Muttering
Incantations

Nadja Quante

[…] During her one-year studio fellowship at Künstlerhaus Bremen, Hurtado Otero explored vessels as archives and carriers of invisible histories. In her new work, titled The Carrier, The Pot, The Instrument, the artist merges video, sound, text, and objects into an installation, in which each element is a conveyor of a story. She tells a story of bodies in the interplay of the five elements of earth, water, fire, air, and space. The video camera circumnavigates an object with five interconnected vessels, which can also be seen on a dry riverbed of stones in the installation. Five women feel and examine the ceramic body, the surface, the shape, and the inner space of the vessel.

They swing the vessel and let water run from one body of the vessel to the next — just as stories are passed from one body to another. They make the object resonate — without the sound being audible because the video remains silent. An English text in the subtitles of the video tells a poetic story that unfolds in interweaving strands: A conversation between a vessel and a woman, a story about the relationship between humans and fire. Sounds recorded with the vessel can be heard through speakers in the room — the sounding body of the vessel, knocking, water, a voice speaking into the vessel. The story emerges in the in-between — in the parallelism but not synchronicity of image, text, sound, voice, object and landscape. It challenges the linearity that usually is ascribed to history and replaces it with different strands of histories. In Hurtado Otero’s poetic approach, the vessel becomes the embodiment of earth, water, fire, air, as well as the space — the ether in which it was formed.

“Because I listen to everything, and to listen to everything means to embody chaos.”