George Maciunas, a founding member of the Fluxus collective, proposed in the 1960s to turn the daily, intimate act of brushing one’s teeth into a work of art. By all accounts, today that proposition has more than materialised on social media. But does it make sense that all those people, and on all those occasions when they brush their teeth with an artistic intention, should record and edit this action for its subsequent diffusion as a cultural object?
It is like in that story by J.L. Borges in which a map was so precise that it occupied the same extension of the land it represented. We need a lifetime, without pauses or breaks, to visualise such a work but, despite the fact that contemplating the alien and the repetition of the ephemeral are paralysing, both contain a nostalgia that connects us. That is to say, imperfection. Imperfection assumed through a very specific type of voluntary improvisation (or conscious experimentation) which projects forms on the edge, between the prepared and the fortuitous. It is then the duty of every high level improviser to drive fearlessly along this tightrope, to enjoy the imbalance and, if necessary, to let himself fall into the void.
Now, like good taxidermists of time, Fernando Ulzión, Matías Riquelme and Mikel Vega have decided to bottle one of their sessions and document the fall as an intact and indelible figure. In it, the limit of failure disappears. In it, the error reflects like a mirror and so, in this album entitled «Protoctist», the trio from Bilbao have managed to capture an unrepeatable act. It is like someone who imprisons the flow of time so that its waves deform and remove the patinas of the dust that surrounds us, pushing dirt and shaking shells until it affects us. Until the umbilical cord of our indifferent perfection corrupts, rots and stinks. Everything, as long as it breaks and we overflow. Because when we add up more time stored than has actually elapsed, the universe will collapse.
