Alibi is what we commonly call the excuse a person uses to justify that they are somewhere else at the moment an event takes place. When it comes to giving shape to an exhibition, an alibi is a technical way of placing yourself somewhere else, relocating oneself but with the ultimate purpose of appearing present. An alibi allows you to think that it is someone else who is directing operations, in such a way that the work consists in putting yourself at the service of said direction. This exhibition is the outcome of a system of alibis in which the most complicated part was to conceive pretexts to restrict the infinite possibilities (formal, positional, executive, relational), allowing for a wide range of individual conflicts, thus freeing us from the accumulation of coercions concealed by the inertias of all convention.

As a child, I was told that the old system once used to create usable paths up a mountainside consisted in loading a donkey with a heavy burden and setting it loose in the direction of the mountaintop. The donkey economizes its energy to the utmost, always taking the most horizontal slopes possible, which, zigzagging, will lead it to the top with the least force possible in relation to the burden it is carrying. Once the path has been outlined by the animal, it would then be widened and adapted for human use. The “form”—the zigzag path—could be viewed as the result of an equation that includes: 1. A pre-existing obstacle: the mountainside; 2. A desire or goal: to climb the slope; 3. An instrument for measuring and calculation: the donkey, which has a built-in energy-saving mechanism; and, finally, 4. The equation needs something extra: the burden.

Likewise, in the artistic process, in order to arrive at a form— be it the zigzag or be it the mountainside whose slope and height remain unknown to us until we reach the top—we only know intuitively that we have to load a structure to the maximum, with a large quantity of materials. Real, Ideal and Vital materials that ensure that the relationship between the weight of them all and the animal’s energy-saving mechanism will create a path. A path that, when used, will tell us the size of the slope, and when arriving to the end (if we do) will show us the form —the zigzag and the height of the mountain. Just like the donkey, we have to come up with subterfuges, dangling any kind of carrot before us, encouragements that lead the animal we are in a certain direction. The specificity of the artistic process is that we are all these things: donkey, mountainside, burden, track and carrot. Once the foregoing has been fulfilled, a structure or strategy could give us a form, but no form in itself will guarantee us meaning, because it is always somewhere else and will depend on the complexity of the question and the motivation, and the way in which you combine the factors that intervene in relation to the genuine need of our action.

Besides a place where you exhibit finished works, an exhibition can function as a device that precipitates processes to publically and externally digest the material with which we have been working. I recently saw a documentary on television in which it describes how some spiders, who have no stomach, paralyse their prey with poison, and inject digestive fluids that produce an external digestion of the animal inside its own teguments, after which the spider sucks out the resulting juices. In the same way, this exhibition Animals that Support the Weight of Mysterious Burdens is a digestion, a long rumination in open view, where each one of the gallery’s three spaces corresponds to a different part of a stomach; a place of production, where it is a question of avoiding the idea of exhibition in order to be able to produce an exhibition.