The Return of the Junker JM 2000 at Bombon Projects / Barcelona

The Return of the Junker JM 2000 / curated by Sira Pizà


Josep Maynou, Jordi Mitjà


10 October – 6 December, 2019


Bombon Projects
Carrer de Trafalgar 45
local 3, 08010
Barcelona


Photography by Roberto Ruiz




The more we use things, the more we become
like them. Machines are human, they are as equally composed of screws as they
are of calculations, equally made of engine and engineering. We make technology
in our likeness and we think of it as part of ourselves: it
s already replacing us,
we
ve already become one.
The tricked-out car doesn
t look
like the owner as much as the owner looks like the car. We imagine technology
and then technology makes us imagine as it. We think of time in the shape of a
wheel, in the shape of a car or in the shape of an airplane. The emblem of an
obsolete speed, the car is the machine that still roots us to the ground, that
makes us feel the bumps in the road and makes us look out the window at the
changing landscape. It
s the beginning
of accelerated time, but it
s still a
mobile home[1]
 at 1:1 scale, a domestic bubble that moves
through space. It is the opposite of the aircraft, which homogenizes everything
making it small in the distance, which takes off and lands in places that are
not even places, without anything happening in the in-between. In incorporeal
times, the car still connects us to the age of the assembly line and the
workshop and the parking garage. In the myth of living machines, cars are the
first to rise against their owners, transformed into crude and curt robots.
In ancient theater, the term Deus ex Machina was born to describe the
device used to bring actors playing gods into the scene, creating an illusion
of flight or apparition. Later, it is used to describe a strategy, also a device, but a narrative one, which
introduces a change so unexpected to the plot that it appears unlikely[2].
Devices, apparatus, tools, or mechanisms, are as much inert as they are alive:
social, historical, political, small and large machines are composed of organs and
organized intelligence systems. Theater operates on the premise of illusionism,
creating an autonomous time and space zone where things, which aren
t really there, appear real
to the audience. It occurs that within the limits of the stage nothing is just
what it is, but everything that it can seem to be. The value of that illusion
lies only in the body of the actor, which contains the possibility of talking,
acting, performing. Possibility is the most immaterial thing that can be
governed: the abstract machineries of political economies govern bodies and
their powers.
In Return
of the Junker. JM 2000
, the main character is absent, it is a ghost, a
mortal machine, a body
thats been exploded
into all of its possibilities. More t
han that, a car is a lethal
machine, an ever-latent accident, the potentiality of a disaster being activated
at every instant. Here, the machine is a technique, an effect, a trick: a twist
that resolves the act. Turned into a face, a painting, a domestic item, or a
workshop, its personalities manifest themselves in every transfigured fragment.
In an inverse modification, it comes back from the junkyard to recompose itself
in the hands of the artists, dressed with an auto-mechanic
s coveralls and a magicians hat.
Sira
Pizà
Figueres,
Octubre 2019
  
* Created in the family metal shop of
one of the artists, Return of the Junker.
JM 2000
is a collaboration between Josep Maynou and Jordi Mitjà produced in
the area of Empordà between spring and fall 2019.


[1] Jean Baudrillard starts his chapterAddendum:
The domestic world and the car
describing cars in his book The System of Objects. In the Spanish
version of Siglo XXI Editores, Madrid,
1999.
[2] Gerald Raunig talks about it in the chapter
Theater Machines, in A
Thousand Machines, A Concise Philosophy of the Machine as Social Movement
.
Semiotext(e), MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2010.