“After turning it over in my mind, because this was a very specific commission, I decided to hand out one of the elements of the work to each of the guests at the ceremony, so that although the work is a single entity, each of the people that were there had a part, a fragment of this total work. What I did was get some sheets of DIN A4 and pour oil over them, making a stain that spread out as the paper absorbed it, and over which I did not have total control, because it depended on the paper, the amount of oil and so on. I then wrote on this stain one of the definitions of oil found in the dictionary and also all the senses of this word that appeared in the dictionary. On the day of the ceremony, each of us had one of these A4 sheets and we read out the part of the definition on our piece of paper. In this instance I combined two elements which are relatively common in my work to establish a complementary relationship between an image and a text. The image here would be the oil stain, which in each case assumed a different form, and the complement or textual support would be the definitions from the dictionary as a counterpart to the image. (…) This is a normal practice in my work, in which the text often takes on the quality of the image, and the image that of the text. One of the things that interested me was the idea that everyone should take part, the idea that the work was not unique and indivisible. Once I knew how many people would be coming to the ceremony, I did the same number of pieces of paper, so that each of the participants could take away a part as a souvenir or a residue of this action.”

Ignasi Aballí