Meeting points or In search of the Euler line

Nicolas Paris lives and works in Bogota, Columbia. Central to his practice are pedagogical strategies and communicative techniques informed by his years teaching in rural Columbia, as well as a selection from history and and the history of educational philosophy. Subjects in his research range from the Aristotelian concept of skhole, to the principles of the French medieval organisation of craftsmen Compagnons du Devoir, the writings of French philosopher Joseph Jacotot (1770-1840) and forms of dissidence enacted by Argentina’s first trade union, organised in 1886. Much of his work is organised by geometrical principles, which frame his characterisation of space as designating “invisible relations.” He writes that space “has the ability to fill itself with codes, speak, multiply and limit what happens around it. Based on this idea it offers opportunities to start dialogues and exchanges, so that it can work as a pedagogical tool.” He conceives of the gallery as an educational space, or classroom, and his works as exercises.

The engagements they encourage his viewers to have result in interactions he calls workshops. This choice of language points to the works’ social aspect, and resists the characterisation of art as without function, by highlighting art’s educative capacity in a way that dislocates both art and education from the restraints usually imposed by their relative institutional frameworks. This work is based on the Euler Line, named after the 18th century mathematician Leonhard Euler who, in 1765, showed that the orthocenter, circumcenter, and centroid of all non-equilateral triangles could be connected by a single line.

Paris sees the collinearity which characterises the Euler line as representative of the space of potential connection between people, noting “we have often said that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. I would like to say that the most effective distance between two human beings is an imaginary line.” These relations are symbolised by the work’s installation of two groups of stools: “the larger group draws a triangle and traces the three centers within it, the smaller group extracts the smaller triangle projected from these three centers.” The piece works as a metaphor for the results gained from engaging in various and multiple forms of connection. It reflects Paris’ larger idea of an occult curriculum, which consists of “the things that the participants/students learn through the experience of attending a classroom/institution besides the educational objectives of such institutions.” In line with this description, his work might be characterised as adopting a secondary status to the forms of action and dialogue performed by viewers, which he sees as constituting the real work of his practice. “For me,” he says, “the artistic work is not an end-result in and of itself, but rather a starting point and catalyst for a more elusive, ephemeral and polyvalent experience.”