ABSTRACT
Through this chapter, we will have a glance at how artists, be they writers, painters, dancers or musicians, have looked for spaces of imagination and creation. Spaces where emptiness calls us to otherness, to the artist him/herself, to the interstice between absence and felt presence. The field of art introduces us to an empty space and an anachronistic time – a space without coordinates, a time without past or future. It proposes an “operated spacing,” where the object becomes, like the trace, the sign of a loss, as Didi-Huberman (2014) would say. As Cervantes says in Don Quixote, only the poet can recount or sing about things not as they were, but as they should have been.
Art has the potential to create a state of exceptionality. It can generate a space of possibility, an encounter with the visible and tangible, which opens up and evolves before our eyes. Four cases accompanied by a personal narrative will explain this thesis: the pandemic autoethnographic narrative; the space taken away in Julio Cortazar's The House Taken Over (1951); the labyrinth as a refuge from external violence as embodied by Isabel Allende's The House of the Spirits (1982); the paradoxical space of Juan Rulfo's Pedro Páramo (1997). In turn, we will reflect on the longed-for, impossible space shown in Doris Salcedo's artwork Shibboleth (2007). Aesthetic perception opens up a new spatiality; the painting as a work of art is not in the space it inhabits; dance and theatre are developed in a space without objectives and without directions: it is a suspension of our history. Arts therapies unravel the ambiguous, contradictory and multiple sense of the space that humans have inhabited, still inhabit or create around them, making a space for transformation and transcendence. As in Cervantes’ work, the space of the arts fluctuates between what is perceived and what is felt, the trace of what has been and the yearning for its apprehension.
