Transit Zone
Marina Pastor
This space is not space, this place is not a place. It is the boundary of the maps, the no-man´s land between two borders, The place where there are neither policemen nor stations, because Natuka Honrubia’s works makes us turn inside ourselves, they talk to you about you and to me about me, but in what we have in common, they quote us, they convene us towards the future, delaying this encounter between our two “I” ( mine with mine, yours with yours, yours with mine), making evident the hiatus, but they also quote us in a second sense, commenting on our own life, our condition as human beings dedicated towards this irretrievably moment, because they talk to us about our death, they are its silhouettes, phantoms of the permanent disability as an external condition. For that, Natuka uses narrative references,: wheelchairs curiously unsteady, almost ephemeral, almost at the edge of the falling, ladders, man-stretchers, balustrades, but also antropomorphical elements which, fragmented, are made up within the elements to be part of them, feet, hands,…they constitute them to make a physical a transitional stat, a state which is not a state but a “pre-position”, (“between”), as a permanent condition, make palpable thanks to an ironical poetry, which makes the materials the inverse of themselves: the iron made wire, the solidity that talks to us about the fragility of the existence, the lead that refers us to an ascent, the quilted toughness of the love place, pierced by death. Significants and significances exchange themselves interchanging their properties, in order to reflect the contrast between what is transcendental and what is purely wordly, between the anecdote and the depth.
Thus, Natuka’s work coagulates life, time, in order to throw us towards the search of a sense, of the sense that crosses over our life, of the sense that stimulates us, everyday, towards death, the sense that we achieve in that final instant, in which we are not able to project any more what we will be, in which we are what we have already which constitutes ourselves, closed, completed, but also in which we stop being, and maybe, the best achievement, what Natuka has best achieved is to elude terror, and change it for the intimacy, in order to make us face the moment, dance with the fear of dying with the dignity chorus that sets in motion, with the dignity of a final which could be integrated within the line of this vital course, within the lines of her work´s weave. Death is not a scythe, but its inversion, a comma, which as a state of the same name, is emphasized as an intertextual zone, a stoppage in the text, leaning smile from which to jump poetically to the other side, place both for the oblivion and the memory, because it also talks about both, they are fused on the surfaces, trapped in wire cages, rocked by the poetry of daily objects, objects which seem to have marked some life, which are waiting for us there, deep down in one´s self, in this place of a recalling and senile anarchy where they stop being oneself memory to become a “don´t forget me”, in order to be constituted as the will, as the momentary legacy that nobody takes away, as if we could get trapped somehow within its mesenteries, objects bulged of vital time from which we could live in the rest, in order to form some madness, jump over the threads and dwell in this moment in which death is not desirable, not because you desire to live, but because everything is stated except oneself.
Future anticipations, Natuka’s work uses predominately the resort of the vertical position, not only to talk to us about the unsteady, when the unsteady are we, but also to transmit this tension towards the open space, towards an ascendant representation of life. With this, her works are transitional lines, metaphorical places in the etymological sense of the word (“meta-fore”: take farther…), they are points or constellations in which to read a future as uncertain as sure ( we are all going to die, this is the unavoidable condition of life) and in the vertical position it is reflexed a second tension, the one of the germ free of a hospital, the one of the white corridor, the one of the white dressing gown, the one of the white bed… allegories in which the intimacy of the most intimate act, because there is no more intimate act than death, it is cancelled in an anonymous and absolute way, because the great irony is that the boundary of these two spaces without colour of death that we deny by dressing in black, as if by seizing it we could not to die, as if by locking it up others could solve, without personal implications, the background that dwells in all of us..
Natuka, with the clarity of the language that, however, is not evident, builds from the lightness of the poetry, the narration of a story that we all know, but that any of us is aware of. Her work is schemed of a geography so earthly as heavenly, abyss of the ascent with leaded wings that realize her works, iron or steal spatial threads, meat stretchers, balustrades to lean on the unsteady intimacy, works that constitute the conscience of this space which is not a space, this place which is not a place. It is the boundary of the maps, the no-man´s land between two borders, the place where there are neither policemen nor stations, the interrogative concavity of the last why, because…
- PASTOR, Marina: Zona de Trànsit / Zona de Tránsito / Transit Zone, in Devenir, Espai d’Art A. Lambert, Xàbia (Alicante), Spain, 1996. D.L.: A-675-1996. (Catalogue)