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Contents : D j vu: real and imagined space in the work of Cristina Iglesias Cristina Iglesias Whitechapel Gallery London April 2003. Cristina Iglesias is an artist who plays with our relationship to space challenging the ways in which we perceive material objects with the insertion of moments of illusion and places of imagination. Iglesias turns us upside-down while we are still standing offers new worlds to enter yet holds them away presents us with materials that appear to be one thing yet we discover are quite another. Iglesias locates us within the distinctions traditionally held between real and imagined objective and subjective intimate and distant natural and artificial in the manner of surrealist writings and art works but following tendencies in post minimalist sculpture. My discussion of Iglesias draws on the theoretical work of Walter Benjamin and Luce Irigaray in particular their discussions of transitional places relational spaces and transformational actions. When Iglesias introduced her recent show at the Whitechapel London (April 2003) she described her work in terms of d j vu some things you see will remind you of others . My talk navigates these spaces of d j vu produced by the work real and imagined material and illusionary. I aim to create a number of inter-connected and juxtaposed scenes which pay attention to the particular positions that a critic adopts in relation to an art work and the aesthetic qualities of relationships in motion. The work is about space and place inside and outside intimacy and distance real and imagined natural and artificial. The work plays with our relationship to space challenging the ways we perceive space ground and sky relationships spaces that are offered for us to enter yet held away materials that appear to be one thing but we discover are quite another. It is important that you experience the work as a journey through the gallery a journey through space. As you walk through the works some things you see will remind you of others juxtaposition and sequence are important so is repetition. Sometimes you will see the same motif or think you see the same motif at other times the reference alters slightly. Iglesias work aims to transform the way we understand this gallery and the ways in which the works themselves relate to one another to their past lives. Tilted Hanging Ceiling 1997 I used to spend a lot of time as kid upsidedown. I would lie on the sofa flinging my head backwards looking up at the ceiling wishing it was the floor. It was so clean and white. there was no mess. It was unmarked by the past. If we look up at the plane suspended above us it is not a light canopy it is heavy heavy and thick. It is the kind of terrain one normally looks down onto. Is it the bottom of the sea Or is it a field of mushrooms Yet normally one would look down onto the top of a mushrooms yet here we are looking at the underside of a field of mushrooms.. Where would we need to be in order to look up at the underside of a field of mushrooms This is a place that will not reconcile the physical and the mental. Iglesias offers a place which can be entered in one way but not in another. I wonder whether this is spatial dialectics a contradiction held in one moment One the walls around the upside down mushroom field there are also the spaces in the wall images to occupy. Iglesias says these are models models to think about spaces models I work and play with for her models offer a way of thinking a way of drawing . The images are photographs of cut up cardboard boxes assembled to form a labyrinth or is it a town. The images are as tall as you are. To enter them at this scale is easy but to enter them when they are understood as the cardboard boxes they clearly reference is more difficult you will have to shrink. Where will you be then In some imaginative land or magic place Iglesias work reminds me of the worlds inhabited by Alice in Wonderland The Borrowers Flat Stanley all figures whose size or flatness allows them a different experience of the relationship between body and space. Iglesias asks us to be in many different places at once to be impossible spaces we can only do this through the embodied imagination. That s prepositions for you. They don t change in themselves but they change everything around them: words things and people prepositions transform words and syntax while pr -pos s transform men.1 Michel Serres has commented on the transformative role of prepositions that they possess a strong suggestive role that they are capable of changing everything around them. Some prepositions emphasise position the relation of an object or a subject to place such as on in between through. Others focus on relationships between subjects and objects for example among with and the directional for or to yet others contain elements of time as in beyon

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