nataliadomínguez

DOES THE MOUNTAIN EXIST?
Project in collaboration with Carlos Aparicio
2020 - 2022

Listen the sound work here [in Spanish]
Read the transcription of the sound work here [in English]
Ask the access to watch the whole video by writing to hola@nataliadominguez.com

In 2003, the Center for Cognitive Science from the University at Buffalo published Do mountains exist? Towards an Ontology of Landforms, a paper focused on the ontological reality of the concept of mountain. According to their research, the boundaries of the mountain are so vague and wide that the ontology could question its physicality due to the impossibility to determine clear limits.

Accepting their assumption and considering the mountain as a temporary, indeterminate and, even, fictional element, this project narrates a fragmented story about our perception of the landscape, considering it as a by-product of our perceptive abilities and linguistic limitations, at the same time that constantly adapts to the different mediums and exhibition spaces in a wish to evince the fluidity of landscape.

Done in collaboration with Carlos Aparicio, this work desires to question reality through a very abstract element which, in this case, is language. What interest us about language is how it irrefutably determines the way we interact with reality while, at the same time, constantly shows its inability to fully represent what it refers to. And having this in mind, we consider that, in our unstable reality, the only way for human kind to survive to what cannot be held by their hands, is by capturing it using the ontological limits of language.

The narrator of this fragmented story progressively makes his speech more and more abstract, abandoning visual references and successively questioning how language also constricts the space around us.

¿Existe la montaña? [Does the mountain exist?]
HD dual video, speakers and speaker structures
25'00''
2022

In Una forma incontrolable
From January 27th to February 27th, 2022
Festival FACBA'12
Centro Damián Bayón - Instituto de América
Santa Fe, Granada (Spain)

The project ¿Existe la montaña? (Does the mountain exist?), mutable and polyhedral, arose as an adaptation of a performative conference initially presented at HANGAR (Barcelona) in September 2020. The images above show its version as a two-channel audiovisual installation within the exhibition Una forma incontrolable (Centro Damián Bayón - Instituto de América. Santa Fe, Granada). On the one hand, a video was presented with 3D images in which the figure of Mount Everest was progressively decomposed over archival and appropriate images. The other video showed the transcription of the audio of the piece, which could be heard at the same time.

¿Existe la montaña?
Video dual HD
25'00''
2022

En Una forma incontrolable
Del 27 de enero al 27 de febrero de 2022
Centro Damián Bayón. Festival FACBA'12

In its sound version, the project invites the viewer to sit on pouffes to listen to the piece more attentively.

This exhibition version also presents an edition of three non-serialised posters that the viewer can take away with them. They show three visual experimentations through stones and remains of architectural elements that generate a new landscape, accompanied by three phrases taken from the sound piece that reflect, once again, on the relationship between landscape, experience and language. The erosion of the posters as they are torn off generates a new mountain landscape, proposing strata and symbolic heights.

¿Existe la montaña? [Does the mountain exist?]
Stereo sound composition
25’01’’ played in loop

Puffs
Digital print on cloth
100 x 100 x 100 cm

In ¿Existe la montaña?
From September 10th to October 23rd, 2022
Curated by Quim Torres
Mèdol - Centre d'arts contemporànies de Tarragona (Spain)

84 montañas I, II y III [84 mountains I, II y III]
Full-color print on ciclus print 80 gr. paper, aluminium platen and screws
420 x 197 mm
100 copies non numbered edition (per poster)

¿Existe la montaña? [Does the mountain exist?]
Performatic conference
Text, HD video, LED sign, soil, humidifier and "backpack-speakers"
16' 46''
2020

In Hangar Obert
September 18th, 2020
Hangar. Barcelona (Spain)

credits

sound co-design and production
Vicente Gadea

voice
Víctor Ballester