The City Council of Mieres, through its Councilor for Culture, Rocío Antela, and by the hand of the Lev (Visual Electronics Laboratory), have done it again and that, again, the Pozu Santa Barbara (PZSB) is placed again at the forefront of large -format audiovisual facilities, in this case, with the inauguration of Speculum, In which the Dutch artistic collective, Smark, has made a reinterpretation of The Garden of Delicias, of El Bosco, based on themes such as digital identity, the behavior of the masses, the culture of surveillance or omnipresence of the brands, all reflected in their work.
Located in the overflow, in the middle of the Mining Valley of Turón (Mieres), the Pozu Santa Barbara, one of the most important and large of the Minera Basin of the Flow, maintained its activity from 1913 to 1995, when it stopped producing. It was the first mining well to be declared a good of cultural interest, in Spain, it was in 2008. However, the true cultural impulse was given in 2015 the City Council of Mieres, when the then councilor Juan Ponte made the Pozu a reference in the international artistic avant -garde with ‘Solid Light’ by Anthony McCalla success in style.
Since then, they have passed through the overflowing facilities and exhibitions of Asturian, German, Australian or Italian artists, such as ‘Blasting’, ‘Innerlight’, ‘Visual Bird Sounds’ U ‘dreamlike’. Now comes what is probably the installation of higher dimensions that Pozu has housed, with 18 meters of projection that occupy almost all of the Santa Barbara compressors room.
The Smak collective, based in the city of Breda, began working in the central cloth of this project in 2016, when they received the commission of Stedelijk Museum, to commemorate the fifth centenary of the death of Jheronimus van Aken, El Bosco (1516). For the museum of his city they made the central cloth of the triptych, whose brilliant success led them to continue their work to complete it with the other two panels.
The three panels that make up Speculum, which emulate almost reliable the great pictorial work that houses the Prado Museum, portray life in Eden, paradise and hell, getting a faithful reflection of current society and its discomforts, showing the image of a world in which people live hyperconnected, and maintaining a link, even impacting, even impact News, despite the fact that its creation began almost ten years ago.
In Edena landscape in pastel tones evokes a Silicon Valley Digital, where technology and hyperconnectivity promise an immaterial utopia. However, the apparent calm, hides a controlled reality and in constant surveillance by the power of large corporations. The screen on the left of the triptych is dedicated to Paradise. Finally, in the panel of YoNfieron the right, there is a chaotic and violent vision, where punishments are directly linked to the excesses of the digital age: overexposure in social networks, addiction to algorithms and massive information control.
The installation closes with two large screens that flank the digital triptych through which six archetypal characters parade, on a practically human scale, something that supposes a novelty in the facilities housed in the Pozu of the overflow. These characters are Big Dada, Cyberbully, Dynamo Twins, Crapivore, Egonaut and Mother. Each of them is meticulously characterized, reflecting different aspects of our hyperconnected society.
In this contemporary vision of Dante’s hell, where punishment reflects sin, Cyberbully shows an internet troll trapped and tormented inside a gigantic hashtag, while in Big Dada, surveillance cameras rebel against their own creator.
The obsession with online identity and digital narcissism are embodied in Egonaut and in many other figures that inhabit the side screens. Dynamo Twins represents an incessant work wheel, without rest, while crapivore personifies a being composed entirely of ultraprocessed products. For its part, Mother is presented as a feminized body that expels and welcomes characters, all controlled by a central entity.
Following the composition and perspective of classical Renaissance painting, Smack’s portraits place the characters in monumental and evocative landscapes: rocky mountains, burning skies and geometric gardens that reinforce the depth and drama of each image, facing a universe as fascinating as disturbing, where technology and society are intertwined in a relentless portrait of our time.
For Cristina de Silva to be able to work in the Pozu Santa Barbara is a real luxury, because those of the Lev are not galleries, build from “special and singular” spaces and what they found in the Valley of Turón allows them to develop projects that would otherwise be impossible. That is why Silva highlights the “powerful” cultural offer developed by the City Council of Mieres, betting on another way of orienting the territory and doing it with the same courage, he emphasizes, with which the Pozu Santa Barbara, who already in full boom of mining was avant -garde, worked.
Within the activities related to the Pozu Santa Barbara, and as a connection link between the audiovisual avant -garde and citizenship, from the Lev they have launched workshops that started with one destined for students in which, for five days, they learned to make mapping whose images and music were made with artificial intelligence. In the short term, more will arrive.
Speculum will remain open to the public until July 13, during the eleven to two in the afternoon and from four and a half to nine at night, during holidays and weekends. Guided visits were also organized for the months of April and May, whose squares are exhausted, although they will organize again for the month of June.
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