Exhibition

How True, and Yet I Mistook It!
BPA// Raum
Berlin / 26.04 – 08.06.24

Artists

Francisca Khamis Giacoman
Cosima zu Knyphausen
Juan Larraín González
Lanna Leite
Alicia Luz Rodríguez
Craig Stewart

In my worn out copy of The Aleph, malformed by the humidity of an accident and the passing of the years, right on that page where, once upon a time, a small insect was stamped (and mummified), there is a part of Borges’ story The Immortal that similarly left a great impression on me. In it, the narrator, who has already unknowingly (by mistake?) drunk from the river that “purifies men from death” enters a palace in the coveted city of
the immortals, only to discover, horrified, how the architecture, of chaotic and incoherent forms, seems to obey a “complex senselessness”. The staircases instill a “singular fatigue” because of their irregularities, and the doors and corridors lead nowhere.

I had crossed a labyrinth, but the crisp City of Immortals frightened and repulsed me. A labyrinth is a house carved to
confuse men; its architecture, prodigal in symmetries, is subordinated to that end. In the palace I imperfectly explored, the architecture lacked an end.

In this exercise of imagination, immortality is not the eternal reverberation of a fixed identity, as we usually think of deities, or as we venerate our idols. On the contrary: those who do not die are beings described as Troglodytes who seem to not have to know language, because they have already forgotten it, in the dense oblivion of having already been everything. Stripped of any sense of urgency, they live self-absorbed in the inertia of thought and alienated from the physical world. Even from pity: when one of their peers falls into a deep quarry, he is scorched by thirst, but it takes seventy years before someone throws him a rope. The character’s self equally dissolves in his biography of potential, infinite as the permutations of the universe.

Homer composed the Odyssey; postulated an infinite term, with infinite circumstances and changes, the impossible is not to
compose, even once, the Odyssey.

Certainly, it is the notion of an end that makes us preciously pathetic, elegiac and ceremonial. And it is in relation to our life long challenge of resourcefulness, attached to some kind of meaning, that a notion of error emerges. As artists, we create our own methods, rules and techniques as ways, not only to navigate this, but to make our relationship to mistakes our profession.

But what is an error?

- A mistake that may or may not have legal consequences
- Something precise (as to how it differs from the norm)
- That which mistakes something false for something true.
- An involuntary movement
- Something that happens randomly, by chance
- Not letting go
- A Freudian slip
- An oversight caused by the tiredness and fatigue (the fatigue being caused by regular and standardized stairs)
- Relying too much on one’s own expertise
- Something fixable
- Something irreparable
- According to Gonzalo Rojas’ poem Mortal, which coincidentally was the last tweet of Felipe Camiroaga (one of Chile’s most popular television presenter, actor and falcon breeder) before dying in a plane crash: A mistake would be not to love each other.¹

If the opposite of an error is assertiveness, success, it is worth noting that not all mistakes, or what we perceive as wrong, happen accidentally. As I learned in a conversation with Alicia, it was Borges who translated, nine years after its publication, the novel Orlando: A Biography by Virginia Woolf, a fictional biography that spans over 300 years and tells the story of Orlando, who during this time ages only thirty-six years, lives multiple lives as a poet, nobleman and diplomat, and changes gender from a man to a woman. For several decades, this was the only and undisputed Spanish version. And yet, in it, Borges (mis)took something a bit beyond small ‘poetic licences’: his translation makes incisive, biased modifications, omissions of complete sentences and changes of pronouns that substantially alter and skew the author’s voice, as well as the brilliantly transgressive, satirical and queer quality of this text, one that has opened so many real doors to our collective imagination.

But without extending this introduction any further (time is precious!):

How true, and yet I mistook it! brings together works that deal with error, repetition and memory. For this exhibition at BPA Raum, I invited five fellow artists with whom I have shared in collaborations, friendship and dialogue, and who have in common, in their mortal biographies, a non-linear career in the arts. The title takes a phrase from Anne Carson’s poem Essay on what I think about most, in which Greek lyric by the hungry spartan poet Alcmán, containing an error of arithmetic, is analyzed to reflect on the idea of metaphor as what allows the mind to “experience itself ”, and error being what lies in the core of creativity and poetry.

At first it looks odd, contradictory or wrong, / then it makes sense. / And at this moment, according to Aristotle, /the
mind turns to itself and says: / “How true, and yet I mistook it!” / From the true mistakes of metaphor a lesson can be
learned.

– text by Cosima zu Knyhausen
Berlin 2024

1
Del aire soy, del aire, como todo mortal, / del gran vuelo terrible y estoy aquí de paso a las estrellas, / pero vuelvo a decirte que los hombres estamos ya tan cerca los unos de los otros / que sería un error, si el estallido mismo es un error, / que sería un error el que no nos amáramos.

I am of the air, of the air, like any mortal, / from the great, terrible flight, and I am here only passing through to the stars, / but I must say again that we humans are already so close to each other / that it would be a mistake, if the explosion itself is a mistake, / it would be a mistake not to love each other.

[Berlin Program for Artists]

Craig Stewart

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