︎︎︎“DOCUMENTATION OF OBJECTS, ANIMALS, PEOPLE AND EVENTS” Diego Cortés
december 2, 2023
As part of other activities taking place in the space, and in connection with our 2023 curatorial project ‘The Weeds Club’, we present the results of a research project associated with the metaphors we have proposed in it. As an installed practice, artist Diego Cortés cooked a dish from his region (Galicia) to tell us about the work process.
A term composed of two words that defines those plants that grow in places undesirable to humans, which can be metaphorically attributed both to those condemned to marginality and to those who are normative by imposition, and which bears the title ‘bad’ and the name ‘weed’, is an irresistible trigger. It sounds good. It sounds like an insult and, like some of them, has the versatility to be used both pejoratively and appreciatively. A gem.
In the development of my practice of creating images, situations tend to arise in which randomness disrupts the futile attempt to control the desired outcome. Accidents that cause a project to take a detour from that moment on and create a tension between will and chance that I find generally enriches the process.
In this presentation, and doing a little archaeology on my own work, I document three cases, which together aim to illustrate how ‘weeds’ in the form of resistant ideas or images emerge, creating what I understand as ‘accidental images’.
The “accidental image” is a statistical rendering of artificial intelligence; mine. It is another compound term which, like “weed”, can refer to both the marginal and the normative, the natural and the artificial.
It can result from something original and arbitrary or intentional and derivative, it can allude to the present or the past, but in any case, due to its unexpected origin, like the ‘weed’ it depends in its existence and raison d'être, above all from the point of view, on interpretation... on its relationship with human beings.
*Diego Cortés (Vigo 1978). Trained as an architect at ETSAM. He lives and works between Vigo and Madrid, although he tends to be more productive when travelling. He maintains a critical/stoic stance on life without advocating any other type of existence. He tries to discover in his painting precisely what he was not looking for.