the idiot
Curator: Martí Peran
Artist: Javier Peñafiel

Idiocy is not synonymous with anonymity (the dissolution of the subject in the common) or with stupidity (the misuse of intelligence); idiocy must be conjugated as a displacement of openness that suspends the centrality of reason, the model of subjectivity that shelters it (the person) and the devices that protect it (law, traditional political forms and models established communities). The idiot, against the violence of consensus, opens thought to a field of singularities that frees the subject from himself and throws him into the childish (non-personal) space of a full time. Through this opening outside of reason and its ideological and institutional continents, the idiot has a deposing force that allows him to confront the insignificance of what is real (the idiocy of the world) without abdicating his creativity. The idiot is thus the one who leads a retreat, not to keep quiet, but as a guarantee of attention and enthusiasm.

The project is presented as a heterodox archive with the purpose, not of capturing the idiot but, on the contrary, to open up his figure in numerous incarnations. The archive of idiots – real and fictitious – is accompanied by two tools of approach: its performative activation proposed by Javier Peñafiel and the reflections offered by Carlos Losilla and Miguel Morey on the figure of the idiot.