The city is full of ghosts. Some wander the streets, casting their shadows on buildings and making almost inaudible noises. Others remain underground and only come out on designated dates. Some come from the past, others from the future and others have never existed nor will ever exist: they are in our nightmares and desires. There are many artists who have noticed their elusive presence and have dedicated part of their lives to invoking ghosts, to try to record their presence in drawings, photogravures, gramophones and poems. In the basement of the Conde Duque center in Madrid, eight contemporary artists these days expose their methods for talking to the city’s ghosts in the exhibition The deserted festivals. The title, taken from a surrealist poem by Alberti, Maruja Mallo’s first ascent to the underground (1929), sneaks through the works and traces connection points between them.
The installations, sculptures and drawings are distributed throughout that labyrinth of exposed brick naves that comprises the Vault Room, a dark space with nooks where each piece tells us about its ghosts with relative intimacy. On the way to the underground, Fernando Sánchez Castillo has created an LED sculpture that replicates the filament of the light bulb in the Guernica. Through its blinking, the sculpture calls in Morse to the 2,936 people executed between 1939 and 1944 in the surroundings of the Almudena cemetery; many still in common graves.
Elsa Paricio from Madrid also seeks to connect with the afterlife. through the NINES (Novel Institute Noticing External Signals). This fictional research center, based in the Paricio family garden in Guadalajara, aims to trace the extracorporeal journey of María de los Ángeles Paricio (1959-2020-?). The original method of spiritualism consists of evaporating sea water with Indian ink on large plastics that now hang at the entrance to the room, in a mixture of humor, mourning and poetic image.
The curators are aware that a theoretical framework that is perhaps too generic can confuse the visitor.
Clara Moreno Cela talks about other types of spectra in Backroom Seseña: those who hid behind the cranes of the city of Toledo at the height of the real estate bubble. With the crisis, these half-finished buildings became an urban desert to which Moreno Cela gives meaning. To do so he relies on terrifying internet legends (creepypasta). The drawings of half-finished buildings and the video of an impossible walk are accompanied by a poem printed on the door of an elevator about ghost cities and their many dangers: “May God help you if you hear something wandering around because rest assured that you will already hear it.” He has listened to you.”
Ana Laura Aláez, from the Academy of Rome, has collected the sounds of these ghosts in the form of techno music. Through powerful headphones you can listen to your EP Rome while contemplating Bernini’s obsessive drawings of the face of Blessed Ludovica Albertoni. By cyclically reproducing her face, which is the epitome of ecstasy, the artist seems to highlight the terror that excessive pleasure also generates. The techno finishes activating the brilliant sculptures and drawings; The verses that, among the music, the artist recites lead us to another vision of Bernini’s mystical and erotic dream: “A sound cries, / surrounds a will / without naming it, / listens to that breath, / begins another dance / with the ghosts / in disappearance.”
The specters pursue us like echoes, but also like shadows. Paco Chanivet has created a large planetarium with unique planets and extraterrestrial zoomorphs that orbit around a large idol, half alien and half shiny fossil. The shadows they cast run through the galleries and end up disappearing between the arches. The sinister also stars in Pere Llobera’s strange Bethlehem portal, based on a poem by Kenneth Patchen (The Kindness of Clowns). In a scene that could almost be considered idyllic, some ceramic clowns go to visit the author, hidden in a small house in the forest. His intentions seem doubtful. Near this miniature nightmare you can hear the voices of five neat sculptures that replicate the shapes of particular ceramic and wooden vases or urns. The sounds they make remind us of human voices, but they do not say anything intelligible. Its author, Carlos Monleón, has investigated the limits of our hearing capacity and, when we approach the sculptures, we feel that the sound is there, even though we cannot hear it. The voices show us his hiding place, but they don’t let us access it.
At the back of a gallery, and in a disjointed manner, Clara Montoya’s project on the law that grants rights to the Whanganui River in New Zealand is presented. Although the sculpture that accompanies the translated text of the law is evocative, the interest in linking the jurisprudence of the non-human and the news that a river can be a legal entity with the ghost story of the exhibition requires too much rhetorical carousing. big.
On the other hand, the never-built project by architect Luis Moya is very pertinent, with which the political meaning of the previous works is rounded off. In the middle of the Civil War, together with other comrades from the rebel side, he imagined an enormous funerary complex with a large central pyramid, which inevitably reminds us of the Cuelgamuros valley. In the room hang the never-executed plans of the pharaonic work, although the protagonist is a drawing of his that is quite far from technicality: in it, a large building made up of bones collapses among skeletons that emerge from it.
A revenge for the dead in the face of the horror of war? The curators do not present their conclusions in this regard, although they do give all possible information to the visitor: in addition to the posters, printed on red fabric and illuminated near each work, at the entrance to the exhibition we are offered a fanzine, a sheet of room, some QR codes with audios of each artist and information about guided tours. Perhaps they are aware that the diversity of ghosts can confuse the visitor in a theoretical framework that is perhaps too generic, into which they seem to put too many things. However, the works are so powerful and the space contributes so much to their effect that the atmosphere is enormously achieved, thanks to an almost miraculous balance between “experience” and contemplation. It is easy to recognize the ghosts of the city when we leave the underground.
The deserted festivals. Count Duke. Madrid. Until July 21.
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