In his works Rubén
Grilo employs a variety of means to intervene in the structures of enunciation
and reception that drive a given activity, such as producing works of art,
reading, or visiting an exhibition. In revisiting these structures Grilo
exposes the mechanisms that allow us to give value, construct meaning and
modulate an experience.

In Erres
and in other previous projects, the exhibition is defined through seemingly
simple operations that provoke a distortion. Grilo understands the exhibition
as a space of exception that makes it possible to stage a rupture, to alter the
formulas of mediation and to reveal the codes that we, as artists or
spectators, adopt and tacitly reproduce. In Erres
this reversal is clearly manifested in the apparent emptiness of the interior
space of the art centre and in the concentration of sculptures on the outside
of the building. Through this dislocation Grilo challenges the distinction
between container and content, but also the notion of spatial efficiency. This
sequence not only tests our expectations of the exhibition, but also a
museography tradition that gives a preferential role to stagnant spaces and
restricts the possibilities of interference between strictly artistic
discourses and other discourses.

Inside Lo Pati we find Progress Barks,
a sound project that Grilo has developed in collaboration with software
researcher Robert M. Ochshorn. The title of the piece plays with the similarity
between the words bark and bar highlighting the strangeness of linear progress
when applied to the latter instead of the former. For some years now, Ochshorn
has been researching the development of automated learning systems involving
processes such as speech and image recognition. It was precisely this shared
interest in the question of speech that led them to ask: what would happen if a
machine learned to bark? Progress Barks presents different phases of this process and places
at the forefront the questions of training, validation and copying as learning
strategies.

Last January, during his stay at the artists’
residence in Balada, Rubén Grilo visited a dog rescue centre near Amposta.
There he found that many of the rescued dogs are hunting dogs that are dumped
at the end of the season; also, that some hunters cross-breed dogs with the aim
of bringing together in the same species those qualities that are particularly
attractive for hunting activities.

Rubén
Grilo asked himself: if dog breeds were letters, would hunters be looking for
those letters that write and read better? What happens when the letters speak
for themselves? It is said that only domesticated dogs bark. Are they trying to
talk to us? Is  it a form of empathy or a
strange form of self-domestication?

The audio from this experiment is “textless
speech;” indeed, isn’t this the origin of human language?
Isn’t copying sounds how we learn to speak when we don’t possess the ability to
articulate from a textual basis?

On the façades
of Lo Pati Rubén Grilo presents a group of pieces that give
continuity to Screen Alphabet, a series of sculptures initiated in 2011 in which he
employs tubular structures and projection screens to draw letters. Grilo refers
to these letters as an “alphabet in ruins”, a series of materially
singular pieces in which the rigid and the soft converge. On the one hand, the
steel that allows them to be anchored and defines tension points, on the other,
the screen, a material without memory that appears here devoid of its main
function: to be the support for an image. The repetition, or in this case, the
rewriting, of the letter R, functions in the same way as a generative process,
in which the distinction between model and copy appears blurred. Just as in Progress
Barks the dog’s bark fails to convey a message, by
extracting the letters from their usual frames of action—text and speech—Grilo
underlines their functional precariousness. If inside Lo Pati the barks put
into practice a speech devoid of text, on the outside we find a sequence of
letters that is not inscribed in any word. 

The choice of the letter that gives the project its
name is no coincidence. The R, the nineteenth letter of the alphabet, was
formerly known as “littera canina,”
canine letter (isn’t the sound of the R the sound a dog makes when it growls?)
Thus, we could venture to think that it was the close contact between dogs and
humans that made it possible to identify and integrate this letter into the
Latin alphabet. The paradox presented by this fact is that, just as the letter
R displays an archaic trace of inter-species communication, according to Grilo,
the R, like many other letters that are difficult to pronounce, also has the
capacity to establish a non-geographical boundary. This boundary would no
longer be located in the discursive sense we give to words, but in the use of
the word as an instrument of discrimination and empowerment, of acceptance and
rejection.

In one of the first conversations, we had with Rubén Grilo about this project, he spoke to me about weedy
rice. This variety of wild rice is characteristic for its red coloured grain
and its spike,
which produces a lower amount of rice compared to other varieties, a
fact that causes it to be considered a plague. It is inevitable to establish a
connection between the weedy rice, the dogs and the trembling R’s that occupy
the façades
of Lo Pati: although they do so in different ways, all three exist as impure
forms of life that resist domestication, and yet contribute to a territory that
manifests by mingling.

Marc
Navarro