I feel very lucky for the fact I could attend the show Time Capsules at The Gallery Soho, few minutes before they closed down. I met there Pablo Padilla Jargstorf, one of the participants of the exhibition and he took the time to talk to me about his work and its process. His sound installation, called Resonances of Things to Come, has different layers of approaching, either temporal and spatial. I feel terrible to be that descriptive, but since an important part of his work has to deal with the sound and the in situ experience, would be really unfair to write about something you can’t see on pictures.
Aside from the rest of the exhibition, Padilla Jargstorf made a small shed, a space on the gallery that would create a very isolate and personal experience for the visitors. Through a dim light, you can see how the floor has been covered with small mirror fragments while the wooden walls are full with framed pictures of rabbits and old houses on the country side. The floor has several microphones attached and any sound there is recorded, distorted and deferred on hidden boxers so the spectator realises that a sort of macabre echo accompanies the footsteps.
The author literally pervades his work with his own life (sidenote: he had to break 5 mirrors which means 35 years of bad luck… coincidentally his own age). Once I entered in the shed I couldn’t avoid the scary feeling that I was entering the artist’s soul. All those stimuli provoked on me many insane worlds related with children’s literature. Once inside, I was everywhere but in a gallery. Like the bunny that appears on a text in the catalogue, I was not sure if I could believe in my own perception: “Every single instant was happening at the same time, in the same space. Time was simultaneous. Space was palimpsest”.
