“The moon came to the forge (…) the child is looking at it,” reads the first verses of Romance of the moonpoem from the book gypsy ballad by Federico García Lorca. The man from Granada describes in the text how a boy is experiencing “the duende”, a mysterious force that has the ability to move and transform the viewer. The notion of that supernatural power that drives individual and collective change is the axis of the exhibition In the moved air organized by the Reina Sofía Museum and the Center de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB), open from this Wednesday until March 17, 2025. The title borrows another part of the Romance of the moon.
“An image can transform your life but you don’t know it. Emotions have a relationship with the unconscious and poetic images can be a means to understand it: what is in my memory? What is my desire?” explains the curator of the exhibition and French philosopher Georges Didi-Huberman. In reality, the exhibition is an essay by this theorist of visual semiotics, “an exposition by a Frenchman about emancipatory Spain.” To spread his idea about art as an activator of personal and social revolution, he has displayed almost 300 works, including paintings, sculptures, installations, photographs or films by 140 artists, varied and with no apparent connection, such as Goya, Dalí, Picasso, Goethe, Victor Hugo , Miró, Passolini or Rodin.
Side by side, a photographic montage by Bertolt Brecht and a cinematographic sequence by Béla Tarr can share the same wall, the choreographies of dancer Israel Galván as an engraving by Goya. The common thread here is the emotions that an image can awaken and its subsequent shock, understood as a concatenation of sensations that affect an ensemble, an environment and its relationships. “The question I ask is not whether emotions are good or bad, but the use we give them. A propaganda image is an image that produces an emotion it captures but this, for example [señala una de las fotografías de la serie Una vez y no más de Corinne Mercadier]is more ambiguous, it poses a question that is hypothetical, poetic, it opens our gaze and, when it opens, so does an emancipatory thought,” says Didi-Huberman.
To develop his thesis, the French art historian has divided the exhibition into seven chapters: childhood, thoughts, faces, gestures, places, policies and childhoods. The leitmotif is the work of García Lorca that runs through all the rooms with his handwritten drawings or photographs. The first and last parts are both dedicated to the first phase of human life: childhood. Thus, the exhibition opens with a young Ana Torrent in a sequence of The hive by Víctor Erice, kids sitting on Peironcely Street in a bombed-out Vallecas captured by Robert Capa or the astonished, curious and distrustful look of a child watching a play, portrayed in the short ten minutes older by Herz Frank.
“The question in a museum or in any cultural institution is how we look. García Lorca has an answer and it is magnificent: we need to look with the eyes of a child and ask for the moon,” says Didi-Huberman. The second chapter, ‘Thoughts’, reflects how human beings have wanted to explain and understand emotions and how they are evoked. It is displayed from a copy of The expression of emotions in man from Charles Darwin, to a study of eye expressions carried out by José García Hidalgo. In this part, through documents and philosophical essays, Descartes’ theories and Kant’s theories dialogue.
In faces, the attempts to transform into plastic material the range of expressions that a face can produce are collected. There are the head studies of Alberto Giacometti, the sculpture Screaming Montserrat Mask by Julio González or two pieces, in wax, rough and poorly defined, that Medardo Rosso molded from his son’s head. But emotions not only use the face as a vehicle, they are also expressed in body language (hands, dancing bodies), the basis of the chapter ‘Gestures’. In it, the histrionic movements of the German dancer, pioneer of the performance, Valeska Gert, portrayed by Suse Byk. Involuntary gestures, associated with madness or experimentation with psychotropic substances, are also included with works by Antonin Artaud or Dalí.
The most abstract and inconcrete side of In the moved air is the chapter dedicated to ‘Sites’. Not only for hosting pieces by Miró or Lucio, but for the concept that Didi-Hubermann has of the space: “Places altered by the tragic element of human emotion, impregnated with emotions and desires.” From the unreal we move on to the tangential and punctual through the ‘Policies’ section. The emotion of an image can become a generator of social movement, of mass rejection, as proven by Goya’s war engravings, Julio Ubiña’s photographs of wakes or the documentary The rage by Pier Paolo Passolini. “In that film we have two joint themes: the mourning of the women of the miners killed by a gas explosion and the explosion of the atomic bomb.”
Passolini’s film connects with the last room, which returns to childhood, but in a more raw and visceral way. Drawings of the surviving children of Hiroshima are hung alongside those of other Syrian refugee minors. One of the latter draws a series of bombs falling on a family, the face of one of them traces small tears. It is the look of a child transformed by an image, just like one who sees the moon in the sky. Romance of the moon by García Lorca.
#Lorca #taught #breath #image
