YME Focusing your whole artistic practice from individuality is to deny yourself the possibility to aspire to share with others the fruits of something that doesn’t only relate to you, but to everyone equally. It isn’t only a few creators who have questioned such rigid notions of authority that we continue to manage with in the 21st century. It’s problematic to talk about the author today through art theory. The conception of the solitary artist in their studio has been turned upside down and has turned to speaking about the artist as a manager, as a generator of spaces to mobilize ideas. P350 as a project isn’t a clumping of individuals in the way that cultural industries implicate. In some of the conversations poet Omar Pérez and I had around 2009, the idea emerged to launch an editorial project in dialogue with our context —flexible, mutant, independent of the industry. A project that through horizontality would reunite a flow of information that would function to amplify other voices, avoiding the hierarchy of discourse and that sought additionally to open a space from creativity, with the goal to achieve cultural autonomy. That’s how P350 was created, a self-managed publication produced with paper recycled from cement sacks and constituting a platform capable of visualizing the proposals of graffiti artists, tattooists, designers, visual artists, spontaneous creators, emerging poets, etc. In a strict sense, P350 isn’t a magazine nor a fanzine, but a space of creative freedom that questions the protagonism of editorial management. A horizontal space of discussion that analyses the production of the magazine, as we traditionally understand it— editorial board, series, networks of production and distribution—and that, for example, doesn’t pay ISBN and declares to be anti-copyright. It’s about a gesture that’s consolidated through interactions sparked by the presentations of the project, which become a space to voice and propitiate dialogue about varied themes, creating personal networks and exchanges. We organize exhibitions, lectures and workshops that function as springs to promote debate and the mobility of thinking, an excuse to get together, share something and recuperate spaces of collective production.
Yornel J. Mártinez Elías, P350, 2009, editorial project. Courtesy of the artist.
Yornel J. Mártinez Elías, P350, 2009, editorial project. Courtesy of the artist.
Yornel J. Mártinez Elías, P350, 2009, editorial project. Courtesy of the artist.
DC Once upon a time, excess was praised as the ultimately necessary means for artistic experimentation. It seems that now we absolutely feel the need to get back to the essentials (for the sake of the environment, for the collective, for our own mind). It’s interesting to think that when we feel cornered we feel we need to get back to something... of course we are only human and have to work with what we know from experience. But it seems also inevitable to include in the equation other living things so that we can learn or relearn ways of enduring. Can enthusiasm overcome anxiety?
YME One participates in many realities in the same moment. For example, in the space of politics everything is happening at the same time and is being traversed by many views and ways of understanding. Evidently many things escape us, or we decide to focus our vision on a concrete point, something as ample as the universe or as specific and minuscule as an atom. In that space many experiences can occur and cross. I think that’s what I try to capture from the sensorial to the sentient. An electroshock of impressions...
Yornel J. Mártinez Elías,
P350, 2009, editorial project. Courtesy of the artist.
DC Is the world hysteric? And, if so, is that a bad thing?
YME From your question, another inquiry arises for me: how to maintain some sanity in an “order” that tends constantly toward schizophrenia? Pataphysics comes to mind and how some of its ideas help you to reflect better about other systems of thinking because they include paradox, the absurd and the taste for irony. A mental illness has invaded the planet, it is banality. The other day I heard a phrase on Cuban television that caught my attention. They were talking about the elimination of the zones of silence, referring to the arrival of communication mechanisms to the most remote places. Calling that the eradication of the zones of silence seemed absurd to me because it converted silence into something criminal. Its natural, or I prefer to say logical, that confronted by the fast-paced avalanche of progress, silence seems like a negligible fringe, something like weeds. In the end it’s a byproduct, sawdust in our fabric of happiness. Regulations for what’s called “sound pollution” aren’t more, but less lucky than other regulations designed to reduce, you can say, disguise constant pollutants. However, silence and quietness are, in a way, prime material and the foundation for any creation, which is unthinkable without them; it is incomprehensible to create without taking them into account, without loving or protecting them, or even studying them, because there’s so much richness in that emptiness of objectivity. And if language, in the end, isn’t anything else except symbolism, and if, to culminate, that language says that being silent means abiding, I ask again —What is silence?
Yornel Martínez Elías, El caballo de las praderas, 2006. Landscape intervention.
