Negotiating Picu Cuturruñau

Walk, resulting in audio-work in Spanish and English, recording a dialogue describing the joint-negotiation of a mountain route. Laboral, Spain. 2008

Commissioned and produced for the exhibition There Is No Road at LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial, Asturias, Northern Spain.

6-channel audio

2009

12^th December 2008 - 16^th March 2009

Review by Melissa Gronlund in Frieze (April 2009)

Catalogue available.

"In a more recent work I directly addressed these moments when the shared-decision of which path to take becomes apparent and their consequence is recognized not only in terms of navigation, but also as significant moments of dialogic interaction. In Negotiating Picu Cuturruñau (Nov 2008) I walked with a shepherd across the face of a mountain in Asturias in Northern Spain. Our route-finding was left to negotiation - a simultaneous negotiation between us and of the mountain. Each point of decision-making - of deciding which way to go - was moderated by the weighing of the hazards and our ability to negotiate them. At each point, our imaginations ran rife - at one moment pushing us onward; limiting our movements the next. At each point, as Dorothy Wordsworth noted, (Wordsworth, D. 1991 p.57) we were at risk of being 'bewildered' - a condition that is ours to be imagined: beyond a simple 'being lost', transforming us into the wild - or a creature of it - overrun by the wilderness. These are the moments, when our imaginations also run wild, ahead of us…"

"For… Simon Pope…the mountains beckon. In their monumentality, they put into perspective human effort and human time. But images of mountains can no longer escape co-option into the European tradition of the sublime. In these experiments with time, there arises a further twist in the road: that the one who experiences it is always two, or three, or more. The road not only dissolves the insistent ego of contemporary capital, but evokes, enables and encourages another multiplicity, a social self who undertakes to act across languages, to help and care, to be experienced by the road as much as to experience it."

—Sean Cubitt, The Road (No Road) 2008

View back to the start of the walk at Somiedo

Michel looking down scree slope, towards our destination

Dani recording the dialogue- session after the walk, with Michel and translator, Maria

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