Eva Lootz’s objects have handles and holes, simulating devices that ask to be activated, handled and held. They are sensorial products that cry out to be touched and listened to. Lootz’s installations and works—many of her early pieces are associated with orality and the act of eating—often “speak” about the process of study, of interaction with time, with space, with riverbeds, with subtle movement, with pauses, with the slumber of the inert and with the apparent stillness of timelessness.

7 Pieces was first presented at Otros Abanicos (Other Fans) at Sala de Exposiciones Banco Exterior, a group exhibition in 1985 curated by Natacha Seseña and commissioned by Fundación Banco Exterior, for which 29 artists were invited to decorate small or large traditional Spanish fans or Japanese round fans with total freedom. In 1988 the show toured to the Spanish Institute in New York, and in 1990 to Palacete del Embarcadero in the port of Santander. The exhibition and its accompanying catalogue provided a context for the works with texts penned expressly for the occasion by writers like Francisco Umbral, Camilo José Cela, Antonio Gala and Elisa de Rojas, among others. To prepare the exhibition, the artists were provided in advance with fans of several sizes. Eva Lootz dismantled the ones she was given, arranging their parts with other elements she produced herself, focusing on the element of opening and closing for her variations.

Throughout her decades-long art practice, Lootz has been creating living sculptures and installations that explore the boundaries of the body, expand the sentient process and caress exceptional times and processes, always in quest of an active listening to what goes unnoticed, to those slow and silent things that the always accelerated Western world is unable to pay attention to. That is the context for the emergence of the paraffin hand, that speaks about perception, about the senses and, when connected to the fan, is a source of the cooling action and a capturer of air.

Also included in this work are pieces of felt soaked in paraffin. In the process of production, Eva Lootz makes the most of the physical properties of the materials, which are soaked and squeezed in order to stain and “cook”—in evident allusion to the afore-mentioned orality and eating—architectures that function as bridges between the body and the perceptible.

In this work we also observe a device made up of gilded bronze flutes. A customary resource in the artist’s practice, the conical shape, with openings and closures at either end, underscores the contrast of opposites, the empty and the full. As part of an ensemble of elements reflecting on the fan, an item traditionally associated with women, the flutes almost seem like a bouquet of figures of polished and cold beauty.

In the exhibition catalogue the work was paired with a text by Jaime Gil de Biedma called “Aire: Nada” (Air: Nothing). In it, the writer recalls his life in the Philippines and punkahs, the large collective fans manually operated by a young servant during the hot afternoon hours.