“Loreto Martínez Troncoso uses words as vehicles of transmission; words which she transposes to invest them with new meanings and create new situations. Her works are palimpsests in which intertextuality is an instrument for communication, and her actions manifest themselves in the artist’s physical presence or through devices intended to act as a medium for the text, monologue, discourse or conference.

Loreto Martínez Troncoso’s work is essentially immaterial. Her first performances arose from very specific moments and assumed the protocols established for each particular context: events, exhibition openings, press conferences… The act of ‘taking the floor’ gave rise to concepts such as here and now and came to constitute the core content of the pieces. Questions such as ‘What is action?’ and ‘How and when does it begin?’ derive from the artist’s practice or experience as subject-object, a condition which implies the presence of the spectator in a given time and place.

The idea of the audience as the absolute and inalienable addressee without which there is no work (to borrow Rancière’s idea in The Emancipated Spectator) is fleshed out in recent works, where the artist abandons spontaneous intervention and the word is transmitted via physical devices such as headphones, projectors and loudspeakers that the spectator activates – maintaining his condition of performer – in his encounter with the work and place at a given time. Absence functions as a transposition of presence, for, as the artist argues, ‘inaction, too, is a form of action’.

The exhibition presented at the MARCO is composed of re-readings of existing pieces, new output, and documents that deal with themes such as disappearance, memory and fear – aspects that surface repeatedly throughout Loreto Martínez Troncoso’s oeuvre and which the artist conveys using a language that shows her awareness of the power of naming or excluding. First in French (she studied Fine Arts in Bordeaux and Lyons and has pursued most of her career in France), then in Spanish, Galician, Basque and Portuguese (she currently lives in Porto), her works are articulated as fragments or quotations that respond to the exhibition room as in a space of resonance. Each of her works is like a work in process, a fragment of a greater corpus, for as the art critic and curator François Piron wrote in a recent text about the artist, ‘For some years now, Loreto Martínez Troncoso has built her work exclusively from texts; or to be more exact, from one single text, subjacent, resumed and expanded upon in different successive appearances’.

The exhibition begins with Finalmente, ¿con o sin título? —domingo, 21 de junio de 2009—, 2011, a spoken text that functions as a reactivation of a situation of a presence (and a present) gone by. Recorded on vinyl, it is activated when the viewer places the needle on the disc, thereby allowing it to exist for a duration of time which is determined by the visitor and the medium, with a beginning and an end. The text, a performance in which allusion is made to the search for new spaces to be addressed, traces the journey of when the artist first ‘began to speak’, or ‘to take the floor’, to the present moment, and incorporates another element that serves as a nod to the spectator: What is that plant placed next to the record player doing? It functions as a physical representation in the space, as a transposition to an object of a fragment of the sound piece in which we hear the artist exclaim, Boas noites, estou aquí dereitiña como unha pranta! [Good evening. I am standing here straight as a plant!]

Just as these words are directed at a ‘you’ in the plural form, the sound piece En la noche, 2010, is directed at a singular ‘you’, a sole spectator invited to take part in an encounter ‘between you and me’. Originally installed in the FRAC des Pays de la Loire as part of an exhibition, Les Vagues, mounted during the 24th edition of the Ateliers Internationaux, opposite the only window or opening giving on to the exterior of the exhibition space, it is now shown translated from French into Spanish and acquires a new temporality and location, its back to the outside.

One of the galleries displays gatherings or fragments of processes – documents we might say – or that which arises in the margins of works. The power point projection titled ‘Viaje alrededor de mi cuarto’ o ‘Un cuarto propio’ podrían ser el título, si un título hubiese que darle. Y, entre paréntesis: (una lectura para un domingo), 2011, functions as a visual reading made up of a gathering of fragments visualised, read, said, heard, written; extracts taken from a multiplicity of sources and authorships. Bits and pieces that exist in parallel with her writing or with her more visible work and which have been left ‘unpolished’. Composed in the manner of an exquisite cadaver, the ‘reading’ threads together different fragments to provoke impossible meetings, like that of an oyster and the anarchist Voltairine de Cleyre or that of Francis Ford Coppola and Nina Simone who, at one point, evokes one of the themes of the exhibition: ‘to be free is to have no fear’.

Loreto Martínez Troncoso evokes the ‘passage to action’ as a sign of freedom in the slide projection Pela estrada fóra, 2011, an autofiction built on snips of memories of a journey made alone along the Portuguese coast in the winter of 2008. An archive of a journey revisited later in pieces such as Finalmente, ¿con o sin título? and begun as a form of escape, it represents not the journey itself, but what might have come of this physical journey the artist undertook after announcing, during a performance in 2006, that ‘the moment for going far away’ had come. At that point her work acquired the connotation of autofiction and its content pointed to a continuity, to a ‘passage to action’.

These pieces belong to the ‘margins’ – the fragmented background – the artist is rendering visible now, which include a selection of drawings made in December 2010 following a series of interviews with pupils of primary and secondary education at García Barbón school in Vigo, in which she asked them to describe their reactions to fear. The device of the interview is something the artist had used previously since it allows her to ‘yield the floor’ to others, as seen in a piece related to this one situated in the far end of the space, ‘No sé si me da miedo la muerte, no sé casi nada desde que llegué al mar’ [sobre el miedo, esbozo#1], 2011, a sound installation on ten channels which talks to us of imposed experiences and education drawing on fragments of interviews Loreto Martínez Troncoso held in Vigo and Nigrán (IES Val Miñor) with people of different ages: children, adolescents, adults and elderly persons. Using these interviews, the artist invites the spectator to enter a dialogue to reflect on concepts such as fear, loss and loneliness. It is part of a long-term project on the theme of silence or on the impossibility of passing to action, on freedom.

Loreto Martínez Troncoso’s oeuvre integrates elements of these margins or hiding-places wherein dwells the invisible and whence the visible emerges. This is the theme of the piece Vergadering der Dieren, 1965-1975 [Assembly of animals], a facsimile of an oil on canvas by an unknown painter in the collection of the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam. The artist appropriates the image and uses it as the starting point of a reflection on the dichotomy between outside and inside. The areas below ground, the places for retiring or hiding, represented in the lower section of the painting, take us to a hidden space where unaccepted or not-so-visible thoughts and attitudes live side by side. All inner energy reaches the surface by some route or other.

The exhibition ends with a transparency-projected text on a wall [Un día escribí, sin fecha], originally published by NEKaTOENEa, the artists’ residence Domaine d’Abbadia, Hendaye, and a special edition made by the artist for this exhibition. Next to these reads a thought projected onto a wall (hay algo que me afecta y necesito reaccionar, there is something bothering me and I need to react) which refers to the need to ‘pass to action’ and is analogous with the act of ‘taking the floor’. We continue to talk of transpositions and alterations, and of temporalities, such as those revealed by the library made up of books that the artist has read and will read. Inside there are exhibition catalogues – again, transpositions of works – and short accounts that accompany her in her infinite search. To sum up: remains, fragments, quotations, words; pasts, presents, futures.”

Agar Ledo Arias and Iñaki Martínez Antelo
[Extract of the text written for the exhibition catalogue]