How can it be otherwise, we catch Oriol Vilanova (Manresa, 1980), the newly appointed representative of Spain at the Venice Biennial for the 2026 edition in a Brussels market, a city where it resides, becoming more copies of those those … Postcards that for more than two decades are the corpus of its artistic project.
Laugh when we ask if it has accelerated the turbo in the acquisition in the face of the fear that you do not have enough to fill the Spanish pavilion, a structure of about 900 square meters, although His set, after 20 years, brings together more than 50,000 entries: «Can you imagine? There are enough – confesses – but there is always room for more. In addition, there lies the base of the project: to display a continuity collection that is known incomplete, a utopian gesture because I can never have them all».
From there too The title of ‘The Remains’ for your Venetian proposal: «Postcards are the remains of remains, a material we no longer give importance, in disuse. A collection of postcards is not an exquisite collection, it is not something for which the big collectors fight. Are objects that are rescued, to which we give a second life», In fact, Vilanova values their repetition, when a card falls in his hands that already had:« It was Benjamin who talked about the fact that, with reproduction, the object, the work of art, would lose its aura. I believe the opposite: when a postcard recovers, a space is sought, it is sent, manipulated, it is given a new meaning. For a collector, a repetition as a whole is a mistake. It is something that I enjoy and put in value ».
The value of the market
The project, selected from seven invitations launched by a jury composed of Ignasi Aballí; the director of CGAC, Santi Olmo; the director of Ca2M, Tania Pardo; Agustín Pérez Rubio, last Spanish commissioner in the international event; Imma Prieto, responsible for Tàpies museum; Manuel Segade, From the Reina Sofía Museum; The editor Rosa Olivares and Santiago Herrero Amigo and Inma Ballesteros, On behalf of AECID, the market also values ”socio-economic space in the peripheries of the cities” in which characters of the most diverse converge (“artists like me, researchers, tourists, clueless …”) to the search for “materials that are the remains of societies, but that tell the history of them.” Blunt, Vilanova defines the market as «History digestion apparatus».
For Venice, the Catalan will have the support of Carles Guerra, who has chosen as commissioner: «He was the perfect candidate. It is true that I have worked with many others that would have worked well, but its character as an independent professional, to which I already knowit gives me security that for a proposal of such magnitude like that of the biennial I prefer to occur ».
From top to bottom, detail of the ‘Diumenge’ projects, at the Tàpies Foundation (2017); ‘Without distinction’, with the CA2M collection in this art center; and works in the Elba Benítez gallery, which represents it
In the city of the channels the collection will be deployed through all the rooms of the pavilion as if of the «Chapters of a novel It was»: «Each theme of it is a chapter; some longer, because it is easier to get material; others shorter; some complementing others; others entering contradiction … ». In addition, ‘The remains’ will include a parallel program of activities taking advantage of the artist’s training as a playwright, which will serve to activate the space in the months that the Biennial lasts from May to November: «They will be Other ways of working the visibility of images, that we still have to define ».
Vilanova assumes that there are already generations that do not know what a postcard is, or, at least, that they have never used them: «That interests me also because My approach to the object is not nostalgic. In addition, the device itself has already transcended its usefulness. How many headlines will you have published in ABC saying things like “a postal landscape”? The term has transcended in language. I like that kind of situations.
To him, the bug for collecting postcards came in a natural way, nothing systematized, “initially interested in books, which he was looking for in flea markets.” It is the “attraction for the object”, the power of the image, What begins to make sense of this compilation, and what converts it based on a long -distance, impossible artistic project, called to failure, which has introduced into spaces such as the CA2M wave Tàpies Foundation, where he already worked with war. The interesting thing about the whole is that it has its small base, in the insignificant, what is not given economic value, which, when it grows, overwhelms, is provided with a special entity: “I always say that the two ingredients that go from the arm and make this collection are time and chance”. It is a matter of time to know how it will flash in Venice.
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