FERNANDO PALMA RODRÍGUEZ

Palma’s presentation at Taipei Biennial 2020, titled You And I Don’t Live On The Same Planet, started with an unexpected ‘encounter’ with ambiguous individuals—machines for some, living for others. The artist acted as a translator or even a diplomat of different ‘cosmologies,’ different ways of articulating the material and the social order.

The artist’s background was significant for the works in Taipei Biennial: in the Nahua perspective, humans are not the only ones to have a persona. According to Palma,

A Persona is defined as somebody who you can have a conversation with, the opposite of an inert object that would be out of volition. A table, a chair, a car, or even a phenomenon such as the wind or attributes of a landscape, say a mountain or the sky, are all personas. The virtue of such understanding is borne of a reciprocity of necessity. It is rather like a symbiosis where the ability of communication, whether it is chemical or genetic, is linked through responsibility and therefore it allows for the condition of possible friendship, not only with other human beings, but with the surroundings as such.

In Palma’s view, therefore, his creatures are alive. Electricity is not so much an objective phenomenon as the vital force that allows the work to flow, and hence a person in its own right.

Text courtesy Taipei Fine Arts Museum