SakanaGallery

gallery.exhibitions

Storyboard

Since 2023, Juan Aizpitarte has been working on “destello”, a fiction documentary feature film that explores the realm of shamanic culture in Peru and is currently in the editing phase. Storyboard does not illustrate that film; it expands it through other media. The charcoal drawings and previously unseen sculptures gathered here function as an archive of the fantastic, that place where a diffuse memory finds material form before becoming fixed as an image. The drawings unfold a dreamlike world made of minerals, animal bodies and vegetal motifs. The sculptures, close to the theriomorphic, offer volumes halfway between creature and raw matter, possible forms seeking to exist in probable places. Between these two disciplines circulates the same intuition: to keep alive what memory threatens to dissolve, without forcing its translation. The relationship with shamanism is not taken for granted. Juan Aizpitarte does not document a rite, nor does he appropriate an imaginary world. For years, he has observed the gestures, ceremonies and cults that converge within this field, allowing that observation to settle equally into drawing, sculpture and the editing of the film. To work with memory is to accept subjective reality as a principle of objectivity, and to trust the processes that unfold between wakefulness and dream. Storyboard is a literal title. Each work is a possible shot, an audiovisual idea released into the space of the gallery, where objects and images allow for multiple narratives without imposing any one in particular. What is shown is not the result of a film, but its parallel thought, that pleasure of creation which precedes the project and exceeds it. A fertile ground for what is still to come.