M HKA Ensembles

Installation, variable dimensions.

Collection: Courtesy of the artist.

Having investigated the life of Roberto Bolaño for several years, Alain Ayers could be seen as a detective-like figure. In 2016, Ayers undertook a residency in Chile for six weeks at Casaplan, Valparaiso, which enabled him to further research Bolaño’s life and work. Time spent in Barcelona and Blanes also provided further time to ‘follow’ Bolaño, looking at the time he lived there. The Distance Between Here & Now could be experienced as a filmic mise-en-scene contemplating some fragments of places from Bolaño’s life, or what Tarkovsky has called a ‘metaphysical scenario’, an inner world of characters. Around an opened/split wall, we see a video of Atacama roads, a silvered entrance, a fragmented table of archived references (momentos), a geometric device measuring impossible inversions, and the contemplative (endless) horizon of Blanes. Bolaño was always fond of quotations, clues and memories. The work forms a space in which one can project and imagine one’s own time with “ghosts”, who as Bolaño also noted, exist outside of time.