Counting trees | olga-olivera-arte

Counting Trees. 2019-26. Video, 22:28 min. In Contrapastoral: Art and Farming. Curated by Pau Minguet. Museu Morera. Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Lleida.

Walking beneath the open skies of the Lleida plain, where winter fog gives way to suffocating heat and the dust of rural tracks clings to the skin, is a physical act that borders on endurance. In this landscape, surrendered to the dictates of agrarian capitalism that removes old trees while introducing new models often poorly adapted to their environment and circumstances, actions emerge that can seem almost surreal.

Counting Trees is exhibited on the periphery, a place to which I have tried to bring visibility and value time and again. A space from which to think about what remains on the margins, the real. It is precisely in such places that I have repeatedly found myself positioned, both by territory and by personal history. But let us leave my story aside, a story that exerts a centripetal force from which I neither can nor wish to escape. Who knows where I would be otherwise.

To place one's body at the margin, to remain there for hours under the summer sun, is to understand that the force of the margin can become titanic.

It is a pure, conceptual, rationalist action, one rooted in mathematical enumeration. Yet it also contains a force born from an almost quixotic impulse: walking the roads of Ponent in order to count and catalogue whatever may appear, a plane tree or the remains of a felled trunk that has almost become a sculpture. There are artists who would artificially manufacture such forms within the outdated representational models of art.

The work imitates a certain corporate literalness while simultaneously resisting it. The tree, the symbol, the archetype, ends up breaking through the pavement, at times awkwardly, almost beyond words, or transforms into a pair of Dalinian crutches. Clouds appear only to disappear beneath layers of photographic retouching. Or a background calls out to us...

And above all there is the absurd and incoherent act of counting trees. Can we know how many there are? Does it truly make sense to count them? Is such a task even possible?

Art is this: a moment of friction. It neither speaks nor allows itself to be spoken. It neither is nor is not.

The deeper one enters into it, the more one understands this position. The position of simplicity, which is not the same as superficiality. Susan Sontag wrote of leaving works alone, allowing them simply to be. Perhaps this is especially important at a time saturated with direct publicity and pedagogical mediation. Our society still seems to occupy a profoundly immature position, like that of an adolescent crying out for attention.

I speak of pedagogy from a position I can sustain, from a life devoted to it. But also from my family history. In this country, one cannot make a living from art, and this is a profound deficiency that deserves much broader discussion.

This work is simply that: counting trees. One, two, three, twenty, or fifty thousand. Something apparently simple yet tremendously complex. Art requires long stretches of time, hard work, process, maturity, discomfort and perseverance. No one would question that understanding Mozart or attending an opera requires training the ear through repeated listening. Today some call this elitism, born of a constant fear of not appearing sufficiently modern, without really knowing what being modern means. Every age has sought to be modern in its own way. Or perhaps it is simply a matter of falling, again and again, into the same old patterns. History, unfortunately, is full of weak moments.

And a final note: we should be careful with this tremendously powerful margin, because in its distance from the centre it can also become too lax. Perhaps someone ought to speak about that force, its dangers and its blurrings.

Finally, I would like to say that conceptual art is neither mathematical nor cold, nor does it necessarily turn away from emotional impulse. Let us not be deceived by superficial assumptions: both realities can coexist. The impulse behind Counting Trees emerges precisely from a hard and piercing life, among the clods of earth of the land where I grew up.

Olga Olivera-Tabeni

P.S. I am delighted to have my work in dialogue with that of Olga Sacharoff and, above all, with that of Hernández Pijuan. It is an honour to share this space with an artist who has been a key reference for me since my years as a Fine Arts student.