rome, the dance of US soldiers in Afghanistan, sandstorms, Hurricane Katrina, glacier collapses, the Statue of Liberty, Twitter. It was all the same apart from the words. The words, said and written, all had the same meaning. And when there was any attempt at communication time stopped dead. Something said to me: Weeglcoommm tru dde moderkn agxge xekkk. And in the room a sharp tap again on my left shoulder. That tap still hurts, although I like to take pleasure from it. My encounters with Paco Chanivet’s last work were a kind of threshold experience, but encounters in which, despite their skewed logics, I felt good and could cope with life, manage stress. Something akin to the effects on the body when ketamine is taken, or the hallucinations caused by a good hit of noradrenaline. However, beyond my personal journey and recollections of those dreams, Chanivet’s work brings us closer to two geopsychological approaches — or perhaps it would be more accurate to say gemopsychologcal — at which I think it might be a good idea to stop. When I left the room, still in darkness, I decided to take the green line on the underground and change at Plaza España, on the next train bound for Hospitalet. I couldn’t help thinking about the approaches Mark Fisher wrote about the hauntological dimension of current time. Reflections in which the English critic speaks of a certain formal nostalgia for everything that could exist and which, nevertheless, is shoddily buried by the phantasmagorical end of Capitalism Realism. Having said that, I feel that hauntology, exactly as it functions in Chanivet’s work, doesn’t deal with nostalgia at all. What his latest intervention speaks of is that every present situation is tied to a series of possible futures, some of which can be carried out but the majority of which aren’t. As the situation changes, these future possibilities become rigid, brittle, inert and finally impossible and unable to be realised. In hindsight, it seems that some have not been viable futures at all, but they don’t turn into nothing. Instead, they give form to meaning in a future that really happens, its symbolic traces lingering within us. And that is precisely where the magic of Chanivet lies: in creating possible conditions to be able to see these traces and get to know the way in which they continue to affect our sense of still-possible futures, or ones that are perhaps still possible. And here it is important to emphasise that the world-views his work sets forth are always unique and non-transferrable, joined to the incomplete memories and moods of all those people who have witnessed his recently unveiled exhibition. Paco Chanivet’s hauntology talks to us at once of delirium, illness, synaesthesia, a state of ecstasy, allowing us to explore beyond the normative limits of our body. That which occurs when imagination goes crazy, becomes disturbed, unhinged and unkempt when we can understand that in expanding the limit of the capacity of a body, we broaden everyone’s potential. Thus, the English writer and photographer Matt Colquhoun, influenced by Fisher, influenced by Bataille, influenced by Nietzsche, recently wrote on his blog xenogothic.com, how “mankind cannot remain indifferent to its monsters, given they cannot escape the constitution of the perfect type”. Colquhoun, who on different occasions has thought about today’s ontologies of body horror, also speaks of gothic not being an aesthetic genre but a prosthetic sensibility, “It is a mode of addition, extension and attachment and one that has taken on many different forms, from ‘hook hands’ to new technologies that allow a body to exceed its own limits”. The prosthetic is not then simply a medical adjective but an ontological one. In other words, Paco Chanivet’s gothic prosthesis gives speculative form to that which today would seem not to take it. Yet in gothic literature it is the past and present that are seriously confused, and the characters appear forced to relive certain past dramas with their own bodies; here something similar occurs but moves in the other direction. Our own projections and future desires journey across us to remind us that we are trapped in the framework we have configured on our idea of ourselves. We will desecrate the fictitious eye of Udjat to which we obey, Chanivet tells us. We eye ourselves. But to desecrate there is a need to fashion a tactic or collusion — an artwork — capable of demystifying objects, people and things separated and captured by theological devices from all religions that have us shut in celestial caves as if we were the martyrs of their rotten cause. We eye ourselves with our clenched and viscous teeth. We eye ourselves as if it were a sacrilege of our permanent disability. We eye ourselves to abandon the blind logics of automated reproduction. We eye ourselves dirty and desensitised. We eye ourselves to feel the flesh of this world and the trace of all undead futures to come. — All Undead Futures of Paco Chanivet by Núria Gómez Gabriel When I set foot inside the room it was almost completely dark. I couldn’t make out if there were seats or benches, so I remained standing, still, until my eyes adjusted to the darkness. After a few long minutes waiting in unabated silence, I decided to sit on the floor of the black box, and, as I rested my hands on its surface, I could perceive it was acorn-shaped, a thin and opaque velvet. I was sure of it because velvet has a very distinctive odour to it, perhaps the smell of the passage of time, a build-up of dust. Time smells something like childhood film theatres, not unlike the odour of crypts or subterranean caves where the dead were buried in the 10th century to hide the graves of martyrs from the eyes of the profane. The atmosphere was wet, uncomfortable, like a typical December day in Barcelona. From the first minute I noticed that I wasn’t alone, although I couldn’t clearly discern what or who was with me, or the distance between us. Suddenly I heard a strange sound that came from the outside; it seemed strange because it was like a slapping sound, although on the skin of my wrist I felt a breeze more similar to the brush of a caress, or like a knot being untied. Gradually, I felt the limits of the black box were inching closer to my body until the space became still and a small and tenuous pink light started to shine at a distance that was incomprehensible in relation to where I was still sitting. I moved towards that light, arching my back slightly and leaning a little to the left. It was a tiny quartzite sculpted in a shape that looked like the Eye of Horus or Udjat, that symbol with apotropaic characteristics — magic, protective, purifying, healing — which in ancient times embodied the order of the imperturbable and was used to invoke cosmic-state stability. In fact, in Ancient Egypt it was one of the most powerful amulets because of its sight-enhancing qualities and an ancestral remedy for ocular diseases, counteracting “eye hunting” or the evil eye and protecting the dead in the afterlife. Upon inspecting the red quartzite up close, something halfway between my ears and Adam’s apple began to vibrate. Red quartzite is a metamorphic rock, semi-transparent or translucid, producing a shine known as aventurescence. Aventurine stones produce an optical effect similar to glitter, with hundreds of small dots that glisten and, depending on the position of the stone, or whether you change your angle of vision, the reflection makes the shiny points move and sparkle. While I was lost in that minute landscape, the Udjat contours became warped and the eye now looked more like an orifice with clenched and viscous teeth that moved with a physical momentum that was not easily recognised. It was then, observing that seemingly disfigured, twisted and incomplete thing that my tongue started to produce salty saliva. I don’t remember seeing anything else, nor do I recall the time I spent inside the exhibition in terms of minutes, hours or seconds. Yet I do remember dream sequences outside of time. And I also remember their colour: from orangey red to violet pink to black-yellow. A dream within a dream within a memory outside my eyes and field of vision. They were not my dreams. Or maybe they were. They were the memories of all undead futures afforded by Paco Chanivet’s La prótesis prometeica (Promethean Prosthesis). The question lies in how, in each one, I could partly recognise what was happening. For example, I recognised my friends but was unaware of their lives. They were underground lives, lived together inside a volcano called Ennneés. And they would sing beautiful songs. And it was always night-time. And they drank a kind of bluish tequila they kept buried in ash. And they slept for days on end. Even asleep they kept on singing. But they didn’t have children. They told me that reproduction belonged to another time and since maternity remained trapped there, they were the family. Later, in a second vision, just the opposite happened. I couldn’t recognise any of the forms I was interacting with. They were like masses with a consistency similar to spiderwebs, light and sticky. Or no, they were more like clumps of vaporous clothing which, when fused together, wailed a hardcore polyphony. Their movements brought to mind certain mechanics in our world, syncopated, fast, voracious. And every time they advanced towards a place my body became lighter, and lighter. First a finger, then the lower abdomen, then my jaw. What I recall with absolute clarity was the last of the sequences because it seemed very much like the present day. A Dubai blaze, Pope Francis in Rome, the dance of US soldiers in Afghanistan, sandstorms, Hurricane Katrina, glacier collapses, the Statue of Liberty, Twitter. It was all the same apart from the words. The words, said and written, all had the same meaning. And when there was any attempt at communication time stopped dead. Something said to me: Weeglcoommm tru dde moderkn agxge xekkk. And in the room a sharp tap again on my left shoulder. That tap still hurts, although I like to take pleasure from it. My encounters with Paco Chanivet’s last work were a kind of threshold experience, but encounters in which, despite their skewed logics, I felt good and could cope with life, manage stress. Something akin to the effects on the body when ketamine is taken, or the hallucinations caused by a good hit of noradrenaline. However, beyond my personal journey and recollections of those dreams, Chanivet’s work brings us closer to two geopsychological approaches — or perhaps it would be more accurate to say gemopsychologcal — at which I think it might be a good idea to stop. When I left the room, still in darkness, I decided to take the green line on the underground and change at Plaza España, on the next train bound for Hospitalet. I couldn’t help thinking about the approaches Mark Fisher wrote about the hauntological dimension of current time. Reflections in which the English critic speaks of a certain formal nostalgia for everything that could exist and which, nevertheless, is shoddily buried by the phantasmagorical end of Capitalism Realism. Having said that, I feel that hauntology, exactly as it functions in Chanivet’s work, doesn’t deal with nostalgia at all. What his latest intervention speaks of is that every present situation is tied to a series of possible futures, some of which can be carried out but the majority of which aren’t. As the situation changes, these future possibilities become rigid, brittle, inert and finally impossible and unable to be realised. In hindsight, it seems that some have not been viable futures at all, but they don’t turn into nothing. Instead, they give form to meaning in a future that really happens, its symbolic traces lingering within us. And that is precisely where the magic of Chanivet lies: in creating possible conditions to be able to see these traces and get to know the way in which they continue to affect our sense of still-possible futures, or ones that are perhaps still possible. And here it is important to emphasise that the world-views his work sets forth are always unique and non-transferrable, joined to the incomplete memories and moods of all those people who have witnessed his recently unveiled exhibition. Paco Chanivet’s hauntology talks to us at once of delirium, illness, synaesthesia, a state of ecstasy, allowing us to explore beyond the normative limits of our body. That which occurs when imagination goes crazy, becomes disturbed, unhinged and unkempt when we can understand that in expanding the limit of the capacity of a body, we broaden everyone’s potential. Thus, the English writer and photographer Matt Colquhoun, influenced by Fisher, influenced by Bataille, influenced by Nietzsche, recently wrote on his blog xenogothic.com, how “mankind cannot remain indifferent to its monsters, given they cannot escape the constitution of the perfect type”. Colquhoun, who on different occasions has thought about today’s ontologies of body horror, also speaks of gothic not being an aesthetic genre but a prosthetic sensibility, “It is a mode of addition, extension and attachment and one that has taken on many different forms, from ‘hook hands’ to new technologies that allow a body to exceed its own limits”. The prosthetic is not then simply a medical adjective but an ontological one. In other words, Paco Chanivet’s gothic prosthesis gives speculative form to that which today would seem not to take it. Yet in gothic literature it is the past and present that are seriously confused, and the characters appear forced to relive certain past dramas with their own bodies; here something similar occurs but moves in the other direction. Our own projections and future desires journey across us to remind us that we are trapped in the framework we have configured on our idea of ourselves. We will desecrate the fictitious eye of Udjat to which we obey, Chanivet tells us. We eye ourselves. But to desecrate there is a need to fashion a tactic or collusion — an artwork — capable of demystifying objects, people and things separated and captured by theological devices from all religions that have us shut in celestial caves as if we were the martyrs of their rotten cause. We eye ourselves with our clenched and viscous teeth. We eye ourselves as if it were a sacrilege of our permanent disability. We eye ourselves to abandon the blind logics of automated reproduction. We eye ourselves dirty and desensitised. We eye ourselves to feel the flesh of this world and the trace of all undead futures to come. — All Undead Futures of Paco Chanivet by Núria Gómez Gabriel When I set foot inside the room it was almost completely dark. I couldn’t make out if there were seats or benches, so I remained standing, still, until my eyes adjusted to the darkness. After a few long minutes waiting in unabated silence, I decided to sit on the floor of the black box, and, as I rested my hands on its surface, I could perceive it was acorn-shaped, a thin and opaque velvet. I was sure of it because velvet has a very distinctive odour to it, perhaps the smell of the passage of time, a build-up of dust. Time smells something like childhood film theatres, not unlike the odour of crypts or subterranean caves where the dead were buried in the 10th century to hide the graves of martyrs from the eyes of the profane. The atmosphere was wet, uncomfortable, like a typical December day in Barcelona. From the first minute I noticed that I wasn’t alone, although I couldn’t clearly discern what or who was with me, or the distance between us. Suddenly I heard a strange sound that came from the outside; it seemed strange because it was like a slapping sound, although on the skin of my wrist I felt a breeze more similar to the brush of a caress, or like a knot being untied. Gradually, I felt the limits of the black box were inching closer to my body until the space became still and a small and tenuous pink light started to shine at a distance that was incomprehensible in relation to where I was still sitting. I moved towards that light, arching my back slightly and leaning a little to the left. It was a tiny quartzite sculpted in a shape that looked like the Eye of Horus or Udjat, that symbol with apotropaic characteristics — magic, protective, purifying, healing — which in ancient times embodied the order of the imperturbable and was used to invoke cosmic-state stability. In fact, in Ancient Egypt it was one of the most powerful amulets because of its sight-enhancing qualities and an ancestral remedy for ocular diseases, counteracting “eye hunting” or the evil eye and protecting the dead in the afterlife. Upon inspecting the red quartzite up close, something halfway between my ears and Adam’s apple began to vibrate. Red quartzite is a metamorphic rock, semi-transparent or translucid, producing a shine known as aventurescence. Aventurine stones produce an optical effect similar to glitter, with hundreds of small dots that glisten and, depending on the position of the stone, or whether you change your angle of vision, the reflection makes the shiny points move and sparkle. While I was lost in that minute landscape, the Udjat contours became warped and the eye now looked more like an orifice with clenched and viscous teeth that moved with a physical momentum that was not easily recognised. It was then, observing that seemingly disfigured, twisted and incomplete thing that my tongue started to produce salty saliva. I don’t remember seeing anything else, nor do I recall the time I spent inside the exhibition in terms of minutes, hours or seconds. Yet I do remember dream sequences outside of time. And I also remember their colour: from orangey red to violet pink to black-yellow. A dream within a dream within a memory outside my eyes and field of vision. They were not my dreams. Or maybe they were. They were the memories of all undead futures afforded by Paco Chanivet’s La prótesis prometeica (Promethean Prosthesis). The question lies in how, in each one, I could partly recognise what was happening. For example, I recognised my friends but was unaware of their lives. They were underground lives, lived together inside a volcano called Ennneés. And they would sing beautiful songs. And it was always night-time. And they drank a kind of bluish tequila they kept buried in ash. And they slept for days on end. Even asleep they kept on singing. But they didn’t have children. They told me that reproduction belonged to another time and since maternity remained trapped there, they were the family. Later, in a second vision, just the opposite happened. I couldn’t recognise any of the forms I was interacting with. They were like masses with a consistency similar to spiderwebs, light and sticky. Or no, they were more like clumps of vaporous clothing which, when fused together, wailed a hardcore polyphony. Their movements brought to mind certain mechanics in our world, syncopated, fast, voracious. And every time they advanced towards a place my body became lighter, and lighter. First a finger, then the lower abdomen, then my jaw. What I recall with absolute clarity was the last of the sequences because it seemed very much like the present day. A Dubai blaze, Pope Francis in Rome, the dance of US soldiers in Afghanistan, sandstorms, Hurricane Katrina, glacier collapses, the Statue of Liberty, Twitter. It was all the same apart from the words. The words, said and written, all had the same meaning. And when there was any attempt at communication time stopped dead. Something said to me: Weeglcoommm tru dde moderkn agxge xekkk. And in the room a sharp tap again on my left shoulder. That tap still hurts, although I like to take pleasure from it. My encounters with Paco Chanivet’s last work were a kind of threshold experience, but encounters in which, despite their skewed logics, I felt good and could cope with life, manage stress. Something akin to the effects on the body when ketamine is taken, or the hallucinations caused by a good hit of noradrenaline. However, beyond my personal journey and recollections of those dreams, Chanivet’s work brings us closer to two geopsychological approaches — or perhaps it would be more accurate to say gemopsychologcal — at which I think it might be a good idea to stop. When I left the room, still in darkness, I decided to take the green line on the underground and change at Plaza España, on the next train bound for Hospitalet. I couldn’t help thinking about the approaches Mark Fisher wrote about the hauntological dimension of current time. Reflections in which the English critic speaks of a certain formal nostalgia for everything that could exist and which, nevertheless, is shoddily buried by the phantasmagorical end of Capitalism Realism. Having said that, I feel that hauntology, exactly as it functions in Chanivet’s work, doesn’t deal with nostalgia at all. What his latest intervention speaks of is that every present situation is tied to a series of possible futures, some of which can be carried out but the majority of which aren’t. As the situation changes, these future possibilities become rigid, brittle, inert and finally impossible and unable to be realised. In hindsight, it seems that some have not been viable futures at all, but they don’t turn into nothing. Instead, they give form to meaning in a future that really happens, its symbolic traces lingering within us. And that is precisely where the magic of Chanivet lies: in creating possible conditions to be able to see these traces and get to know the way in which they continue to affect our sense of still-possible futures, or ones that are perhaps still possible. And here it is important to emphasise that the world-views his work sets forth are always unique and non-transferrable, joined to the incomplete memories and moods of all those people who have witnessed his recently unveiled exhibition. Paco Chanivet’s hauntology talks to us at once of delirium, illness, synaesthesia, a state of ecstasy, allowing us to explore beyond the normative limits of our body. That which occurs when imagination goes crazy, becomes disturbed, unhinged and unkempt when we can understand that in expanding the limit of the capacity of a body, we broaden everyone’s potential. Thus, the English writer and photographer Matt Colquhoun, influenced by Fisher, influenced by Bataille, influenced by Nietzsche, recently wrote on his blog xenogothic.com, how “mankind cannot remain indifferent to its monsters, given they cannot escape the constitution of the perfect type”. Colquhoun, who on different occasions has thought about today’s ontologies of body horror, also speaks of gothic not being an aesthetic genre but a prosthetic sensibility, “It is a mode of addition, extension and attachment and one that has taken on many different forms, from ‘hook hands’ to new technologies that allow a body to exceed its own limits”. The prosthetic is not then simply a medical adjective but an ontological one. In other words, Paco Chanivet’s gothic prosthesis gives speculative form to that which today would seem not to take it. Yet in gothic literature it is the past and present that are seriously confused, and the characters appear forced to relive certain past dramas with their own bodies; here something similar occurs but moves in the other direction. Our own projections and future desires journey across us to remind us that we are trapped in the framework we have configured on our idea of ourselves. We will desecrate the fictitious eye of Udjat to which we obey, Chanivet tells us. We eye ourselves. But to desecrate there is a need to fashion a tactic or collusion — an artwork — capable of demystifying objects, people and things separated and captured by theological devices from all religions that have us shut in celestial caves as if we were the martyrs of their rotten cause. We eye ourselves with our clenched and viscous teeth. We eye ourselves as if it were a sacrilege of our permanent disability. We eye ourselves to abandon the blind logics of automated reproduction. We eye ourselves dirty and desensitised. We eye ourselves to feel the flesh of this world and the trace of all undead futures to come. — All Undead Futures of Paco Chanivet by Núria Gómez Gabriel When I set foot inside the room it was almost completely dark. I couldn’t make out if there were seats or benches, so I remained standing, still, until my eyes adjusted to the darkness. After a few long minutes waiting in unabated silence, I decided to sit on the floor of the black box, and, as I rested my hands on its surface, I could perceive it was acorn-shaped, a thin and opaque velvet. I was sure of it because velvet has a very distinctive odour to it, perhaps the smell of the passage of time, a build-up of dust. Time smells something like childhood film theatres, not unlike the odour of crypts or subterranean caves where the dead were buried in the 10th century to hide the graves of martyrs from the eyes of the profane. The atmosphere was wet, uncomfortable, like a typical December day in Barcelona. From the first minute I noticed that I wasn’t alone, although I couldn’t clearly discern what or who was with me, or the distance between us. Suddenly I heard a strange sound that came from the outside; it seemed strange because it was like a slapping sound, although on the skin of my wrist I felt a breeze more similar to the brush of a caress, or like a knot being untied. Gradually, I felt the limits of the black box were inching closer to my body until the space became still and a small and tenuous pink light started to shine at a distance that was incomprehensible in relation to where I was still sitting. I moved towards that light, arching my back slightly and leaning a little to the left. It was a tiny quartzite sculpted in a shape that looked like the Eye of Horus or Udjat, that symbol with apotropaic characteristics — magic, protective, purifying, healing — which in ancient times embodied the order of the imperturbable and was used to invoke cosmic-state stability. In fact, in Ancient Egypt it was one of the most powerful amulets because of its sight-enhancing qualities and an ancestral remedy for ocular diseases, counteracting “eye hunting” or the evil eye and protecting the dead in the afterlife. Upon inspecting the red quartzite up close, something halfway between my ears and Adam’s apple began to vibrate. Red quartzite is a metamorphic rock, semi-transparent or translucid, producing a shine known as aventurescence. Aventurine stones produce an optical effect similar to glitter, with hundreds of small dots that glisten and, depending on the position of the stone, or whether you change your angle of vision, the reflection makes the shiny points move and sparkle. While I was lost in that minute landscape, the Udjat contours became warped and the eye now looked more like an orifice with clenched and viscous teeth that moved with a physical momentum that was not easily recognised. It was then, observing that seemingly disfigured, twisted and incomplete thing that my tongue started to produce salty saliva. I don’t remember seeing anything else, nor do I recall the time I spent inside the exhibition in terms of minutes, hours or seconds. Yet I do remember dream sequences outside of time. And I also remember their colour: from orangey red to violet pink to black-yellow. A dream within a dream within a memory outside my eyes and field of vision. They were not my dreams. Or maybe they were. They were the memories of all undead futures afforded by Paco Chanivet’s La prótesis prometeica (Promethean Prosthesis). The question lies in how, in each one, I could partly recognise what was happening. For example, I recognised my friends but was unaware of their lives. They were underground lives, lived together inside a volcano called Ennneés. And they would sing beautiful songs. And it was always night-time. And they drank a kind of bluish tequila they kept buried in ash. And they slept for days on end. Even asleep they kept on singing. But they didn’t have children. They told me that reproduction belonged to another time and since maternity remained trapped there, they were the family. Later, in a second vision, just the opposite happened. I couldn’t recognise any of the forms I was interacting with. They were like masses with a consistency similar to spiderwebs, light and sticky. Or no, they were more like clumps of vaporous clothing which, when fused together, wailed a hardcore polyphony. Their movements brought to mind certain mechanics in our world, syncopated, fast, voracious. And every time they advanced towards a place my body became lighter, and lighter. First a finger, then the lower abdomen, then my jaw. What I recall with absolute clarity was the last of the sequences because it seemed very much like the present day. A Dubai blaze, Pope Francis in Rome, the dance of US soldiers in Afghanistan, sandstorms, Hurricane Katrina, glacier collapses, the Statue of Liberty, Twitter. It was all the same apart from the words. The words, said and written, all had the same meaning. And when there was any attempt at communication time stopped dead. Something said to me: Weeglcoommm tru dde moderkn agxge xekkk. And in the room a sharp tap again on my left shoulder. That tap still hurts, although I like to take pleasure from it. My encounters with Paco Chanivet’s last work were a kind of threshold experience, but encounters in which, despite their skewed logics, I felt good and could cope with life, manage stress. Something akin to the effects on the body when ketamine is taken, or the hallucinations caused by a good hit of noradrenaline. However, beyond my personal journey and recollections of those dreams, Chanivet’s work brings us closer to two geopsychological approaches — or perhaps it would be more accurate to say gemopsychologcal — at which I think it might be a good idea to stop. When I left the room, still in darkness, I decided to take the green line on the underground and change at Plaza España, on the next train bound for Hospitalet. I couldn’t help thinking about the approaches Mark Fisher wrote about the hauntological dimension of current time. Reflections in which the English critic speaks of a certain formal nostalgia for everything that could exist and which, nevertheless, is shoddily buried by the phantasmagorical end of Capitalism Realism. Having said that, I feel that hauntology, exactly as it functions in Chanivet’s work, doesn’t deal with nostalgia at all. What his latest intervention speaks of is that every present situation is tied to a series of possible futures, some of which can be carried out but the majority of which aren’t. As the situation changes, these future possibilities become rigid, brittle, inert and finally impossible and unable to be realised. In hindsight, it seems that some have not been viable futures at all, but they don’t turn into nothing. Instead, they give form to meaning in a future that really happens, its symbolic traces lingering within us. And that is precisely where the magic of Chanivet lies: in creating possible conditions to be able to see these traces and get to know the way in which they continue to affect our sense of still-possible futures, or ones that are perhaps still possible. And here it is important to emphasise that the world-views his work sets forth are always unique and non-transferrable, joined to the incomplete memories and moods of all those people who have witnessed his recently unveiled exhibition. Paco Chanivet’s hauntology talks to us at once of delirium, illness, synaesthesia, a state of ecstasy, allowing us to explore beyond the normative limits of our body. That which occurs when imagination goes crazy, becomes disturbed, unhinged and unkempt when we can understand that in expanding the limit of the capacity of a body, we broaden everyone’s potential. Thus, the English writer and photographer Matt Colquhoun, influenced by Fisher, influenced by Bataille, influenced by Nietzsche, recently wrote on his blog xenogothic.com, how “mankind cannot remain indifferent to its monsters, given they cannot escape the constitution of the perfect type”. Colquhoun, who on different occasions has thought about today’s ontologies of body horror, also speaks of gothic not being an aesthetic genre but a prosthetic sensibility, “It is a mode of addition, extension and attachment and one that has taken on many different forms, from ‘hook hands’ to new technologies that allow a body to exceed its own limits”. The prosthetic is not then simply a medical adjective but an ontological one. In other words, Paco Chanivet’s gothic prosthesis gives speculative form to that which today would seem not to take it. Yet in gothic literature it is the past and present that are seriously confused, and the characters appear forced to relive certain past dramas with their own bodies; here something similar occurs but moves in the other direction. Our own projections and future desires journey across us to remind us that we are trapped in the framework we have configured on our idea of ourselves. We will desecrate the fictitious eye of Udjat to which we obey, Chanivet tells us. We eye ourselves. But to desecrate there is a need to fashion a tactic or collusion — an artwork — capable of demystifying objects, people and things separated and captured by theological devices from all religions that have us shut in celestial caves as if we were the martyrs of their rotten cause. We eye ourselves with our clenched and viscous teeth. We eye ourselves as if it were a sacrilege of our permanent disability. We eye ourselves to abandon the blind logics of automated reproduction. We eye ourselves dirty and desensitised. We eye ourselves to feel the flesh of this world and the trace of all undead futures to come. — All Undead Futures of Paco Chanivet by Núria Gómez Gabriel When I set foot inside the room it was almost completely dark. I couldn’t make out if there were seats or benches, so I remained standing, still, until my eyes adjusted to the darkness. After a few long minutes waiting in unabated silence, I decided to sit on the floor of the black box, and, as I rested my hands on its surface, I could perceive it was acorn-shaped, a thin and opaque velvet. I was sure of it because velvet has a very distinctive odour to it, perhaps the smell of the passage of time, a build-up of dust. Time smells something like childhood film theatres, not unlike the odour of crypts or subterranean caves where the dead were buried in the 10th century to hide the graves of martyrs from the eyes of the profane. The atmosphere was wet, uncomfortable, like a typical December day in Barcelona. From the first minute I noticed that I wasn’t alone, although I couldn’t clearly discern what or who was with me, or the distance between us. Suddenly I heard a strange sound that came from the outside; it seemed strange because it was like a slapping sound, although on the skin of my wrist I felt a breeze more similar to the brush of a caress, or like a knot being untied. Gradually, I felt the limits of the black box were inching closer to my body until the space became still and a small and tenuous pink light started to shine at a distance that was incomprehensible in relation to where I was still sitting. I moved towards that light, arching my back slightly and leaning a little to the left. It was a tiny quartzite sculpted in a shape that looked like the Eye of Horus or Udjat, that symbol with apotropaic characteristics — magic, protective, purifying, healing — which in ancient times embodied the order of the imperturbable and was used to invoke cosmic-state stability. In fact, in Ancient Egypt it was one of the most powerful amulets because of its sight-enhancing qualities and an ancestral remedy for ocular diseases, counteracting “eye hunting” or the evil eye and protecting the dead in the afterlife. Upon inspecting the red quartzite up close, something halfway between my ears and Adam’s apple began to vibrate. Red quartzite is a metamorphic rock, semi-transparent or translucid, producing a shine known as aventurescence. Aventurine stones produce an optical effect similar to glitter, with hundreds of small dots that glisten and, depending on the position of the stone, or whether you change your angle of vision, the reflection makes the shiny points move and sparkle. While I was lost in that minute landscape, the Udjat contours became warped and the eye now looked more like an orifice with clenched and viscous teeth that moved with a physical momentum that was not easily recognised. It was then, observing that seemingly disfigured, twisted and incomplete thing that my tongue started to produce salty saliva. I don’t remember seeing anything else, nor do I recall the time I spent inside the exhibition in terms of minutes, hours or seconds. Yet I do remember dream sequences outside of time. And I also remember their colour: from orangey red to violet pink to black-yellow. A dream within a dream within a memory outside my eyes and field of vision. They were not my dreams. Or maybe they were. They were the memories of all undead futures afforded by Paco Chanivet’s La prótesis prometeica (Promethean Prosthesis). The question lies in how, in each one, I could partly recognise what was happening. For example, I recognised my friends but was unaware of their lives. They were underground lives, lived together inside a volcano called Ennneés. And they would sing beautiful songs. And it was always night-time. And they drank a kind of bluish tequila they kept buried in ash. And they slept for days on end. Even asleep they kept on singing. But they didn’t have children. They told me that reproduction belonged to another time and since maternity remained trapped there, they were the family. Later, in a second vision, just the opposite happened. I couldn’t recognise any of the forms I was interacting with. They were like masses with a consistency similar to spiderwebs, light and sticky. Or no, they were more like clumps of vaporous clothing which, when fused together, wailed a hardcore polyphony. Their movements brought to mind certain mechanics in our world, syncopated, fast, voracious. And every time they advanced towards a place my body became lighter, and lighter. First a finger, then the lower abdomen, then my jaw. What I recall with absolute clarity was the last of the sequences because it seemed very much like the present day. A Dubai blaze, Pope Francis in Rome, the dance of US soldiers in Afghanistan, sandstorms, Hurricane Katrina, glacier collapses, the Statue of Liberty, Twitter. It was all the same apart from the words. The words, said and written, all had the same meaning. And when there was any attempt at communication time stopped dead. Something said to me: Weeglcoommm tru dde moderkn agxge xekkk. And in the room a sharp tap again on my left shoulder. That tap still hurts, although I like to take pleasure from it. My encounters with Paco Chanivet’s last work were a kind of threshold experience, but encounters in which, despite their skewed logics, I felt good and could cope with life, manage stress. Something akin to the effects on the body when ketamine is taken, or the hallucinations caused by a good hit of noradrenaline. However, beyond my personal journey and recollections of those dreams, Chanivet’s work brings us closer to two geopsychological approaches — or perhaps it would be more accurate to say gemopsychologcal — at which I think it might be a good idea to stop. When I left the room, still in darkness, I decided to take the green line on the underground and change at Plaza España, on the next train bound for Hospitalet. I couldn’t help thinking about the approaches Mark Fisher wrote about the hauntological dimension of current time. Reflections in which the English critic speaks of a certain formal nostalgia for everything that could exist and which, nevertheless, is shoddily buried by the phantasmagorical end of Capitalism Realism. Having said that, I feel that hauntology, exactly as it functions in Chanivet’s work, doesn’t deal with nostalgia at all. What his latest intervention speaks of is that every present situation is tied to a series of possible futures, some of which can be carried out but the majority of which aren’t. As the situation changes, these future possibilities become rigid, brittle, inert and finally impossible and unable to be realised. In hindsight, it seems that some have not been viable futures at all, but they don’t turn into nothing. Instead, they give form to meaning in a future that really happens, its symbolic traces lingering within us. And that is precisely where the magic of Chanivet lies: in creating possible conditions to be able to see these traces and get to know the way in which they continue to affect our sense of still-possible futures, or ones that are perhaps still possible. And here it is important to emphasise that the world-views his work sets forth are always unique and non-transferrable, joined to the incomplete memories and moods of all those people who have witnessed his recently unveiled exhibition. Paco Chanivet’s hauntology talks to us at once of delirium, illness, synaesthesia, a state of ecstasy, allowing us to explore beyond the normative limits of our body. That which occurs when imagination goes crazy, becomes disturbed, unhinged and unkempt when we can understand that in expanding the limit of the capacity of a body, we broaden everyone’s potential. Thus, the English writer and photographer Matt Colquhoun, influenced by Fisher, influenced by Bataille, influenced by Nietzsche, recently wrote on his blog xenogothic.com, how “mankind cannot remain indifferent to its monsters, given they cannot escape the constitution of the perfect type”. Colquhoun, who on different occasions has thought about today’s ontologies of body horror, also speaks of gothic not being an aesthetic genre but a prosthetic sensibility, “It is a mode of addition, extension and attachment and one that has taken on many different forms, from ‘hook hands’ to new technologies that allow a body to exceed its own limits”. The prosthetic is not then simply a medical adjective but an ontological one. In other words, Paco Chanivet’s gothic prosthesis gives speculative form to that which today would seem not to take it. Yet in gothic literature it is the past and present that are seriously confused, and the characters appear forced to relive certain past dramas with their own bodies; here something similar occurs but moves in the other direction. Our own projections and future desires journey across us to remind us that we are trapped in the framework we have configured on our idea of ourselves. We will desecrate the fictitious eye of Udjat to which we obey, Chanivet tells us. We eye ourselves. But to desecrate there is a need to fashion a tactic or collusion — an artwork — capable of demystifying objects, people and things separated and captured by theological devices from all religions that have us shut in celestial caves as if we were the martyrs of their rotten cause. We eye ourselves with our clenched and viscous teeth. We eye ourselves as if it were a sacrilege of our permanent disability. We eye ourselves to abandon the blind logics of automated reproduction. We eye ourselves dirty and desensitised. We eye ourselves to feel the flesh of this world and the trace of all undead futures to come. — All Undead Futures of Paco Chanivet by Núria Gómez Gabriel When I set foot inside the room it was almost completely dark. I couldn’t make out if there were seats or benches, so I remained standing, still, until my eyes adjusted to the darkness. After a few long minutes waiting in unabated silence, I decided to sit on the floor of the black box, and, as I rested my hands on its surface, I could perceive it was acorn-shaped, a thin and opaque velvet. I was sure of it because velvet has a very distinctive odour to it, perhaps the smell of the passage of time, a build-up of dust. Time smells something like childhood film theatres, not unlike the odour of crypts or subterranean caves where the dead were buried in the 10th century to hide the graves of martyrs from the eyes of the profane. The atmosphere was wet, uncomfortable, like a typical December day in Barcelona. From the first minute I noticed that I wasn’t alone, although I couldn’t clearly discern what or who was with me, or the distance between us. Suddenly I heard a strange sound that came from the outside; it seemed strange because it was like a slapping sound, although on the skin of my wrist I felt a breeze more similar to the brush of a caress, or like a knot being untied. Gradually, I felt the limits of the black box were inching closer to my body until the space became still and a small and tenuous pink light started to shine at a distance that was incomprehensible in relation to where I was still sitting. I moved towards that light, arching my back slightly and leaning a little to the left. It was a tiny quartzite sculpted in a shape that looked like the Eye of Horus or Udjat, that symbol with apotropaic characteristics — magic, protective, purifying, healing — which in ancient times embodied the order of the imperturbable and was used to invoke cosmic-state stability. In fact, in Ancient Egypt it was one of the most powerful amulets because of its sight-enhancing qualities and an ancestral remedy for ocular diseases, counteracting “eye hunting” or the evil eye and protecting the dead in the afterlife. Upon inspecting the red quartzite up close, something halfway between my ears and Adam’s apple began to vibrate. Red quartzite is a metamorphic rock, semi-transparent or translucid, producing a shine known as aventurescence. Aventurine stones produce an optical effect similar to glitter, with hundreds of small dots that glisten and, depending on the position of the stone, or whether you change your angle of vision, the reflection makes the shiny points move and sparkle. While I was lost in that minute landscape, the Udjat contours became warped and the eye now looked more like an orifice with clenched and viscous teeth that moved with a physical momentum that was not easily recognised. It was then, observing that seemingly disfigured, twisted and incomplete thing that my tongue started to produce salty saliva. I don’t remember seeing anything else, nor do I recall the time I spent inside the exhibition in terms of minutes, hours or seconds. Yet I do remember dream sequences outside of time. And I also remember their colour: from orangey red to violet pink to black-yellow. A dream within a dream within a memory outside my eyes and field of vision. They were not my dreams. Or maybe they were. They were the memories of all undead futures afforded by Paco Chanivet’s La prótesis prometeica (Promethean Prosthesis). The question lies in how, in each one, I could partly recognise what was happening. For example, I recognised my friends but was unaware of their lives. They were underground lives, lived together inside a volcano called Ennneés. And they would sing beautiful songs. And it was always night-time. And they drank a kind of bluish tequila they kept buried in ash. And they slept for days on end. Even asleep they kept on singing. But they didn’t have children. They told me that reproduction belonged to another time and since maternity remained trapped there, they were the family. Later, in a second vision, just the opposite happened. I couldn’t recognise any of the forms I was interacting with. They were like masses with a consistency similar to spiderwebs, light and sticky. Or no, they were more like clumps of vaporous clothing which, when fused together, wailed a hardcore polyphony. Their movements brought to mind certain mechanics in our world, syncopated, fast, voracious. And every time they advanced towards a place my body became lighter, and lighter. First a finger, then the lower abdomen, then my jaw. What I recall with absolute clarity was the last of the sequences because it seemed very much like the present day. A Dubai blaze, Pope Francis in Rome, the dance of US soldiers in Afghanistan, sandstorms, Hurricane Katrina, glacier collapses, the Statue of Liberty, Twitter. It was all the same apart from the words. The words, said and written, all had the same meaning. And when there was any attempt at communication time stopped dead. Something said to me: Weeglcoommm tru dde moderkn agxge xekkk. And in the room a sharp tap again on my left shoulder. That tap still hurts, although I like to take pleasure from it. My encounters with Paco Chanivet’s last work were a kind of threshold experience, but encounters in which, despite their skewed logics, I felt good and could cope with life, manage stress. Something akin to the effects on the body when ketamine is taken, or the hallucinations caused by a good hit of noradrenaline. However, beyond my personal journey and recollections of those dreams, Chanivet’s work brings us closer to two geopsychological approaches — or perhaps it would be more accurate to say gemopsychologcal — at which I think it might be a good idea to stop. When I left the room, still in darkness, I decided to take the green line on the underground and change at Plaza España, on the next train bound for Hospitalet. I couldn’t help thinking about the approaches Mark Fisher wrote about the hauntological dimension of current time. Reflections in which the English critic speaks of a certain formal nostalgia for everything that could exist and which, nevertheless, is shoddily buried by the phantasmagorical end of Capitalism Realism. Having said that, I feel that hauntology, exactly as it functions in Chanivet’s work, doesn’t deal with nostalgia at all. What his latest intervention speaks of is that every present situation is tied to a series of possible futures, some of which can be carried out but the majority of which aren’t. As the situation changes, these future possibilities become rigid, brittle, inert and finally impossible and unable to be realised. In hindsight, it seems that some have not been viable futures at all, but they don’t turn into nothing. Instead, they give form to meaning in a future that really happens, its symbolic traces lingering within us. And that is precisely where the magic of Chanivet lies: in creating possible conditions to be able to see these traces and get to know the way in which they continue to affect our sense of still-possible futures, or ones that are perhaps still possible. And here it is important to emphasise that the world-views his work sets forth are always unique and non-transferrable, joined to the incomplete memories and moods of all those people who have witnessed his recently unveiled exhibition. Paco Chanivet’s hauntology talks to us at once of delirium, illness, synaesthesia, a state of ecstasy, allowing us to explore beyond the normative limits of our body. That which occurs when imagination goes crazy, becomes disturbed, unhinged and unkempt when we can understand that in expanding the limit of the capacity of a body, we broaden everyone’s potential. Thus, the English writer and photographer Matt Colquhoun, influenced by Fisher, influenced by Bataille, influenced by Nietzsche, recently wrote on his blog xenogothic.com, how “mankind cannot remain indifferent to its monsters, given they cannot escape the constitution of the perfect type”. Colquhoun, who on different occasions has thought about today’s ontologies of body horror, also speaks of gothic not being an aesthetic genre but a prosthetic sensibility, “It is a mode of addition, extension and attachment and one that has taken on many different forms, from ‘hook hands’ to new technologies that allow a body to exceed its own limits”. The prosthetic is not then simply a medical adjective but an ontological one. In other words, Paco Chanivet’s gothic prosthesis gives speculative form to that which today would seem not to take it. Yet in gothic literature it is the past and present that are seriously confused, and the characters appear forced to relive certain past dramas with their own bodies; here something similar occurs but moves in the other direction. Our own projections and future desires journey across us to remind us that we are trapped in the framework we have configured on our idea of ourselves. We will desecrate the fictitious eye of Udjat to which we obey, Chanivet tells us. We eye ourselves. But to desecrate there is a need to fashion a tactic or collusion — an artwork — capable of demystifying objects, people and things separated and captured by theological devices from all religions that have us shut in celestial caves as if we were the martyrs of their rotten cause. We eye ourselves with our clenched and viscous teeth. We eye ourselves as if it were a sacrilege of our permanent disability. We eye ourselves to abandon the blind logics of automated reproduction. We eye ourselves dirty and desensitised. We eye ourselves to feel the flesh of this world and the trace of all undead futures to come. — All Undead Futures of Paco Chanivet by Núria Gómez Gabriel When I set foot inside the room it was almost completely dark. I couldn’t make out if there were seats or benches, so I remained standing, still, until my eyes adjusted to the darkness. After a few long minutes waiting in unabated silence, I decided to sit on the floor of the black box, and, as I rested my hands on its surface, I could perceive it was acorn-shaped, a thin and opaque velvet. I was sure of it because velvet has a very distinctive odour to it, perhaps the smell of the passage of time, a build-up of dust. Time smells something like childhood film theatres, not unlike the odour of crypts or subterranean caves where the dead were buried in the 10th century to hide the graves of martyrs from the eyes of the profane. The atmosphere was wet, uncomfortable, like a typical December day in Barcelona. From the first minute I noticed that I wasn’t alone, although I couldn’t clearly discern what or who was with me, or the distance between us. Suddenly I heard a strange sound that came from the outside; it seemed strange because it was like a slapping sound, although on the skin of my wrist I felt a breeze more similar to the brush of a caress, or like a knot being untied. Gradually, I felt the limits of the black box were inching closer to my body until the space became still and a small and tenuous pink light started to shine at a distance that was incomprehensible in relation to where I was still sitting. I moved towards that light, arching my back slightly and leaning a little to the left. It was a tiny quartzite sculpted in a shape that looked like the Eye of Horus or Udjat, that symbol with apotropaic characteristics — magic, protective, purifying, healing — which in ancient times embodied the order of the imperturbable and was used to invoke cosmic-state stability. In fact, in Ancient Egypt it was one of the most powerful amulets because of its sight-enhancing qualities and an ancestral remedy for ocular diseases, counteracting “eye hunting” or the evil eye and protecting the dead in the afterlife. Upon inspecting the red quartzite up close, something halfway between my ears and Adam’s apple began to vibrate. Red quartzite is a metamorphic rock, semi-transparent or translucid, producing a shine known as aventurescence. Aventurine stones produce an optical effect similar to glitter, with hundreds of small dots that glisten and, depending on the position of the stone, or whether you change your angle of vision, the reflection makes the shiny points move and sparkle. While I was lost in that minute landscape, the Udjat contours became warped and the eye now looked more like an orifice with clenched and viscous teeth that moved with a physical momentum that was not easily recognised. It was then, observing that seemingly disfigured, twisted and incomplete thing that my tongue started to produce salty saliva. I don’t remember seeing anything else, nor do I recall the time I spent inside the exhibition in terms of minutes, hours or seconds. Yet I do remember dream sequences outside of time. And I also remember their colour: from orangey red to violet pink to black-yellow. A dream within a dream within a memory outside my eyes and field of vision. They were not my dreams. Or maybe they were. They were the memories of all undead futures afforded by Paco Chanivet’s La prótesis prometeica (Promethean Prosthesis). The question lies in how, in each one, I could partly recognise what was happening. For example, I recognised my friends but was unaware of their lives. They were underground lives, lived together inside a volcano called Ennneés. And they would sing beautiful songs. And it was always night-time. And they drank a kind of bluish tequila they kept buried in ash. And they slept for days on end. Even asleep they kept on singing. But they didn’t have children. They told me that reproduction belonged to another time and since maternity remained trapped there, they were the family. Later, in a second vision, just the opposite happened. I couldn’t recognise any of the forms I was interacting with. They were like masses with a consistency similar to spiderwebs, light and sticky. Or no, they were more like clumps of vaporous clothing which, when fused together, wailed a hardcore polyphony. Their movements brought to mind certain mechanics in our world, syncopated, fast, voracious. And every time they advanced towards a place my body became lighter, and lighter. First a finger, then the lower abdomen, then my jaw. What I recall with absolute clarity was the last of the sequences because it seemed very much like the present day. A Dubai blaze, Pope Francis in Rome, the dance of US soldiers in Afghanistan, sandstorms, Hurricane Katrina, glacier collapses, the Statue of Liberty, Twitter. It was all the same apart from the words. The words, said and written, all had the same meaning. And when there was any attempt at communication time stopped dead. Something said to me: Weeglcoommm tru dde moderkn agxge xekkk. And in the room a sharp tap again on my left shoulder. That tap still hurts, although I like to take pleasure from it. My encounters with Paco Chanivet’s last work were a kind of threshold experience, but encounters in which, despite their skewed logics, I felt good and could cope with life, manage stress. Something akin to the effects on the body when ketamine is taken, or the hallucinations caused by a good hit of noradrenaline. However, beyond my personal journey and recollections of those dreams, Chanivet’s work brings us closer to two geopsychological approaches — or perhaps it would be more accurate to say gemopsychologcal — at which I think it might be a good idea to stop. When I left the room, still in darkness, I decided to take the green line on the underground and change at Plaza España, on the next train bound for Hospitalet. I couldn’t help thinking about the approaches Mark Fisher wrote about the hauntological dimension of current time. Reflections in which the English critic speaks of a certain formal nostalgia for everything that could exist and which, nevertheless, is shoddily buried by the phantasmagorical end of Capitalism Realism. Having said that, I feel that hauntology, exactly as it functions in Chanivet’s work, doesn’t deal with nostalgia at all. What his latest intervention speaks of is that every present situation is tied to a series of possible futures, some of which can be carried out but the majority of which aren’t. As the situation changes, these future possibilities become rigid, brittle, inert and finally impossible and unable to be realised. In hindsight, it seems that some have not been viable futures at all, but they don’t turn into nothing. Instead, they give form to meaning in a future that really happens, its symbolic traces lingering within us. And that is precisely where the magic of Chanivet lies: in creating possible conditions to be able to see these traces and get to know the way in which they continue to affect our sense of still-possible futures, or ones that are perhaps still possible. And here it is important to emphasise that the world-views his work sets forth are always unique and non-transferrable, joined to the incomplete memories and moods of all those people who have witnessed his recently unveiled exhibition. Paco Chanivet’s hauntology talks to us at once of delirium, illness, synaesthesia, a state of ecstasy, allowing us to explore beyond the normative limits of our body. That which occurs when imagination goes crazy, becomes disturbed, unhinged and unkempt when we can understand that in expanding the limit of the capacity of a body, we broaden everyone’s potential. Thus, the English writer and photographer Matt Colquhoun, influenced by Fisher, influenced by Bataille, influenced by Nietzsche, recently wrote on his blog xenogothic.com, how “mankind cannot remain indifferent to its monsters, given they cannot escape the constitution of the perfect type”. Colquhoun, who on different occasions has thought about today’s ontologies of body horror, also speaks of gothic not being an aesthetic genre but a prosthetic sensibility, “It is a mode of addition, extension and attachment and one that has taken on many different forms, from ‘hook hands’ to new technologies that allow a body to exceed its own limits”. The prosthetic is not then simply a medical adjective but an ontological one. In other words, Paco Chanivet’s gothic prosthesis gives speculative form to that which today would seem not to take it. Yet in gothic literature it is the past and present that are seriously confused, and the characters appear forced to relive certain past dramas with their own bodies; here something similar occurs but moves in the other direction. Our own projections and future desires journey across us to remind us that we are trapped in the framework we have configured on our idea of ourselves. We will desecrate the fictitious eye of Udjat to which we obey, Chanivet tells us. We eye ourselves. But to desecrate there is a need to fashion a tactic or collusion — an artwork — capable of demystifying objects, people and things separated and captured by theological devices from all religions that have us shut in celestial caves as if we were the martyrs of their rotten cause. We eye ourselves with our clenched and viscous teeth. We eye ourselves as if it were a sacrilege of our permanent disability. We eye ourselves to abandon the blind logics of automated reproduction. We eye ourselves dirty and desensitised. We eye ourselves to feel the flesh of this world and the trace of all undead futures to come. — All Undead Futures of Paco Chanivet by Núria Gómez Gabriel When I set foot inside the room it was almost completely dark. I couldn’t make out if there were seats or benches, so I remained standing, still, until my eyes adjusted to the darkness. After a few long minutes waiting in unabated silence, I decided to sit on the floor of the black box, and, as I rested my hands on its surface, I could perceive it was acorn-shaped, a thin and opaque velvet. I was sure of it because velvet has a very distinctive odour to it, perhaps the smell of the passage of time, a build-up of dust. Time smells something like childhood film theatres, not unlike the odour of crypts or subterranean caves where the dead were buried in the 10th century to hide the graves of martyrs from the eyes of the profane. The atmosphere was wet, uncomfortable, like a typical December day in Barcelona. From the first minute I noticed that I wasn’t alone, although I couldn’t clearly discern what or who was with me, or the distance between us. Suddenly I heard a strange sound that came from the outside; it seemed strange because it was like a slapping sound, although on the skin of my wrist I felt a breeze more similar to the brush of a caress, or like a knot being untied. Gradually, I felt the limits of the black box were inching closer to my body until the space became still and a small and tenuous pink light started to shine at a distance that was incomprehensible in relation to where I was still sitting. I moved towards that light, arching my back slightly and leaning a little to the left. It was a tiny quartzite sculpted in a shape that looked like the Eye of Horus or Udjat, that symbol with apotropaic characteristics — magic, protective, purifying, healing — which in ancient times embodied the order of the imperturbable and was used to invoke cosmic-state stability. In fact, in Ancient Egypt it was one of the most powerful amulets because of its sight-enhancing qualities and an ancestral remedy for ocular diseases, counteracting “eye hunting” or the evil eye and protecting the dead in the afterlife. Upon inspecting the red quartzite up close, something halfway between my ears and Adam’s apple began to vibrate. Red quartzite is a metamorphic rock, semi-transparent or translucid, producing a shine known as aventurescence. Aventurine stones produce an optical effect similar to glitter, with hundreds of small dots that glisten and, depending on the position of the stone, or whether you change your angle of vision, the reflection makes the shiny points move and sparkle. While I was lost in that minute landscape, the Udjat contours became warped and the eye now looked more like an orifice with clenched and viscous teeth that moved with a physical momentum that was not easily recognised. It was then, observing that seemingly disfigured, twisted and incomplete thing that my tongue started to produce salty saliva. I don’t remember seeing anything else, nor do I recall the time I spent inside the exhibition in terms of minutes, hours or seconds. Yet I do remember dream sequences outside of time. And I also remember their colour: from orangey red to violet pink to black-yellow. A dream within a dream within a memory outside my eyes and field of vision. They were not my dreams. Or maybe they were. They were the memories of all undead futures afforded by Paco Chanivet’s La prótesis prometeica (Promethean Prosthesis). The question lies in how, in each one, I could partly recognise what was happening. For example, I recognised my friends but was unaware of their lives. They were underground lives, lived together inside a volcano called Ennneés. And they would sing beautiful songs. And it was always night-time. And they drank a kind of bluish tequila they kept buried in ash. And they slept for days on end. Even asleep they kept on singing. But they didn’t have children. They told me that reproduction belonged to another time and since maternity remained trapped there, they were the family. Later, in a second vision, just the opposite happened. I couldn’t recognise any of the forms I was interacting with. They were like masses with a consistency similar to spiderwebs, light and sticky. Or no, they were more like clumps of vaporous clothing which, when fused together, wailed a hardcore polyphony. Their movements brought to mind certain mechanics in our world, syncopated, fast, voracious. And every time they advanced towards a place my body became lighter, and lighter. First a finger, then the lower abdomen, then my jaw. What I recall with absolute clarity was the last of the sequences because it seemed very much like the present day. A Dubai blaze, Pope Francis in Rome, the dance of US soldiers in Afghanistan, sandstorms, Hurricane Katrina, glacier collapses, the Statue of Liberty, Twitter. It was all the same apart from the words. The words, said and written, all had the same meaning. And when there was any attempt at communication time stopped dead. Something said to me: Weeglcoommm tru dde moderkn agxge xekkk. And in the room a sharp tap again on my left shoulder. That tap still hurts, although I like to take pleasure from it. My encounters with Paco Chanivet’s last work were a kind of threshold experience, but encounters in which, despite their skewed logics, I felt good and could cope with life, manage stress. Something akin to the effects on the body when ketamine is taken, or the hallucinations caused by a good hit of noradrenaline. However, beyond my personal journey and recollections of those dreams, Chanivet’s work brings us closer to two geopsychological approaches — or perhaps it would be more accurate to say gemopsychologcal — at which I think it might be a good idea to stop. When I left the room, still in darkness, I decided to take the green line on the underground and change at Plaza España, on the next train bound for Hospitalet. I couldn’t help thinking about the approaches Mark Fisher wrote about the hauntological dimension of current time. Reflections in which the English critic speaks of a certain formal nostalgia for everything that could exist and which, nevertheless, is shoddily buried by the phantasmagorical end of Capitalism Realism. Having said that, I feel that hauntology, exactly as it functions in Chanivet’s work, doesn’t deal with nostalgia at all. What his latest intervention speaks of is that every present situation is tied to a series of possible futures, some of which can be carried out but the majority of which aren’t. As the situation changes, these future possibilities become rigid, brittle, inert and finally impossible and unable to be realised. In hindsight, it seems that some have not been viable futures at all, but they don’t turn into nothing. Instead, they give form to meaning in a future that really happens, its symbolic traces lingering within us. And that is precisely where the magic of Chanivet lies: in creating possible conditions to be able to see these traces and get to know the way in which they continue to affect our sense of still-possible futures, or ones that are perhaps still possible. And here it is important to emphasise that the world-views his work sets forth are always unique and non-transferrable, joined to the incomplete memories and moods of all those people who have witnessed his recently unveiled exhibition. Paco Chanivet’s hauntology talks to us at once of delirium, illness, synaesthesia, a state of ecstasy, allowing us to explore beyond the normative limits of our body. That which occurs when imagination goes crazy, becomes disturbed, unhinged and unkempt when we can understand that in expanding the limit of the capacity of a body, we broaden everyone’s potential. Thus, the English writer and photographer Matt Colquhoun, influenced by Fisher, influenced by Bataille, influenced by Nietzsche, recently wrote on his blog xenogothic.com, how “mankind cannot remain indifferent to its monsters, given they cannot escape the constitution of the perfect type”. Colquhoun, who on different occasions has thought about today’s ontologies of body horror, also speaks of gothic not being an aesthetic genre but a prosthetic sensibility, “It is a mode of addition, extension and attachment and one that has taken on many different forms, from ‘hook hands’ to new technologies that allow a body to exceed its own limits”. The prosthetic is not then simply a medical adjective but an ontological one. In other words, Paco Chanivet’s gothic prosthesis gives speculative form to that which today would seem not to take it. Yet in gothic literature it is the past and present that are seriously confused, and the characters appear forced to relive certain past dramas with their own bodies; here something similar occurs but moves in the other direction. Our own projections and future desires journey across us to remind us that we are trapped in the framework we have configured on our idea of ourselves. We will desecrate the fictitious eye of Udjat to which we obey, Chanivet tells us. We eye ourselves. But to desecrate there is a need to fashion a tactic or collusion — an artwork — capable of demystifying objects, people and things separated and captured by theological devices from all religions that have us shut in celestial caves as if we were the martyrs of their rotten cause. We eye ourselves with our clenched and viscous teeth. We eye ourselves as if it were a sacrilege of our permanent disability. We eye ourselves to abandon the blind logics of automated reproduction. We eye ourselves dirty and desensitised. We eye ourselves to feel the flesh of this world and the trace of all undead futures to come. — All Undead Futures of Paco Chanivet by Núria Gómez Gabriel When I set foot inside the room it was almost completely dark. I couldn’t make out if there were seats or benches, so I remained standing, still, until my eyes adjusted to the darkness. After a few long minutes waiting in unabated silence, I decided to sit on the floor of the black box, and, as I rested my hands on its surface, I could perceive it was acorn-shaped, a thin and opaque velvet. I was sure of it because velvet has a very distinctive odour to it, perhaps the smell of the passage of time, a build-up of dust. Time smells something like childhood film theatres, not unlike the odour of crypts or subterranean caves where the dead were buried in the 10th century to hide the graves of martyrs from the eyes of the profane. The atmosphere was wet, uncomfortable, like a typical December day in Barcelona. From the first minute I noticed that I wasn’t alone, although I couldn’t clearly discern what or who was with me, or the distance between us. Suddenly I heard a strange sound that came from the outside; it seemed strange because it was like a slapping sound, although on the skin of my wrist I felt a breeze more similar to the brush of a caress, or like a knot being untied. Gradually, I felt the limits of the black box were inching closer to my body until the space became still and a small and tenuous pink light started to shine at a distance that was incomprehensible in relation to where I was still sitting. I moved towards that light, arching my back slightly and leaning a little to the left. It was a tiny quartzite sculpted in a shape that looked like the Eye of Horus or Udjat, that symbol with apotropaic characteristics — magic, protective, purifying, healing — which in ancient times embodied the order of the imperturbable and was used to invoke cosmic-state stability. In fact, in Ancient Egypt it was one of the most powerful amulets because of its sight-enhancing qualities and an ancestral remedy for ocular diseases, counteracting “eye hunting” or the evil eye and protecting the dead in the afterlife. Upon inspecting the red quartzite up close, something halfway between my ears and Adam’s apple began to vibrate. Red quartzite is a metamorphic rock, semi-transparent or translucid, producing a shine known as aventurescence. Aventurine stones produce an optical effect similar to glitter, with hundreds of small dots that glisten and, depending on the position of the stone, or whether you change your angle of vision, the reflection makes the shiny points move and sparkle. While I was lost in that minute landscape, the Udjat contours became warped and the eye now looked more like an orifice with clenched and viscous teeth that moved with a physical momentum that was not easily recognised. It was then, observing that seemingly disfigured, twisted and incomplete thing that my tongue started to produce salty saliva. I don’t remember seeing anything else, nor do I recall the time I spent inside the exhibition in terms of minutes, hours or seconds. Yet I do remember dream sequences outside of time. And I also remember their colour: from orangey red to violet pink to black-yellow. A dream within a dream within a memory outside my eyes and field of vision. They were not my dreams. Or maybe they were. They were the memories of all undead futures afforded by Paco Chanivet’s La prótesis prometeica (Promethean Prosthesis). The question lies in how, in each one, I could partly recognise what was happening. For example, I recognised my friends but was unaware of their lives. They were underground lives, lived together inside a volcano called Ennneés. And they would sing beautiful songs. And it was always night-time. And they drank a kind of bluish tequila they kept buried in ash. And they slept for days on end. Even asleep they kept on singing. But they didn’t have children. They told me that reproduction belonged to another time and since maternity remained trapped there, they were the family. Later, in a second vision, just the opposite happened. I couldn’t recognise any of the forms I was interacting with. They were like masses with a consistency similar to spiderwebs, light and sticky. Or no, they were more like clumps of vaporous clothing which, when fused together, wailed a hardcore polyphony. Their movements brought to mind certain mechanics in our world, syncopated, fast, voracious. And every time they advanced towards a place my body became lighter, and lighter. First a finger, then the lower abdomen, then my jaw. What I recall with absolute clarity was the last of the sequences because it seemed very much like the present day. A Dubai blaze, Pope Francis in Rome, the dance of US soldiers in Afghanistan, sandstorms, Hurricane Katrina, glacier collapses, the Statue of Liberty, Twitter. It was all the same apart from the words. The words, said and written, all had the same meaning. And when there was any attempt at communication time stopped dead. Something said to me: Weeglcoommm tru dde moderkn agxge xekkk. And in the room a sharp tap again on my left shoulder. That tap still hurts, although I like to take pleasure from it. My encounters with Paco Chanivet’s last work were a kind of threshold experience, but encounters in which, despite their skewed logics, I felt good and could cope with life, manage stress. Something akin to the effects on the body when ketamine is taken, or the hallucinations caused by a good hit of noradrenaline. However, beyond my personal journey and recollections of those dreams, Chanivet’s work brings us closer to two geopsychological approaches — or perhaps it would be more accurate to say gemopsychologcal — at which I think it might be a good idea to stop. When I left the room, still in darkness, I decided to take the green line on the underground and change at Plaza España, on the next train bound for Hospitalet. I couldn’t help thinking about the approaches Mark Fisher wrote about the hauntological dimension of current time. Reflections in which the English critic speaks of a certain formal nostalgia for everything that could exist and which, nevertheless, is shoddily buried by the phantasmagorical end of Capitalism Realism. Having said that, I feel that hauntology, exactly as it functions in Chanivet’s work, doesn’t deal with nostalgia at all. What his latest intervention speaks of is that every present situation is tied to a series of possible futures, some of which can be carried out but the majority of which aren’t. As the situation changes, these future possibilities become rigid, brittle, inert and finally impossible and unable to be realised. In hindsight, it seems that some have not been viable futures at all, but they don’t turn into nothing. Instead, they give form to meaning in a future that really happens, its symbolic traces lingering within us. And that is precisely where the magic of Chanivet lies: in creating possible conditions to be able to see these traces and get to know the way in which they continue to affect our sense of still-possible futures, or ones that are perhaps still possible. And here it is important to emphasise that the world-views his work sets forth are always unique and non-transferrable, joined to the incomplete memories and moods of all those people who have witnessed his recently unveiled exhibition. Paco Chanivet’s hauntology talks to us at once of delirium, illness, synaesthesia, a state of ecstasy, allowing us to explore beyond the normative limits of our body. That which occurs when imagination goes crazy, becomes disturbed, unhinged and unkempt when we can understand that in expanding the limit of the capacity of a body, we broaden everyone’s potential. Thus, the English writer and photographer Matt Colquhoun, influenced by Fisher, influenced by Bataille, influenced by Nietzsche, recently wrote on his blog xenogothic.com, how “mankind cannot remain indifferent to its monsters, given they cannot escape the constitution of the perfect type”. Colquhoun, who on different occasions has thought about today’s ontologies of body horror, also speaks of gothic not being an aesthetic genre but a prosthetic sensibility, “It is a mode of addition, extension and attachment and one that has taken on many different forms, from ‘hook hands’ to new technologies that allow a body to exceed its own limits”. The prosthetic is not then simply a medical adjective but an ontological one. In other words, Paco Chanivet’s gothic prosthesis gives speculative form to that which today would seem not to take it. Yet in gothic literature it is the past and present that are seriously confused, and the characters appear forced to relive certain past dramas with their own bodies; here something similar occurs but moves in the other direction. Our own projections and future desires journey across us to remind us that we are trapped in the framework we have configured on our idea of ourselves. We will desecrate the fictitious eye of Udjat to which we obey, Chanivet tells us. We eye ourselves. But to desecrate there is a need to fashion a tactic or collusion — an artwork — capable of demystifying objects, people and things separated and captured by theological devices from all religions that have us shut in celestial caves as if we were the martyrs of their rotten cause. We eye ourselves with our clenched and viscous teeth. We eye ourselves as if it were a sacrilege of our permanent disability. We eye ourselves to abandon the blind logics of automated reproduction. We eye ourselves dirty and desensitised. We eye ourselves to feel the flesh of this world and the trace of all undead futures to come. — All Undead Futures of Paco Chanivet by Núria Gómez Gabriel When I set foot inside the room it was almost completely dark. I couldn’t make out if there were seats or benches, so I remained standing, still, until my eyes adjusted to the darkness. After a few long minutes waiting in unabated silence, I decided to sit on the floor of the black box, and, as I rested my hands on its surface, I could perceive it was acorn-shaped, a thin and opaque velvet. I was sure of it because velvet has a very distinctive odour to it, perhaps the smell of the passage of time, a build-up of dust. Time smells something like childhood film theatres, not unlike the odour of crypts or subterranean caves where the dead were buried in the 10th century to hide the graves of martyrs from the eyes of the profane. The atmosphere was wet, uncomfortable, like a typical December day in Barcelona. From the first minute I noticed that I wasn’t alone, although I couldn’t clearly discern what or who was with me, or the distance between us. Suddenly I heard a strange sound that came from the outside; it seemed strange because it was like a slapping sound, although on the skin of my wrist I felt a breeze more similar to the brush of a caress, or like a knot being untied. Gradually, I felt the limits of the black box were inching closer to my body until the space became still and a small and tenuous pink light started to shine at a distance that was incomprehensible in relation to where I was still sitting. I moved towards that light, arching my back slightly and leaning a little to the left. It was a tiny quartzite sculpted in a shape that looked like the Eye of Horus or Udjat, that symbol with apotropaic characteristics — magic, protective, purifying, healing — which in ancient times embodied the order of the imperturbable and was used to invoke cosmic-state stability. In fact, in Ancient Egypt it was one of the most powerful amulets because of its sight-enhancing qualities and an ancestral remedy for ocular diseases, counteracting “eye hunting” or the evil eye and protecting the dead in the afterlife. Upon inspecting the red quartzite up close, something halfway between my ears and Adam’s apple began to vibrate. Red quartzite is a metamorphic rock, semi-transparent or translucid, producing a shine known as aventurescence. Aventurine stones produce an optical effect similar to glitter, with hundreds of small dots that glisten and, depending on the position of the stone, or whether you change your angle of vision, the reflection makes the shiny points move and sparkle. While I was lost in that minute landscape, the Udjat contours became warped and the eye now looked more like an orifice with clenched and viscous teeth that moved with a physical momentum that was not easily recognised. It was then, observing that seemingly disfigured, twisted and incomplete thing that my tongue started to produce salty saliva. I don’t remember seeing anything else, nor do I recall the time I spent inside the exhibition in terms of minutes, hours or seconds. Yet I do remember dream sequences outside of time. And I also remember their colour: from orangey red to violet pink to black-yellow. A dream within a dream within a memory outside my eyes and field of vision. They were not my dreams. Or maybe they were. They were the memories of all undead futures afforded by Paco Chanivet’s La prótesis prometeica (Promethean Prosthesis). The question lies in how, in each one, I could partly recognise what was happening. For example, I recognised my friends but was unaware of their lives. They were underground lives, lived together inside a volcano called Ennneés. And they would sing beautiful songs. And it was always night-time. And they drank a kind of bluish tequila they kept buried in ash. And they slept for days on end. Even asleep they kept on singing. But they didn’t have children. They told me that reproduction belonged to another time and since maternity remained trapped there, they were the family. Later, in a second vision, just the opposite happened. I couldn’t recognise any of the forms I was interacting with. They were like masses with a consistency similar to spiderwebs, light and sticky. Or no, they were more like clumps of vaporous clothing which, when fused together, wailed a hardcore polyphony. Their movements brought to mind certain mechanics in our world, syncopated, fast, voracious. And every time they advanced towards a place my body became lighter, and lighter. First a finger, then the lower abdomen, then my jaw. What I recall with absolute clarity was the last of the sequences because it seemed very much like the present day. A Dubai blaze, Pope Francis in Rome, the dance of US soldiers in Afghanistan, sandstorms, Hurricane Katrina, glacier collapses, the Statue of Liberty, Twitter. It was all the same apart from the words. The words, said and written, all had the same meaning. And when there was any attempt at communication time stopped dead. Something said to me: Weeglcoommm tru dde moderkn agxge xekkk. And in the room a sharp tap again on my left shoulder. That tap still hurts, although I like to take pleasure from it. My encounters with Paco Chanivet’s last work were a kind of threshold experience, but encounters in which, despite their skewed logics, I felt good and could cope with life, manage stress. Something akin to the effects on the body when ketamine is taken, or the hallucinations caused by a good hit of noradrenaline. However, beyond my personal journey and recollections of those dreams, Chanivet’s work brings us closer to two geopsychological approaches — or perhaps it would be more accurate to say gemopsychologcal — at which I think it might be a good idea to stop. When I left the room, still in darkness, I decided to take the green line on the underground and change at Plaza España, on the next train bound for Hospitalet. I couldn’t help thinking about the approaches Mark Fisher wrote about the hauntological dimension of current time. Reflections in which the English critic speaks of a certain formal nostalgia for everything that could exist and which, nevertheless, is shoddily buried by the phantasmagorical end of Capitalism Realism. Having said that, I feel that hauntology, exactly as it functions in Chanivet’s work, doesn’t deal with nostalgia at all. What his latest intervention speaks of is that every present situation is tied to a series of possible futures, some of which can be carried out but the majority of which aren’t. As the situation changes, these future possibilities become rigid, brittle, inert and finally impossible and unable to be realised. In hindsight, it seems that some have not been viable futures at all, but they don’t turn into nothing. Instead, they give form to meaning in a future that really happens, its symbolic traces lingering within us. And that is precisely where the magic of Chanivet lies: in creating possible conditions to be able to see these traces and get to know the way in which they continue to affect our sense of still-possible futures, or ones that are perhaps still possible. And here it is important to emphasise that the world-views his work sets forth are always unique and non-transferrable, joined to the incomplete memories and moods of all those people who have witnessed his recently unveiled exhibition. Paco Chanivet’s hauntology talks to us at once of delirium, illness, synaesthesia, a state of ecstasy, allowing us to explore beyond the normative limits of our body. That which occurs when imagination goes crazy, becomes disturbed, unhinged and unkempt when we can understand that in expanding the limit of the capacity of a body, we broaden everyone’s potential. Thus, the English writer and photographer Matt Colquhoun, influenced by Fisher, influenced by Bataille, influenced by Nietzsche, recently wrote on his blog xenogothic.com, how “mankind cannot remain indifferent to its monsters, given they cannot escape the constitution of the perfect type”. Colquhoun, who on different occasions has thought about today’s ontologies of body horror, also speaks of gothic not being an aesthetic genre but a prosthetic sensibility, “It is a mode of addition, extension and attachment and one that has taken on many different forms, from ‘hook hands’ to new technologies that allow a body to exceed its own limits”. The prosthetic is not then simply a medical adjective but an ontological one. In other words, Paco Chanivet’s gothic prosthesis gives speculative form to that which today would seem not to take it. Yet in gothic literature it is the past and present that are seriously confused, and the characters appear forced to relive certain past dramas with their own bodies; here something similar occurs but moves in the other direction. Our own projections and future desires journey across us to remind us that we are trapped in the framework we have configured on our idea of ourselves. We will desecrate the fictitious eye of Udjat to which we obey, Chanivet tells us. We eye ourselves. But to desecrate there is a need to fashion a tactic or collusion — an artwork — capable of demystifying objects, people and things separated and captured by theological devices from all religions that have us shut in celestial caves as if we were the martyrs of their rotten cause. We eye ourselves with our clenched and viscous teeth. We eye ourselves as if it were a sacrilege of our permanent disability. We eye ourselves to abandon the blind logics of automated reproduction. We eye ourselves dirty and desensitised. We eye ourselves to feel the flesh of this world and the trace of all undead futures to come. — All Undead Futures of Paco Chanivet by Núria Gómez Gabriel When I set foot inside the room it was almost completely dark. I couldn’t make out if there were seats or benches, so I remained standing, still, until my eyes adjusted to the darkness. After a few long minutes waiting in unabated silence, I decided to sit on the floor of the black box, and, as I rested my hands on its surface, I could perceive it was acorn-shaped, a thin and opaque velvet. I was sure of it because velvet has a very distinctive odour to it, perhaps the smell of the passage of time, a build-up of dust. Time smells something like childhood film theatres, not unlike the odour of crypts or subterranean caves where the dead were buried in the 10th century to hide the graves of martyrs from the eyes of the profane. The atmosphere was wet, uncomfortable, like a typical December day in Barcelona. From the first minute I noticed that I wasn’t alone, although I couldn’t clearly discern what or who was with me, or the distance between us. Suddenly I heard a strange sound that came from the outside; it seemed strange because it was like a slapping sound, although on the skin of my wrist I felt a breeze more similar to the brush of a caress, or like a knot being untied. Gradually, I felt the limits of the black box were inching closer to my body until the space became still and a small and tenuous pink light started to shine at a distance that was incomprehensible in relation to where I was still sitting. I moved towards that light, arching my back slightly and leaning a little to the left. It was a tiny quartzite sculpted in a shape that looked like the Eye of Horus or Udjat, that symbol with apotropaic characteristics — magic, protective, purifying, healing — which in ancient times embodied the order of the imperturbable and was used to invoke cosmic-state stability. In fact, in Ancient Egypt it was one of the most powerful amulets because of its sight-enhancing qualities and an ancestral remedy for ocular diseases, counteracting “eye hunting” or the evil eye and protecting the dead in the afterlife. Upon inspecting the red quartzite up close, something halfway between my ears and Adam’s apple began to vibrate. Red quartzite is a metamorphic rock, semi-transparent or translucid, producing a shine known as aventurescence. Aventurine stones produce an optical effect similar to glitter, with hundreds of small dots that glisten and, depending on the position of the stone, or whether you change your angle of vision, the reflection makes the shiny points move and sparkle. While I was lost in that minute landscape, the Udjat contours became warped and the eye now looked more like an orifice with clenched and viscous teeth that moved with a physical momentum that was not easily recognised. It was then, observing that seemingly disfigured, twisted and incomplete thing that my tongue started to produce salty saliva. I don’t remember seeing anything else, nor do I recall the time I spent inside the exhibition in terms of minutes, hours or seconds. Yet I do remember dream sequences outside of time. And I also remember their colour: from orangey red to violet pink to black-yellow. A dream within a dream within a memory outside my eyes and field of vision. They were not my dreams. Or maybe they were. They were the memories of all undead futures afforded by Paco Chanivet’s La prótesis prometeica (Promethean Prosthesis). The question lies in how, in each one, I could partly recognise what was happening. For example, I recognised my friends but was unaware of their lives. They were underground lives, lived together inside a volcano called Ennneés. And they would sing beautiful songs. And it was always night-time. And they drank a kind of bluish tequila they kept buried in ash. And they slept for days on end. Even asleep they kept on singing. But they didn’t have children. They told me that reproduction belonged to another time and since maternity remained trapped there, they were the family. Later, in a second vision, just the opposite happened. I couldn’t recognise any of the forms I was interacting with. They were like masses with a consistency similar to spiderwebs, light and sticky. Or no, they were more like clumps of vaporous clothing which, when fused together, wailed a hardcore polyphony. Their movements brought to mind certain mechanics in our world, syncopated, fast, voracious. And every time they advanced towards a place my body became lighter, and lighter. First a finger, then the lower abdomen, then my jaw. What I recall with absolute clarity was the last of the sequences because it seemed very much like the present day. A Dubai blaze, Pope Francis in Rome, the dance of US soldiers in Afghanistan, sandstorms, Hurricane Katrina, glacier collapses, the Statue of Liberty, Twitter. It was all the same apart from the words. The words, said and written, all had the same meaning. And when there was any attempt at communication time stopped dead. Something said to me: Weeglcoommm tru dde moderkn agxge xekkk. And in the room a sharp tap again on my left shoulder. That tap still hurts, although I like to take pleasure from it. My encounters with Paco Chanivet’s last work were a kind of threshold experience, but encounters in which, despite their skewed logics, I felt good and could cope with life, manage stress. Something akin to the effects on the body when ketamine is taken, or the hallucinations caused by a good hit of noradrenaline. However, beyond my personal journey and recollections of those dreams, Chanivet’s work brings us closer to two geopsychological approaches — or perhaps it would be more accurate to say gemopsychologcal — at which I think it might be a good idea to stop. When I left the room, still in darkness, I decided to take the green line on the underground and change at Plaza España, on the next train bound for Hospitalet. I couldn’t help thinking about the approaches Mark Fisher wrote about the hauntological dimension of current time. Reflections in which the English critic speaks of a certain formal nostalgia for everything that could exist and which, nevertheless, is shoddily buried by the phantasmagorical end of Capitalism Realism. Having said that, I feel that hauntology, exactly as it functions in Chanivet’s work, doesn’t deal with nostalgia at all. What his latest intervention speaks of is that every present situation is tied to a series of possible futures, some of which can be carried out but the majority of which aren’t. As the situation changes, these future possibilities become rigid, brittle, inert and finally impossible and unable to be realised. In hindsight, it seems that some have not been viable futures at all, but they don’t turn into nothing. Instead, they give form to meaning in a future that really happens, its symbolic traces lingering within us. And that is precisely where the magic of Chanivet lies: in creating possible conditions to be able to see these traces and get to know the way in which they continue to affect our sense of still-possible futures, or ones that are perhaps still possible. And here it is important to emphasise that the world-views his work sets forth are always unique and non-transferrable, joined to the incomplete memories and moods of all those people who have witnessed his recently unveiled exhibition. Paco Chanivet’s hauntology talks to us at once of delirium, illness, synaesthesia, a state of ecstasy, allowing us to explore beyond the normative limits of our body. That which occurs when imagination goes crazy, becomes disturbed, unhinged and unkempt when we can understand that in expanding the limit of the capacity of a body, we broaden everyone’s potential. Thus, the English writer and photographer Matt Colquhoun, influenced by Fisher, influenced by Bataille, influenced by Nietzsche, recently wrote on his blog xenogothic.com, how “mankind cannot remain indifferent to its monsters, given they cannot escape the constitution of the perfect type”. Colquhoun, who on different occasions has thought about today’s ontologies of body horror, also speaks of gothic not being an aesthetic genre but a prosthetic sensibility, “It is a mode of addition, extension and attachment and one that has taken on many different forms, from ‘hook hands’ to new technologies that allow a body to exceed its own limits”. The prosthetic is not then simply a medical adjective but an ontological one. In other words, Paco Chanivet’s gothic prosthesis gives speculative form to that which today would seem not to take it. Yet in gothic literature it is the past and present that are seriously confused, and the characters appear forced to relive certain past dramas with their own bodies; here something similar occurs but moves in the other direction. Our own projections and future desires journey across us to remind us that we are trapped in the framework we have configured on our idea of ourselves. We will desecrate the fictitious eye of Udjat to which we obey, Chanivet tells us. We eye ourselves. But to desecrate there is a need to fashion a tactic or collusion — an artwork — capable of demystifying objects, people and things separated and captured by theological devices from all religions that have us shut in celestial caves as if we were the martyrs of their rotten cause. We eye ourselves with our clenched and viscous teeth. We eye ourselves as if it were a sacrilege of our permanent disability. We eye ourselves to abandon the blind logics of automated reproduction. We eye ourselves dirty and desensitised. We eye ourselves to feel the flesh of this world and the trace of all undead futures to come. — All Undead Futures of Paco Chanivet by Núria Gómez Gabriel When I set foot inside the room it was almost completely dark. I couldn’t make out if there were seats or benches, so I remained standing, still, until my eyes adjusted to the darkness. After a few long minutes waiting in unabated silence, I decided to sit on the floor of the black box, and, as I rested my hands on its surface, I could perceive it was acorn-shaped, a thin and opaque velvet. I was sure of it because velvet has a very distinctive odour to it, perhaps the smell of the passage of time, a build-up of dust. Time smells something like childhood film theatres, not unlike the odour of crypts or subterranean caves where the dead were buried in the 10th century to hide the graves of martyrs from the eyes of the profane. The atmosphere was wet, uncomfortable, like a typical December day in Barcelona. From the first minute I noticed that I wasn’t alone, although I couldn’t clearly discern what or who was with me, or the distance between us. Suddenly I heard a strange sound that came from the outside; it seemed strange because it was like a slapping sound, although on the skin of my wrist I felt a breeze more similar to the brush of a caress, or like a knot being untied. Gradually, I felt the limits of the black box were inching closer to my body until the space became still and a small and tenuous pink light started to shine at a distance that was incomprehensible in relation to where I was still sitting. I moved towards that light, arching my back slightly and leaning a little to the left. It was a tiny quartzite sculpted in a shape that looked like the Eye of Horus or Udjat, that symbol with apotropaic characteristics — magic, protective, purifying, healing — which in ancient times embodied the order of the imperturbable and was used to invoke cosmic-state stability. In fact, in Ancient Egypt it was one of the most powerful amulets because of its sight-enhancing qualities and an ancestral remedy for ocular diseases, counteracting “eye hunting” or the evil eye and protecting the dead in the afterlife. Upon inspecting the red quartzite up close, something halfway between my ears and Adam’s apple began to vibrate. Red quartzite is a metamorphic rock, semi-transparent or translucid, producing a shine known as aventurescence. Aventurine stones produce an optical effect similar to glitter, with hundreds of small dots that glisten and, depending on the position of the stone, or whether you change your angle of vision, the reflection makes the shiny points move and sparkle. While I was lost in that minute landscape, the Udjat contours became warped and the eye now looked more like an orifice with clenched and viscous teeth that moved with a physical momentum that was not easily recognised. It was then, observing that seemingly disfigured, twisted and incomplete thing that my tongue started to produce salty saliva. I don’t remember seeing anything else, nor do I recall the time I spent inside the exhibition in terms of minutes, hours or seconds. Yet I do remember dream sequences outside of time. And I also remember their colour: from orangey red to violet pink to black-yellow. A dream within a dream within a memory outside my eyes and field of vision. They were not my dreams. Or maybe they were. They were the memories of all undead futures afforded by Paco Chanivet’s La prótesis prometeica (Promethean Prosthesis). The question lies in how, in each one, I could partly recognise what was happening. For example, I recognised my friends but was unaware of their lives. They were underground lives, lived together inside a volcano called Ennneés. And they would sing beautiful songs. And it was always night-time. And they drank a kind of bluish tequila they kept buried in ash. And they slept for days on end. Even asleep they kept on singing. But they didn’t have children. They told me that reproduction belonged to another time and since maternity remained trapped there, they were the family. Later, in a second vision, just the opposite happened. I couldn’t recognise any of the forms I was interacting with. They were like masses with a consistency similar to spiderwebs, light and sticky. Or no, they were more like clumps of vaporous clothing which, when fused together, wailed a hardcore polyphony. Their movements brought to mind certain mechanics in our world, syncopated, fast, voracious. And every time they advanced towards a place my body became lighter, and lighter. First a finger, then the lower abdomen, then my jaw. What I recall with absolute clarity was the last of the sequences because it seemed very much like the present day. A Dubai blaze, Pope Francis in Rome, the dance of US soldiers in Afghanistan, sandstorms, Hurricane Katrina, glacier collapses, the Statue of Liberty, Twitter. It was all the same apart from the words. The words, said and written, all had the same meaning. And when there was any attempt at communication time stopped dead. Something said to me: Weeglcoommm tru dde moderkn agxge xekkk. And in the room a sharp tap again on my left shoulder. That tap still hurts, although I like to take pleasure from it. My encounters with Paco Chanivet’s last work were a kind of threshold experience, but encounters in which, despite their skewed logics, I felt good and could cope with life, manage stress. Something akin to the effects on the body when ketamine is taken, or the hallucinations caused by a good hit of noradrenaline. However, beyond my personal journey and recollections of those dreams, Chanivet’s work brings us closer to two geopsychological approaches — or perhaps it would be more accurate to say gemopsychologcal — at which I think it might be a good idea to stop. When I left the room, still in darkness, I decided to take the green line on the underground and change at Plaza España, on the next train bound for Hospitalet. I couldn’t help thinking about the approaches Mark Fisher wrote about the hauntological dimension of current time. Reflections in which the English critic speaks of a certain formal nostalgia for everything that could exist and which, nevertheless, is shoddily buried by the phantasmagorical end of Capitalism Realism. Having said that, I feel that hauntology, exactly as it functions in Chanivet’s work, doesn’t deal with nostalgia at all. What his latest intervention speaks of is that every present situation is tied to a series of possible futures, some of which can be carried out but the majority of which aren’t. As the situation changes, these future possibilities become rigid, brittle, inert and finally impossible and unable to be realised. In hindsight, it seems that some have not been viable futures at all, but they don’t turn into nothing. Instead, they give form to meaning in a future that really happens, its symbolic traces lingering within us. And that is precisely where the magic of Chanivet lies: in creating possible conditions to be able to see these traces and get to know the way in which they continue to affect our sense of still-possible futures, or ones that are perhaps still possible. And here it is important to emphasise that the world-views his work sets forth are always unique and non-transferrable, joined to the incomplete memories and moods of all those people who have witnessed his recently unveiled exhibition. Paco Chanivet’s hauntology talks to us at once of delirium, illness, synaesthesia, a state of ecstasy, allowing us to explore beyond the normative limits of our body. That which occurs when imagination goes crazy, becomes disturbed, unhinged and unkempt when we can understand that in expanding the limit of the capacity of a body, we broaden everyone’s potential. Thus, the English writer and photographer Matt Colquhoun, influenced by Fisher, influenced by Bataille, influenced by Nietzsche, recently wrote on his blog xenogothic.com, how “mankind cannot remain indifferent to its monsters, given they cannot escape the constitution of the perfect type”. Colquhoun, who on different occasions has thought about today’s ontologies of body horror, also speaks of gothic not being an aesthetic genre but a prosthetic sensibility, “It is a mode of addition, extension and attachment and one that has taken on many different forms, from ‘hook hands’ to new technologies that allow a body to exceed its own limits”. The prosthetic is not then simply a medical adjective but an ontological one. In other words, Paco Chanivet’s gothic prosthesis gives speculative form to that which today would seem not to take it. Yet in gothic literature it is the past and present that are seriously confused, and the characters appear forced to relive certain past dramas with their own bodies; here something similar occurs but moves in the other direction. Our own projections and future desires journey across us to remind us that we are trapped in the framework we have configured on our idea of ourselves. We will desecrate the fictitious eye of Udjat to which we obey, Chanivet tells us. We eye ourselves. But to desecrate there is a need to fashion a tactic or collusion — an artwork — capable of demystifying objects, people and things separated and captured by theological devices from all religions that have us shut in celestial caves as if we were the martyrs of their rotten cause. We eye ourselves with our clenched and viscous teeth. We eye ourselves as if it were a sacrilege of our permanent disability. We eye ourselves to abandon the blind logics of automated reproduction. We eye ourselves dirty and desensitised. We eye ourselves to feel the flesh of this world and the trace of all undead futures to come. — All Undead Futures of Paco Chanivet by Núria Gómez Gabriel When I set foot inside the room it was almost completely dark. I couldn’t make out if there were seats or benches, so I remained standing, still, until my eyes adjusted to the darkness. After a few long minutes waiting in unabated silence, I decided to sit on the floor of the black box, and, as I rested my hands on its surface, I could perceive it was acorn-shaped, a thin and opaque velvet. I was sure of it because velvet has a very distinctive odour to it, perhaps the smell of the passage of time, a build-up of dust. Time smells something like childhood film theatres, not unlike the odour of crypts or subterranean caves where the dead were buried in the 10th century to hide the graves of martyrs from the eyes of the profane. The atmosphere was wet, uncomfortable, like a typical December day in Barcelona. From the first minute I noticed that I wasn’t alone, although I couldn’t clearly discern what or who was with me, or the distance between us. Suddenly I heard a strange sound that came from the outside; it seemed strange because it was like a slapping sound, although on the skin of my wrist I felt a breeze more similar to the brush of a caress, or like a knot being untied. Gradually, I felt the limits of the black box were inching closer to my body until the space became still and a small and tenuous pink light started to shine at a distance that was incomprehensible in relation to where I was still sitting. I moved towards that light, arching my back slightly and leaning a little to the left. It was a tiny quartzite sculpted in a shape that looked like the Eye of Horus or Udjat, that symbol with apotropaic characteristics — magic, protective, purifying, healing — which in ancient times embodied the order of the imperturbable and was used to invoke cosmic-state stability. In fact, in Ancient Egypt it was one of the most powerful amulets because of its sight-enhancing qualities and an ancestral remedy for ocular diseases, counteracting “eye hunting” or the evil eye and protecting the dead in the afterlife. Upon inspecting the red quartzite up close, something halfway between my ears and Adam’s apple began to vibrate. Red quartzite is a metamorphic rock, semi-transparent or translucid, producing a shine known as aventurescence. Aventurine stones produce an optical effect similar to glitter, with hundreds of small dots that glisten and, depending on the position of the stone, or whether you change your angle of vision, the reflection makes the shiny points move and sparkle. While I was lost in that minute landscape, the Udjat contours became warped and the eye now looked more like an orifice with clenched and viscous teeth that moved with a physical momentum that was not easily recognised. It was then, observing that seemingly disfigured, twisted and incomplete thing that my tongue started to produce salty saliva. I don’t remember seeing anything else, nor do I recall the time I spent inside the exhibition in terms of minutes, hours or seconds. Yet I do remember dream sequences outside of time. And I also remember their colour: from orangey red to violet pink to black-yellow. A dream within a dream within a memory outside my eyes and field of vision. They were not my dreams. Or maybe they were. They were the memories of all undead futures afforded by Paco Chanivet’s La prótesis prometeica (Promethean Prosthesis). The question lies in how, in each one, I could partly recognise what was happening. For example, I recognised my friends but was unaware of their lives. They were underground lives, lived together inside a volcano called Ennneés. And they would sing beautiful songs. And it was always night-time. And they drank a kind of bluish tequila they kept buried in ash. And they slept for days on end. Even asleep they kept on singing. But they didn’t have children. They told me that reproduction belonged to another time and since maternity remained trapped there, they were the family. Later, in a second vision, just the opposite happened. I couldn’t recognise any of the forms I was interacting with. They were like masses with a consistency similar to spiderwebs, light and sticky. Or no, they were more like clumps of vaporous clothing which, when fused together, wailed a hardcore polyphony. Their movements brought to mind certain mechanics in our world, syncopated, fast, voracious. And every time they advanced towards a place my body became lighter, and lighter. First a finger, then the lower abdomen, then my jaw. What I recall with absolute clarity was the last of the sequences because it seemed very much like the present day. A Dubai blaze, Pope Francis in Rome, the dance of US soldiers in Afghanistan, sandstorms, Hurricane Katrina, glacier collapses, the Statue of Liberty, Twitter. It was all the same apart from the words. The words, said and written, all had the same meaning. And when there was any attempt at communication time stopped dead. Something said to me: Weeglcoommm tru dde moderkn agxge xekkk. And in the room a sharp tap again on my left shoulder. That tap still hurts, although I like to take pleasure from it. My encounters with Paco Chanivet’s last work were a kind of threshold experience, but encounters in which, despite their skewed logics, I felt good and could cope with life, manage stress. Something akin to the effects on the body when ketamine is taken, or the hallucinations caused by a good hit of noradrenaline. However, beyond my personal journey and recollections of those dreams, Chanivet’s work brings us closer to two geopsychological approaches — or perhaps it would be more accurate to say gemopsychologcal — at which I think it might be a good idea to stop. When I left the room, still in darkness, I decided to take the green line on the underground and change at Plaza España, on the next train bound for Hospitalet. I couldn’t help thinking about the approaches Mark Fisher wrote about the hauntological dimension of current time. Reflections in which the English critic speaks of a certain formal nostalgia for everything that could exist and which, nevertheless, is shoddily buried by the phantasmagorical end of Capitalism Realism. Having said that, I feel that hauntology, exactly as it functions in Chanivet’s work, doesn’t deal with nostalgia at all. What his latest intervention speaks of is that every present situation is tied to a series of possible futures, some of which can be carried out but the majority of which aren’t. As the situation changes, these future possibilities become rigid, brittle, inert and finally impossible and unable to be realised. In hindsight, it seems that some have not been viable futures at all, but they don’t turn into nothing. Instead, they give form to meaning in a future that really happens, its symbolic traces lingering within us. And that is precisely where the magic of Chanivet lies: in creating possible conditions to be able to see these traces and get to know the way in which they continue to affect our sense of still-possible futures, or ones that are perhaps still possible. And here it is important to emphasise that the world-views his work sets forth are always unique and non-transferrable, joined to the incomplete memories and moods of all those people who have witnessed his recently unveiled exhibition. Paco Chanivet’s hauntology talks to us at once of delirium, illness, synaesthesia, a state of ecstasy, allowing us to explore beyond the normative limits of our body. That which occurs when imagination goes crazy, becomes disturbed, unhinged and unkempt when we can understand that in expanding the limit of the capacity of a body, we broaden everyone’s potential. Thus, the English writer and photographer Matt Colquhoun, influenced by Fisher, influenced by Bataille, influenced by Nietzsche, recently wrote on his blog xenogothic.com, how “mankind cannot remain indifferent to its monsters, given they cannot escape the constitution of the perfect type”. Colquhoun, who on different occasions has thought about today’s ontologies of body horror, also speaks of gothic not being an aesthetic genre but a prosthetic sensibility, “It is a mode of addition, extension and attachment and one that has taken on many different forms, from ‘hook hands’ to new technologies that allow a body to exceed its own limits”. The prosthetic is not then simply a medical adjective but an ontological one. In other words, Paco Chanivet’s gothic prosthesis gives speculative form to that which today would seem not to take it. Yet in gothic literature it is the past and present that are seriously confused, and the characters appear forced to relive certain past dramas with their own bodies; here something similar occurs but moves in the other direction. Our own projections and future desires journey across us to remind us that we are trapped in the framework we have configured on our idea of ourselves. We will desecrate the fictitious eye of Udjat to which we obey, Chanivet tells us. We eye ourselves. But to desecrate there is a need to fashion a tactic or collusion — an artwork — capable of demystifying objects, people and things separated and captured by theological devices from all religions that have us shut in celestial caves as if we were the martyrs of their rotten cause. We eye ourselves with our clenched and viscous teeth. We eye ourselves as if it were a sacrilege of our permanent disability. We eye ourselves to abandon the blind logics of automated reproduction. We eye ourselves dirty and desensitised. We eye ourselves to feel the flesh of this world and the trace of all undead futures to come. — All Undead Futures of Paco Chanivet by Núria Gómez Gabriel When I set foot inside the room it was almost completely dark. I couldn’t make out if there were seats or benches, so I remained standing, still, until my eyes adjusted to the darkness. After a few long minutes waiting in unabated silence, I decided to sit on the floor of the black box, and, as I rested my hands on its surface, I could perceive it was acorn-shaped, a thin and opaque velvet. I was sure of it because velvet has a very distinctive odour to it, perhaps the smell of the passage of time, a build-up of dust. Time smells something like childhood film theatres, not unlike the odour of crypts or subterranean caves where the dead were buried in the 10th century to hide the graves of martyrs from the eyes of the profane. The atmosphere was wet, uncomfortable, like a typical December day in Barcelona. From the first minute I noticed that I wasn’t alone, although I couldn’t clearly discern what or who was with me, or the distance between us. Suddenly I heard a strange sound that came from the outside; it seemed strange because it was like a slapping sound, although on the skin of my wrist I felt a breeze more similar to the brush of a caress, or like a knot being untied. Gradually, I felt the limits of the black box were inching closer to my body until the space became still and a small and tenuous pink light started to shine at a distance that was incomprehensible in relation to where I was still sitting. I moved towards that light, arching my back slightly and leaning a little to the left. It was a tiny quartzite sculpted in a shape that looked like the Eye of Horus or Udjat, that symbol with apotropaic characteristics — magic, protective, purifying, healing — which in ancient times embodied the order of the imperturbable and was used to invoke cosmic-state stability. In fact, in Ancient Egypt it was one of the most powerful amulets because of its sight-enhancing qualities and an ancestral remedy for ocular diseases, counteracting “eye hunting” or the evil eye and protecting the dead in the afterlife. Upon inspecting the red quartzite up close, something halfway between my ears and Adam’s apple began to vibrate. Red quartzite is a metamorphic rock, semi-transparent or translucid, producing a shine known as aventurescence. Aventurine stones produce an optical effect similar to glitter, with hundreds of small dots that glisten and, depending on the position of the stone, or whether you change your angle of vision, the reflection makes the shiny points move and sparkle. While I was lost in that minute landscape, the Udjat contours became warped and the eye now looked more like an orifice with clenched and viscous teeth that moved with a physical momentum that was not easily recognised. It was then, observing that seemingly disfigured, twisted and incomplete thing that my tongue started to produce salty saliva. I don’t remember seeing anything else, nor do I recall the time I spent inside the exhibition in terms of minutes, hours or seconds. Yet I do remember dream sequences outside of time. And I also remember their colour: from orangey red to violet pink to black-yellow. A dream within a dream within a memory outside my eyes and field of vision. They were not my dreams. Or maybe they were. They were the memories of all undead futures afforded by Paco Chanivet’s La prótesis prometeica (Promethean Prosthesis). The question lies in how, in each one, I could partly recognise what was happening. For example, I recognised my friends but was unaware of their lives. They were underground lives, lived together inside a volcano called Ennneés. And they would sing beautiful songs. And it was always night-time. And they drank a kind of bluish tequila they kept buried in ash. And they slept for days on end. Even asleep they kept on singing. But they didn’t have children. They told me that reproduction belonged to another time and since maternity remained trapped there, they were the family. Later, in a second vision, just the opposite happened. I couldn’t recognise any of the forms I was interacting with. They were like masses with a consistency similar to spiderwebs, light and sticky. Or no, they were more like clumps of vaporous clothing which, when fused together, wailed a hardcore polyphony. Their movements brought to mind certain mechanics in our world, syncopated, fast, voracious. And every time they advanced towards a place my body became lighter, and lighter. First a finger, then the lower abdomen, then my jaw. What I recall with absolute clarity was the last of the sequences because it seemed very much like the present day. A Dubai blaze, Pope Francis in Rome, the dance of US soldiers in Afghanistan, sandstorms, Hurricane Katrina, glacier collapses, the Statue of Liberty, Twitter. It was all the same apart from the words. The words, said and written, all had the same meaning. And when there was any attempt at communication time stopped dead. Something said to me: Weeglcoommm tru dde moderkn agxge xekkk. And in the room a sharp tap again on my left shoulder. That tap still hurts, although I like to take pleasure from it. My encounters with Paco Chanivet’s last work were a kind of threshold experience, but encounters in which, despite their skewed logics, I felt good and could cope with life, manage stress. Something akin to the effects on the body when ketamine is taken, or the hallucinations caused by a good hit of noradrenaline. However, beyond my personal journey and recollections of those dreams, Chanivet’s work brings us closer to two geopsychological approaches — or perhaps it would be more accurate to say gemopsychologcal — at which I think it might be a good idea to stop. When I left the room, still in darkness, I decided to take the green line on the underground and change at Plaza España, on the next train bound for Hospitalet. I couldn’t help thinking about the approaches Mark Fisher wrote about the hauntological dimension of current time. Reflections in which the English critic speaks of a certain formal nostalgia for everything that could exist and which, nevertheless, is shoddily buried by the phantasmagorical end of Capitalism Realism. Having said that, I feel that hauntology, exactly as it functions in Chanivet’s work, doesn’t deal with nostalgia at all. What his latest intervention speaks of is that every present situation is tied to a series of possible futures, some of which can be carried out but the majority of which aren’t. As the situation changes, these future possibilities become rigid, brittle, inert and finally impossible and unable to be realised. In hindsight, it seems that some have not been viable futures at all, but they don’t turn into nothing. Instead, they give form to meaning in a future that really happens, its symbolic traces lingering within us. And that is precisely where the magic of Chanivet lies: in creating possible conditions to be able to see these traces and get to know the way in which they continue to affect our sense of still-possible futures, or ones that are perhaps still possible. And here it is important to emphasise that the world-views his work sets forth are always unique and non-transferrable, joined to the incomplete memories and moods of all those people who have witnessed his recently unveiled exhibition. Paco Chanivet’s hauntology talks to us at once of delirium, illness, synaesthesia, a state of ecstasy, allowing us to explore beyond the normative limits of our body. That which occurs when imagination goes crazy, becomes disturbed, unhinged and unkempt when we can understand that in expanding the limit of the capacity of a body, we broaden everyone’s potential. Thus, the English writer and photographer Matt Colquhoun, influenced by Fisher, influenced by Bataille, influenced by Nietzsche, recently wrote on his blog xenogothic.com, how “mankind cannot remain indifferent to its monsters, given they cannot escape the constitution of the perfect type”. Colquhoun, who on different occasions has thought about today’s ontologies of body horror, also speaks of gothic not being an aesthetic genre but a prosthetic sensibility, “It is a mode of addition, extension and attachment and one that has taken on many different forms, from ‘hook hands’ to new technologies that allow a body to exceed its own limits”. The prosthetic is not then simply a medical adjective but an ontological one. In other words, Paco Chanivet’s gothic prosthesis gives speculative form to that which today would seem not to take it. Yet in gothic literature it is the past and present that are seriously confused, and the characters appear forced to relive certain past dramas with their own bodies; here something similar occurs but moves in the other direction. Our own projections and future desires journey across us to remind us that we are trapped in the framework we have configured on our idea of ourselves. We will desecrate the fictitious eye of Udjat to which we obey, Chanivet tells us. We eye ourselves. But to desecrate there is a need to fashion a tactic or collusion — an artwork — capable of demystifying objects, people and things separated and captured by theological devices from all religions that have us shut in celestial caves as if we were the martyrs of their rotten cause. We eye ourselves with our clenched and viscous teeth. We eye ourselves as if it were a sacrilege of our permanent disability. We eye ourselves to abandon the blind logics of automated reproduction. We eye ourselves dirty and desensitised. We eye ourselves to feel the flesh of this world and the trace of all undead futures to come. — All Undead Futures of Paco Chanivet by Núria Gómez Gabriel When I set foot inside the room it was almost completely dark. I couldn’t make out if there were seats or benches, so I remained standing, still, until my eyes adjusted to the darkness. After a few long minutes waiting in unabated silence, I decided to sit on the floor of the black box, and, as I rested my hands on its surface, I could perceive it was acorn-shaped, a thin and opaque velvet. I was sure of it because velvet has a very distinctive odour to it, perhaps the smell of the passage of time, a build-up of dust. Time smells something like childhood film theatres, not unlike the odour of crypts or subterranean caves where the dead were buried in the 10th century to hide the graves of martyrs from the eyes of the profane. The atmosphere was wet, uncomfortable, like a typical December day in Barcelona. From the first minute I noticed that I wasn’t alone, although I couldn’t clearly discern what or who was with me, or the distance between us. Suddenly I heard a strange sound that came from the outside; it seemed strange because it was like a slapping sound, although on the skin of my wrist I felt a breeze more similar to the brush of a caress, or like a knot being untied. Gradually, I felt the limits of the black box were inching closer to my body until the space became still and a small and tenuous pink light started to shine at a distance that was incomprehensible in relation to where I was still sitting. I moved towards that light, arching my back slightly and leaning a little to the left. It was a tiny quartzite sculpted in a shape that looked like the Eye of Horus or Udjat, that symbol with apotropaic characteristics — magic, protective, purifying, healing — which in ancient times embodied the order of the imperturbable and was used to invoke cosmic-state stability. In fact, in Ancient Egypt it was one of the most powerful amulets because of its sight-enhancing qualities and an ancestral remedy for ocular diseases, counteracting “eye hunting” or the evil eye and protecting the dead in the afterlife. Upon inspecting the red quartzite up close, something halfway between my ears and Adam’s apple began to vibrate. Red quartzite is a metamorphic rock, semi-transparent or translucid, producing a shine known as aventurescence. Aventurine stones produce an optical effect similar to glitter, with hundreds of small dots that glisten and, depending on the position of the stone, or whether you change your angle of vision, the reflection makes the shiny points move and sparkle. While I was lost in that minute landscape, the Udjat contours became warped and the eye now looked more like an orifice with clenched and viscous teeth that moved with a physical momentum that was not easily recognised. It was then, observing that seemingly disfigured, twisted and incomplete thing that my tongue started to produce salty saliva. I don’t remember seeing anything else, nor do I recall the time I spent inside the exhibition in terms of minutes, hours or seconds. Yet I do remember dream sequences outside of time. And I also remember their colour: from orangey red to violet pink to black-yellow. A dream within a dream within a memory outside my eyes and field of vision. They were not my dreams. Or maybe they were. They were the memories of all undead futures afforded by Paco Chanivet’s La prótesis prometeica (Promethean Prosthesis). The question lies in how, in each one, I could partly recognise what was happening. For example, I recognised my friends but was unaware of their lives. They were underground lives, lived together inside a volcano called Ennneés. And they would sing beautiful songs. And it was always night-time. And they drank a kind of bluish tequila they kept buried in ash. And they slept for days on end. Even asleep they kept on singing. But they didn’t have children. They told me that reproduction belonged to another time and since maternity remained trapped there, they were the family. Later, in a second vision, just the opposite happened. I couldn’t recognise any of the forms I was interacting with. They were like masses with a consistency similar to spiderwebs, light and sticky. Or no, they were more like clumps of vaporous clothing which, when fused together, wailed a hardcore polyphony. Their movements brought to mind certain mechanics in our world, syncopated, fast, voracious. And every time they advanced towards a place my body became lighter, and lighter. First a finger, then the lower abdomen, then my jaw. What I recall with absolute clarity was the last of the sequences because it seemed very much like the present day. A Dubai blaze, Pope Francis in Rome, the dance of US soldiers in Afghanistan, sandstorms, Hurricane Katrina, glacier collapses, the Statue of Liberty, Twitter. It was all the same apart from the words. The words, said and written, all had the same meaning. And when there was any attempt at communication time stopped dead. Something said to me: Weeglcoommm tru dde moderkn agxge xekkk. And in the room a sharp tap again on my left shoulder. That tap still hurts, although I like to take pleasure from it. My encounters with Paco Chanivet’s last work were a kind of threshold experience, but encounters in which, despite their skewed logics, I felt good and could cope with life, manage stress. Something akin to the effects on the body when ketamine is taken, or the hallucinations caused by a good hit of noradrenaline. However, beyond my personal journey and recollections of those dreams, Chanivet’s work brings us closer to two geopsychological approaches — or perhaps it would be more accurate to say gemopsychologcal — at which I think it might be a good idea to stop. When I left the room, still in darkness, I decided to take the green line on the underground and change at Plaza España, on the next train bound for Hospitalet. I couldn’t help thinking about the approaches Mark Fisher wrote about the hauntological dimension of current time. Reflections in which the English critic speaks of a certain formal nostalgia for everything that could exist and which, nevertheless, is shoddily buried by the phantasmagorical end of Capitalism Realism. Having said that, I feel that hauntology, exactly as it functions in Chanivet’s work, doesn’t deal with nostalgia at all. What his latest intervention speaks of is that every present situation is tied to a series of possible futures, some of which can be carried out but the majority of which aren’t. As the situation changes, these future possibilities become rigid, brittle, inert and finally impossible and unable to be realised. In hindsight, it seems that some have not been viable futures at all, but they don’t turn into nothing. Instead, they give form to meaning in a future that really happens, its symbolic traces lingering within us. And that is precisely where the magic of Chanivet lies: in creating possible conditions to be able to see these traces and get to know the way in which they continue to affect our sense of still-possible futures, or ones that are perhaps still possible. And here it is important to emphasise that the world-views his work sets forth are always unique and non-transferrable, joined to the incomplete memories and moods of all those people who have witnessed his recently unveiled exhibition. Paco Chanivet’s hauntology talks to us at once of delirium, illness, synaesthesia, a state of ecstasy, allowing us to explore beyond the normative limits of our body. That which occurs when imagination goes crazy, becomes disturbed, unhinged and unkempt when we can understand that in expanding the limit of the capacity of a body, we broaden everyone’s potential. Thus, the English writer and photographer Matt Colquhoun, influenced by Fisher, influenced by Bataille, influenced by Nietzsche, recently wrote on his blog xenogothic.com, how “mankind cannot remain indifferent to its monsters, given they cannot escape the constitution of the perfect type”. Colquhoun, who on different occasions has thought about today’s ontologies of body horror, also speaks of gothic not being an aesthetic genre but a prosthetic sensibility, “It is a mode of addition, extension and attachment and one that has taken on many different forms, from ‘hook hands’ to new technologies that allow a body to exceed its own limits”. The prosthetic is not then simply a medical adjective but an ontological one. In other words, Paco Chanivet’s gothic prosthesis gives speculative form to that which today would seem not to take it. Yet in gothic literature it is the past and present that are seriously confused, and the characters appear forced to relive certain past dramas with their own bodies; here something similar occurs but moves in the other direction. Our own projections and future desires journey across us to remind us that we are trapped in the framework we have configured on our idea of ourselves. We will desecrate the fictitious eye of Udjat to which we obey, Chanivet tells us. We eye ourselves. But to desecrate there is a need to fashion a tactic or collusion — an artwork — capable of demystifying objects, people and things separated and captured by theological devices from all religions that have us shut in celestial caves as if we were the martyrs of their rotten cause. We eye ourselves with our clenched and viscous teeth. We eye ourselves as if it were a sacrilege of our permanent disability. We eye ourselves to abandon the blind logics of automated reproduction. We eye ourselves dirty and desensitised. We eye ourselves to feel the flesh of this world and the trace of all undead futures to come. — All Undead Futures of Paco Chanivet by Núria Gómez Gabriel When I set foot inside the room it was almost completely dark. I couldn’t make out if there were seats or benches, so I remained standing, still, until my eyes adjusted to the darkness. After a few long minutes waiting in unabated silence, I decided to sit on the floor of the black box, and, as I rested my hands on its surface, I could perceive it was acorn-shaped, a thin and opaque velvet. I was sure of it because velvet has a very distinctive odour to it, perhaps the smell of the passage of time, a build-up of dust. Time smells something like childhood film theatres, not unlike the odour of crypts or subterranean caves where the dead were buried in the 10th century to hide the graves of martyrs from the eyes of the profane. The atmosphere was wet, uncomfortable, like a typical December day in Barcelona. From the first minute I noticed that I wasn’t alone, although I couldn’t clearly discern what or who was with me, or the distance between us. Suddenly I heard a strange sound that came from the outside; it seemed strange because it was like a slapping sound, although on the skin of my wrist I felt a breeze more similar to the brush of a caress, or like a knot being untied. Gradually, I felt the limits of the black box were inching closer to my body until the space became still and a small and tenuous pink light started to shine at a distance that was incomprehensible in relation to where I was still sitting. I moved towards that light, arching my back slightly and leaning a little to the left. It was a tiny quartzite sculpted in a shape that looked like the Eye of Horus or Udjat, that symbol with apotropaic characteristics — magic, protective, purifying, healing — which in ancient times embodied the order of the imperturbable and was used to invoke cosmic-state stability. In fact, in Ancient Egypt it was one of the most powerful amulets because of its sight-enhancing qualities and an ancestral remedy for ocular diseases, counteracting “eye hunting” or the evil eye and protecting the dead in the afterlife. Upon inspecting the red quartzite up close, something halfway between my ears and Adam’s apple began to vibrate. Red quartzite is a metamorphic rock, semi-transparent or translucid, producing a shine known as aventurescence. Aventurine stones produce an optical effect similar to glitter, with hundreds of small dots that glisten and, depending on the position of the stone, or whether you change your angle of vision, the reflection makes the shiny points move and sparkle. While I was lost in that minute landscape, the Udjat contours became warped and the eye now looked more like an orifice with clenched and viscous teeth that moved with a physical momentum that was not easily recognised. It was then, observing that seemingly disfigured, twisted and incomplete thing that my tongue started to produce salty saliva. I don’t remember seeing anything else, nor do I recall the time I spent inside the exhibition in terms of minutes, hours or seconds. Yet I do remember dream sequences outside of time. And I also remember their colour: from orangey red to violet pink to black-yellow. A dream within a dream within a memory outside my eyes and field of vision. They were not my dreams. Or maybe they were. They were the memories of all undead futures afforded by Paco Chanivet’s La prótesis prometeica (Promethean Prosthesis). The question lies in how, in each one, I could partly recognise what was happening. For example, I recognised my friends but was unaware of their lives. They were underground lives, lived together inside a volcano called Ennneés. And they would sing beautiful songs. And it was always night-time. And they drank a kind of bluish tequila they kept buried in ash. And they slept for days on end. Even asleep they kept on singing. But they didn’t have children. They told me that reproduction belonged to another time and since maternity remained trapped there, they were the family. Later, in a second vision, just the opposite happened. I couldn’t recognise any of the forms I was interacting with. They were like masses with a consistency similar to spiderwebs, light and sticky. Or no, they were more like clumps of vaporous clothing which, when fused together, wailed a hardcore polyphony. Their movements brought to mind certain mechanics in our world, syncopated, fast, voracious. And every time they advanced towards a place my body became lighter, and lighter. First a finger, then the lower abdomen, then my jaw. What I recall with absolute clarity was the last of the sequences because it seemed very much like the present day. A Dubai blaze, Pope Francis in Rome, the dance of US soldiers in Afghanistan, sandstorms, Hurricane Katrina, glacier collapses, the Statue of Liberty, Twitter. It was all the same apart from the words. The words, said and written, all had the same meaning. And when there was any attempt at communication time stopped dead. Something said to me: Weeglcoommm tru dde moderkn agxge xekkk. And in the room a sharp tap again on my left shoulder. That tap still hurts, although I like to take pleasure from it. My encounters with Paco Chanivet’s last work were a kind of threshold experience, but encounters in which, despite their skewed logics, I felt good and could cope with life, manage stress. Something akin to the effects on the body when ketamine is taken, or the hallucinations caused by a good hit of noradrenaline. However, beyond my personal journey and recollections of those dreams, Chanivet’s work brings us closer to two geopsychological approaches — or perhaps it would be more accurate to say gemopsychologcal — at which I think it might be a good idea to stop. When I left the room, still in darkness, I decided to take the green line on the underground and change at Plaza España, on the next train bound for Hospitalet. I couldn’t help thinking about the approaches Mark Fisher wrote about the hauntological dimension of current time. Reflections in which the English critic speaks of a certain formal nostalgia for everything that could exist and which, nevertheless, is shoddily buried by the phantasmagorical end of Capitalism Realism. Having said that, I feel that hauntology, exactly as it functions in Chanivet’s work, doesn’t deal with nostalgia at all. What his latest intervention speaks of is that every present situation is tied to a series of possible futures, some of which can be carried out but the majority of which aren’t. As the situation changes, these future possibilities become rigid, brittle, inert and finally impossible and unable to be realised. In hindsight, it seems that some have not been viable futures at all, but they don’t turn into nothing. Instead, they give form to meaning in a future that really happens, its symbolic traces lingering within us. And that is precisely where the magic of Chanivet lies: in creating possible conditions to be able to see these traces and get to know the way in which they continue to affect our sense of still-possible futures, or ones that are perhaps still possible. And here it is important to emphasise that the world-views his work sets forth are always unique and non-transferrable, joined to the incomplete memories and moods of all those people who have witnessed his recently unveiled exhibition. Paco Chanivet’s hauntology talks to us at once of delirium, illness, synaesthesia, a state of ecstasy, allowing us to explore beyond the normative limits of our body. That which occurs when imagination goes crazy, becomes disturbed, unhinged and unkempt when we can understand that in expanding the limit of the capacity of a body, we broaden everyone’s potential. Thus, the English writer and photographer Matt Colquhoun, influenced by Fisher, influenced by Bataille, influenced by Nietzsche, recently wrote on his blog xenogothic.com, how “mankind cannot remain indifferent to its monsters, given they cannot escape the constitution of the perfect type”. Colquhoun, who on different occasions has thought about today’s ontologies of body horror, also speaks of gothic not being an aesthetic genre but a prosthetic sensibility, “It is a mode of addition, extension and attachment and one that has taken on many different forms, from ‘hook hands’ to new technologies that allow a body to exceed its own limits”. The prosthetic is not then simply a medical adjective but an ontological one. In other words, Paco Chanivet’s gothic prosthesis gives speculative form to that which today would seem not to take it. Yet in gothic literature it is the past and present that are seriously confused, and the characters appear forced to relive certain past dramas with their own bodies; here something similar occurs but moves in the other direction. Our own projections and future desires journey across us to remind us that we are trapped in the framework we have configured on our idea of ourselves. We will desecrate the fictitious eye of Udjat to which we obey, Chanivet tells us. We eye ourselves. But to desecrate there is a need to fashion a tactic or collusion — an artwork — capable of demystifying objects, people and things separated and captured by theological devices from all religions that have us shut in celestial caves as if we were the martyrs of their rotten cause. We eye ourselves with our clenched and viscous teeth. We eye ourselves as if it were a sacrilege of our permanent disability. We eye ourselves to abandon the blind logics of automated reproduction. We eye ourselves dirty and desensitised. We eye ourselves to feel the flesh of this world and the trace of all undead futures to come. — All Undead Futures of Paco Chanivet by Núria Gómez Gabriel When I set foot inside the room it was almost completely dark. I couldn’t make out if there were seats or benches, so I remained standing, still, until my eyes adjusted to the darkness. After a few long minutes waiting in unabated silence, I decided to sit on the floor of the black box, and, as I rested my hands on its surface, I could perceive it was acorn-shaped, a thin and opaque velvet. I was sure of it because velvet has a very distinctive odour to it, perhaps the smell of the passage of time, a build-up of dust. Time smells something like childhood film theatres, not unlike the odour of crypts or subterranean caves where the dead were buried in the 10th century to hide the graves of martyrs from the eyes of the profane. The atmosphere was wet, uncomfortable, like a typical December day in Barcelona. From the first minute I noticed that I wasn’t alone, although I couldn’t clearly discern what or who was with me, or the distance between us. Suddenly I heard a strange sound that came from the outside; it seemed strange because it was like a slapping sound, although on the skin of my wrist I felt a breeze more similar to the brush of a caress, or like a knot being untied. Gradually, I felt the limits of the black box were inching closer to my body until the space became still and a small and tenuous pink light started to shine at a distance that was incomprehensible in relation to where I was still sitting. I moved towards that light, arching my back slightly and leaning a little to the left. It was a tiny quartzite sculpted in a shape that looked like the Eye of Horus or Udjat, that symbol with apotropaic characteristics — magic, protective, purifying, healing — which in ancient times embodied the order of the imperturbable and was used to invoke cosmic-state stability. In fact, in Ancient Egypt it was one of the most powerful amulets because of its sight-enhancing qualities and an ancestral remedy for ocular diseases, counteracting “eye hunting” or the evil eye and protecting the dead in the afterlife. Upon inspecting the red quartzite up close, something halfway between my ears and Adam’s apple began to vibrate. Red quartzite is a metamorphic rock, semi-transparent or translucid, producing a shine known as aventurescence. Aventurine stones produce an optical effect similar to glitter, with hundreds of small dots that glisten and, depending on the position of the stone, or whether you change your angle of vision, the reflection makes the shiny points move and sparkle. While I was lost in that minute landscape, the Udjat contours became warped and the eye now looked more like an orifice with clenched and viscous teeth that moved with a physical momentum that was not easily recognised. It was then, observing that seemingly disfigured, twisted and incomplete thing that my tongue started to produce salty saliva. I don’t remember seeing anything else, nor do I recall the time I spent inside the exhibition in terms of minutes, hours or seconds. Yet I do remember dream sequences outside of time. And I also remember their colour: from orangey red to violet pink to black-yellow. A dream within a dream within a memory outside my eyes and field of vision. They were not my dreams. Or maybe they were. They were the memories of all undead futures afforded by Paco Chanivet’s La prótesis prometeica (Promethean Prosthesis). The question lies in how, in each one, I could partly recognise what was happening. For example, I recognised my friends but was unaware of their lives. They were underground lives, lived together inside a volcano called Ennneés. And they would sing beautiful songs. And it was always night-time. And they drank a kind of bluish tequila they kept buried in ash. And they slept for days on end. Even asleep they kept on singing. But they didn’t have children. They told me that reproduction belonged to another time and since maternity remained trapped there, they were the family. Later, in a second vision, just the opposite happened. I couldn’t recognise any of the forms I was interacting with. They were like masses with a consistency similar to spiderwebs, light and sticky. Or no, they were more like clumps of vaporous clothing which, when fused together, wailed a hardcore polyphony. Their movements brought to mind certain mechanics in our world, syncopated, fast, voracious. And every time they advanced towards a place my body became lighter, and lighter. First a finger, then the lower abdomen, then my jaw. What I recall with absolute clarity was the last of the sequences because it seemed very much like the present day. A Dubai blaze, Pope Francis in Rome, the dance of US soldiers in Afghanistan, sandstorms, Hurricane Katrina, glacier collapses, the Statue of Liberty, Twitter. It was all the same apart from the words. The words, said and written, all had the same meaning. And when there was any attempt at communication time stopped dead. Something said to me: Weeglcoommm tru dde moderkn agxge xekkk. And in the room a sharp tap again on my left shoulder. That tap still hurts, although I like to take pleasure from it. My encounters with Paco Chanivet’s last work were a kind of threshold experience, but encounters in which, despite their skewed logics, I felt good and could cope with life, manage stress. Something akin to the effects on the body when ketamine is taken, or the hallucinations caused by a good hit of noradrenaline. However, beyond my personal journey and recollections of those dreams, Chanivet’s work brings us closer to two geopsychological approaches — or perhaps it would be more accurate to say gemopsychologcal — at which I think it might be a good idea to stop. When I left the room, still in darkness, I decided to take the green line on the underground and change at Plaza España, on the next train bound for Hospitalet. I couldn’t help thinking about the approaches Mark Fisher wrote about the hauntological dimension of current time. Reflections in which the English critic speaks of a certain formal nostalgia for everything that could exist and which, nevertheless, is shoddily buried by the phantasmagorical end of Capitalism Realism. Having said that, I feel that hauntology, exactly as it functions in Chanivet’s work, doesn’t deal with nostalgia at all. What his latest intervention speaks of is that every present situation is tied to a series of possible futures, some of which can be carried out but the majority of which aren’t. As the situation changes, these future possibilities become rigid, brittle, inert and finally impossible and unable to be realised. In hindsight, it seems that some have not been viable futures at all, but they don’t turn into nothing. Instead, they give form to meaning in a future that really happens, its symbolic traces lingering within us. And that is precisely where the magic of Chanivet lies: in creating possible conditions to be able to see these traces and get to know the way in which they continue to affect our sense of still-possible futures, or ones that are perhaps still possible. And here it is important to emphasise that the world-views his work sets forth are always unique and non-transferrable, joined to the incomplete memories and moods of all those people who have witnessed his recently unveiled exhibition. Paco Chanivet’s hauntology talks to us at once of delirium, illness, synaesthesia, a state of ecstasy, allowing us to explore beyond the normative limits of our body. That which occurs when imagination goes crazy, becomes disturbed, unhinged and unkempt when we can understand that in expanding the limit of the capacity of a body, we broaden everyone’s potential. Thus, the English writer and photographer Matt Colquhoun, influenced by Fisher, influenced by Bataille, influenced by Nietzsche, recently wrote on his blog xenogothic.com, how “mankind cannot remain indifferent to its monsters, given they cannot escape the constitution of the perfect type”. Colquhoun, who on different occasions has thought about today’s ontologies of body horror, also speaks of gothic not being an aesthetic genre but a prosthetic sensibility, “It is a mode of addition, extension and attachment and one that has taken on many different forms, from ‘hook hands’ to new technologies that allow a body to exceed its own limits”. The prosthetic is not then simply a medical adjective but an ontological one. In other words, Paco Chanivet’s gothic prosthesis gives speculative form to that which today would seem not to take it. Yet in gothic literature it is the past and present that are seriously confused, and the characters appear forced to relive certain past dramas with their own bodies; here something similar occurs but moves in the other direction. Our own projections and future desires journey across us to remind us that we are trapped in the framework we have configured on our idea of ourselves. We will desecrate the fictitious eye of Udjat to which we obey, Chanivet tells us. We eye ourselves. But to desecrate there is a need to fashion a tactic or collusion — an artwork — capable of demystifying objects, people and things separated and captured by theological devices from all religions that have us shut in celestial caves as if we were the martyrs of their rotten cause. We eye ourselves with our clenched and viscous teeth. We eye ourselves as if it were a sacrilege of our permanent disability. We eye ourselves to abandon the blind logics of automated reproduction. We eye ourselves dirty and desensitised. We eye ourselves to feel the flesh of this world and the trace of all undead futures to come. — All Undead Futures of Paco Chanivet by Núria Gómez Gabriel When I set foot inside the room it was almost completely dark. I couldn’t make out if there were seats or benches, so I remained standing, still, until my eyes adjusted to the darkness. After a few long minutes waiting in unabated silence, I decided to sit on the floor of the black box, and, as I rested my hands on its surface, I could perceive it was acorn-shaped, a thin and opaque velvet. I was sure of it because velvet has a very distinctive odour to it, perhaps the smell of the passage of time, a build-up of dust. Time smells something like childhood film theatres, not unlike the odour of crypts or subterranean caves where the dead were buried in the 10th century to hide the graves of martyrs from the eyes of the profane. The atmosphere was wet, uncomfortable, like a typical December day in Barcelona. From the first minute I noticed that I wasn’t alone, although I couldn’t clearly discern what or who was with me, or the distance between us. Suddenly I heard a strange sound that came from the outside; it seemed strange because it was like a slapping sound, although on the skin of my wrist I felt a breeze more similar to the brush of a caress, or like a knot being untied. Gradually, I felt the limits of the black box were inching closer to my body until the space became still and a small and tenuous pink light started to shine at a distance that was incomprehensible in relation to where I was still sitting. I moved towards that light, arching my back slightly and leaning a little to the left. It was a tiny quartzite sculpted in a shape that looked like the Eye of Horus or Udjat, that symbol with apotropaic characteristics — magic, protective, purifying, healing — which in ancient times embodied the order of the imperturbable and was used to invoke cosmic-state stability. In fact, in Ancient Egypt it was one of the most powerful amulets because of its sight-enhancing qualities and an ancestral remedy for ocular diseases, counteracting “eye hunting” or the evil eye and protecting the dead in the afterlife. Upon inspecting the red quartzite up close, something halfway between my ears and Adam’s apple began to vibrate. Red quartzite is a metamorphic rock, semi-transparent or translucid, producing a shine known as aventurescence. Aventurine stones produce an optical effect similar to glitter, with hundreds of small dots that glisten and, depending on the position of the stone, or whether you change your angle of vision, the reflection makes the shiny points move and sparkle. While I was lost in that minute landscape, the Udjat contours became warped and the eye now looked more like an orifice with clenched and viscous teeth that moved with a physical momentum that was not easily recognised. It was then, observing that seemingly disfigured, twisted and incomplete thing that my tongue started to produce salty saliva. I don’t remember seeing anything else, nor do I recall the time I spent inside the exhibition in terms of minutes, hours or seconds. Yet I do remember dream sequences outside of time. And I also remember their colour: from orangey red to violet pink to black-yellow. A dream within a dream within a memory outside my eyes and field of vision. They were not my dreams. Or maybe they were. They were the memories of all undead futures afforded by Paco Chanivet’s La prótesis prometeica (Promethean Prosthesis). The question lies in how, in each one, I could partly recognise what was happening. For example, I recognised my friends but was unaware of their lives. They were underground lives, lived together inside a volcano called Ennneés. And they would sing beautiful songs. And it was always night-time. And they drank a kind of bluish tequila they kept buried in ash. And they slept for days on end. Even asleep they kept on singing. But they didn’t have children. They told me that reproduction belonged to another time and since maternity remained trapped there, they were the family. Later, in a second vision, just the opposite happened. I couldn’t recognise any of the forms I was interacting with. They were like masses with a consistency similar to spiderwebs, light and sticky. Or no, they were more like clumps of vaporous clothing which, when fused together, wailed a hardcore polyphony. Their movements brought to mind certain mechanics in our world, syncopated, fast, voracious. And every time they advanced towards a place my body became lighter, and lighter. First a finger, then the lower abdomen, then my jaw. What I recall with absolute clarity was the last of the sequences because it seemed very much like the present day. A Dubai blaze, Pope Francis in Rome, the dance of US soldiers in Afghanistan, sandstorms, Hurricane Katrina, glacier collapses, the Statue of Liberty, Twitter. It was all the same apart from the words. The words, said and written, all had the same meaning. And when there was any attempt at communication time stopped dead. Something said to me: Weeglcoommm tru dde moderkn agxge xekkk. And in the room a sharp tap again on my left shoulder. That tap still hurts, although I like to take pleasure from it. My encounters with Paco Chanivet’s last work were a kind of threshold experience, but encounters in which, despite their skewed logics, I felt good and could cope with life, manage stress. Something akin to the effects on the body when ketamine is taken, or the hallucinations caused by a good hit of noradrenaline. However, beyond my personal journey and recollections of those dreams, Chanivet’s work brings us closer to two geopsychological approaches — or perhaps it would be more accurate to say gemopsychologcal — at which I think it might be a good idea to stop. When I left the room, still in darkness, I decided to take the green line on the underground and change at Plaza España, on the next train bound for Hospitalet. I couldn’t help thinking about the approaches Mark Fisher wrote about the hauntological dimension of current time. Reflections in which the English critic speaks of a certain formal nostalgia for everything that could exist and which, nevertheless, is shoddily buried by the phantasmagorical end of Capitalism Realism. Having said that, I feel that hauntology, exactly as it functions in Chanivet’s work, doesn’t deal with nostalgia at all. What his latest intervention speaks of is that every present situation is tied to a series of possible futures, some of which can be carried out but the majority of which aren’t. As the situation changes, these future possibilities become rigid, brittle, inert and finally impossible and unable to be realised. In hindsight, it seems that some have not been viable futures at all, but they don’t turn into nothing. Instead, they give form to meaning in a future that really happens, its symbolic traces lingering within us. And that is precisely where the magic of Chanivet lies: in creating possible conditions to be able to see these traces and get to know the way in which they continue to affect our sense of still-possible futures, or ones that are perhaps still possible. And here it is important to emphasise that the world-views his work sets forth are always unique and non-transferrable, joined to the incomplete memories and moods of all those people who have witnessed his recently unveiled exhibition. Paco Chanivet’s hauntology talks to us at once of delirium, illness, synaesthesia, a state of ecstasy, allowing us to explore beyond the normative limits of our body. That which occurs when imagination goes crazy, becomes disturbed, unhinged and unkempt when we can understand that in expanding the limit of the capacity of a body, we broaden everyone’s potential. Thus, the English writer and photographer Matt Colquhoun, influenced by Fisher, influenced by Bataille, influenced by Nietzsche, recently wrote on his blog xenogothic.com, how “mankind cannot remain indifferent to its monsters, given they cannot escape the constitution of the perfect type”. Colquhoun, who on different occasions has thought about today’s ontologies of body horror, also speaks of gothic not being an aesthetic genre but a prosthetic sensibility, “It is a mode of addition, extension and attachment and one that has taken on many different forms, from ‘hook hands’ to new technologies that allow a body to exceed its own limits”. The prosthetic is not then simply a medical adjective but an ontological one. In other words, Paco Chanivet’s gothic prosthesis gives speculative form to that which today would seem not to take it. Yet in gothic literature it is the past and present that are seriously confused, and the characters appear forced to relive certain past dramas with their own bodies; here something similar occurs but moves in the other direction. Our own projections and future desires journey across us to remind us that we are trapped in the framework we have configured on our idea of ourselves. We will desecrate the fictitious eye of Udjat to which we obey, Chanivet tells us. We eye ourselves. But to desecrate there is a need to fashion a tactic or collusion — an artwork — capable of demystifying objects, people and things separated and captured by theological devices from all religions that have us shut in celestial caves as if we were the martyrs of their rotten cause. We eye ourselves with our clenched and viscous teeth. We eye ourselves as if it were a sacrilege of our permanent disability. We eye ourselves to abandon the blind logics of automated reproduction. We eye ourselves dirty and desensitised. We eye ourselves to feel the flesh of this world and the trace of all undead futures to come. — All Undead Futures of Paco Chanivet by Núria Gómez Gabriel When I set foot inside the room it was almost completely dark. I couldn’t make out if there were seats or benches, so I remained standing, still, until my eyes adjusted to the darkness. After a few long minutes waiting in unabated silence, I decided to sit on the floor of the black box, and, as I rested my hands on its surface, I could perceive it was acorn-shaped, a thin and opaque velvet. I was sure of it because velvet has a very distinctive odour to it, perhaps the smell of the passage of time, a build-up of dust. Time smells something like childhood film theatres, not unlike the odour of crypts or subterranean caves where the dead were buried in the 10th century to hide the graves of martyrs from the eyes of the profane. The atmosphere was wet, uncomfortable, like a typical December day in Barcelona. From the first minute I noticed that I wasn’t alone, although I couldn’t clearly discern what or who was with me, or the distance between us. Suddenly I heard a strange sound that came from the outside; it seemed strange because it was like a slapping sound, although on the skin of my wrist I felt a breeze more similar to the brush of a caress, or like a knot being untied. Gradually, I felt the limits of the black box were inching closer to my body until the space became still and a small and tenuous pink light started to shine at a distance that was incomprehensible in relation to where I was still sitting. I moved towards that light, arching my back slightly and leaning a little to the left. It was a tiny quartzite sculpted in a shape that looked like the Eye of Horus or Udjat, that symbol with apotropaic characteristics — magic, protective, purifying, healing — which in ancient times embodied the order of the imperturbable and was used to invoke cosmic-state stability. In fact, in Ancient Egypt it was one of the most powerful amulets because of its sight-enhancing qualities and an ancestral remedy for ocular diseases, counteracting “eye hunting” or the evil eye and protecting the dead in the afterlife. Upon inspecting the red quartzite up close, something halfway between my ears and Adam’s apple began to vibrate. Red quartzite is a metamorphic rock, semi-transparent or translucid, producing a shine known as aventurescence. Aventurine stones produce an optical effect similar to glitter, with hundreds of small dots that glisten and, depending on the position of the stone, or whether you change your angle of vision, the reflection makes the shiny points move and sparkle. While I was lost in that minute landscape, the Udjat contours became warped and the eye now looked more like an orifice with clenched and viscous teeth that moved with a physical momentum that was not easily recognised. It was then, observing that seemingly disfigured, twisted and incomplete thing that my tongue started to produce salty saliva. I don’t remember seeing anything else, nor do I recall the time I spent inside the exhibition in terms of minutes, hours or seconds. Yet I do remember dream sequences outside of time. And I also remember their colour: from orangey red to violet pink to black-yellow. A dream within a dream within a memory outside my eyes and field of vision. They were not my dreams. Or maybe they were. They were the memories of all undead futures afforded by Paco Chanivet’s La prótesis prometeica (Promethean Prosthesis). The question lies in how, in each one, I could partly recognise what was happening. For example, I recognised my friends but was unaware of their lives. They were underground lives, lived together inside a volcano called Ennneés. And they would sing beautiful songs. And it was always night-time. And they drank a kind of bluish tequila they kept buried in ash. And they slept for days on end. Even asleep they kept on singing. But they didn’t have children. They told me that reproduction belonged to another time and since maternity remained trapped there, they were the family. Later, in a second vision, just the opposite happened. I couldn’t recognise any of the forms I was interacting with. They were like masses with a consistency similar to spiderwebs, light and sticky. Or no, they were more like clumps of vaporous clothing which, when fused together, wailed a hardcore polyphony. Their movements brought to mind certain mechanics in our world, syncopated, fast, voracious. And every time they advanced towards a place my body became lighter, and lighter. First a finger, then the lower abdomen, then my jaw. What I recall with absolute clarity was the last of the sequences because it seemed very much like the present day. A Dubai blaze, Pope Francis in Rome, the dance of US soldiers in Afghanistan, sandstorms, Hurricane Katrina, glacier collapses, the Statue of Liberty, Twitter. It was all the same apart from the words. The words, said and written, all had the same meaning. And when there was any attempt at communication time stopped dead. Something said to me: Weeglcoommm tru dde moderkn agxge xekkk. And in the room a sharp tap again on my left shoulder. That tap still hurts, although I like to take pleasure from it. My encounters with Paco Chanivet’s last work were a kind of threshold experience, but encounters in which, despite their skewed logics, I felt good and could cope with life, manage stress. Something akin to the effects on the body when ketamine is taken, or the hallucinations caused by a good hit of noradrenaline. However, beyond my personal journey and recollections of those dreams, Chanivet’s work brings us closer to two geopsychological approaches — or perhaps it would be more accurate to say gemopsychologcal — at which I think it might be a good idea to stop. When I left the room, still in darkness, I decided to take the green line on the underground and change at Plaza España, on the next train bound for Hospitalet. I couldn’t help thinking about the approaches Mark Fisher wrote about the hauntological dimension of current time. Reflections in which the English critic speaks of a certain formal nostalgia for everything that could exist and which, nevertheless, is shoddily buried by the phantasmagorical end of Capitalism Realism. Having said that, I feel that hauntology, exactly as it functions in Chanivet’s work, doesn’t deal with nostalgia at all. What his latest intervention speaks of is that every present situation is tied to a series of possible futures, some of which can be carried out but the majority of which aren’t. As the situation changes, these future possibilities become rigid, brittle, inert and finally impossible and unable to be realised. In hindsight, it seems that some have not been viable futures at all, but they don’t turn into nothing. Instead, they give form to meaning in a future that really happens, its symbolic traces lingering within us. And that is precisely where the magic of Chanivet lies: in creating possible conditions to be able to see these traces and get to know the way in which they continue to affect our sense of still-possible futures, or ones that are perhaps still possible. And here it is important to emphasise that the world-views his work sets forth are always unique and non-transferrable, joined to the incomplete memories and moods of all those people who have witnessed his recently unveiled exhibition. Paco Chanivet’s hauntology talks to us at once of delirium, illness, synaesthesia, a state of ecstasy, allowing us to explore beyond the normative limits of our body. That which occurs when imagination goes crazy, becomes disturbed, unhinged and unkempt when we can understand that in expanding the limit of the capacity of a body, we broaden everyone’s potential. Thus, the English writer and photographer Matt Colquhoun, influenced by Fisher, influenced by Bataille, influenced by Nietzsche, recently wrote on his blog xenogothic.com, how “mankind cannot remain indifferent to its monsters, given they cannot escape the constitution of the perfect type”. Colquhoun, who on different occasions has thought about today’s ontologies of body horror, also speaks of gothic not being an aesthetic genre but a prosthetic sensibility, “It is a mode of addition, extension and attachment and one that has taken on many different forms, from ‘hook hands’ to new technologies that allow a body to exceed its own limits”. The prosthetic is not then simply a medical adjective but an ontological one. In other words, Paco Chanivet’s gothic prosthesis gives speculative form to that which today would seem not to take it. Yet in gothic literature it is the past and present that are seriously confused, and the characters appear forced to relive certain past dramas with their own bodies; here something similar occurs but moves in the other direction. Our own projections and future desires journey across us to remind us that we are trapped in the framework we have configured on our idea of ourselves. We will desecrate the fictitious eye of Udjat to which we obey, Chanivet tells us. We eye ourselves. But to desecrate there is a need to fashion a tactic or collusion — an artwork — capable of demystifying objects, people and things separated and captured by theological devices from all religions that have us shut in celestial caves as if we were the martyrs of their rotten cause. We eye ourselves with our clenched and viscous teeth. We eye ourselves as if it were a sacrilege of our permanent disability. We eye ourselves to abandon the blind logics of automated reproduction. We eye ourselves dirty and desensitised. We eye ourselves to feel the flesh of this world and the trace of all undead futures to come. —