Recomptes @ Galeria Cànem
I am taking part in «Recomptes», an exhibition on historical memory organised by Galeria Cànem (Castellón) in collaboration with the GRMHC (Grup per la Recerca de la Memòria Històrica de Castelló). I present a selection of work from the (Un)refuges project.
Mar ARZA - Pilar BELTRAN - Vicent CARDA - Miquel GOZALBO - Isidre MANILS – Geles MIT - Marco Noris – Cristina PERELLO - Pepa L. POQUET - Ester PEGUEROLES - Vicente TIRADO DEL OLMO - Maria ZARRAGA
19 December 2014 — 10 February 2015
Galeria Cànem — Antonio Maura, 6 — 12001 Castelló de la Plana (Spain) — Tel. +34 964 228 879 / +34 670 369 847 — [email protected] — www.galeriacanem.com
Invitation (PDF): Recomptes
The Grup per la Recerca de la Memòria Històrica de Castelló (GRMHC) works with the aim of conveying to society a new kind of cultural information of a historical nature, with a purpose of dissemination and awareness-raising.
The Declaration of Human Rights and the Principles of International Law that protect the victims of violations of these rights, as well as the struggle against impunity, endorse this cause.
Galeria Cànem joins it from a plastic, aesthetic point of view, with the intention — using a different language, that of art — of helping to repair, together, the injustices.
Against the «tale», the «Recounting». Until now the official discourse, the narrative, was to digress, to dilute, to deny in order to forget, to conceal, to erase, to impose: un-memory against memory. Now we recount images to illuminate memory. By helping the Recount that has begun and is unfinished, we make reparation to the victims and the persecuted. By recovering Historical Memory we recover democratic memory in accordance with ethical, political and ideological values; we build a bridge between the facts still to be recovered and the victims and their descendants.
Because we are speaking of people who lived their time dramatically, and whom we now know to be part of a lost unity.
By now that past «is» the construction of a collective, a shared one, and with them we experience the lived events that become memory, aware that, to ease the feeling of loss, we can only store remembrance; thus memory becomes an archive that keeps the memory of the victims alive.
If the «GRMHC» expresses itself through articles, thoughts, research, documents, archives, fieldwork, human remains… now is the moment of art, of aesthetic commitment. These images, visual poetry — that is, what cannot be said — exist to speak of that which is hidden, sacred…
… MAR ARZA, PILAR BELTRÁN, VICENTE CARDA, MIQUEL GOZALBO, ISIDRO MANILS, Geles MIT, MARCO NORIS, ESTER PEGUEROLES, CRISTINA PERELLÓ, PEPA L. POQUET, VICENTE TIRADO DEL OLMO and MARIA ZARRAGA are the ones who provide the images, their vision of the conflict.
There is an alpha and an omega that encompasses the show, in the same way that the death of others, their memory, familiarises us with our own death. By reconstructing the past, we think identity.
Miquel Gozalbo, with a small iron sculpture meant to represent a bomb, gives form to the outbreak of war.
Isidre Manils, with the drawing of a skull (vanitas), is the omega, like a full stop to the tale and a motive for the «Recounting».
In the middle, the «compressed memory»: Mar Arza presents an everyday object, a photo frame, the zero point that bursts, undoing — with sensitivity — forgetting, deceit, concealment, shame… and, as she puts it: «may it not remain mud, ash, fossil… what should be “an urn of recovered life”».
Perhaps in the end, as the Iranian Sahar Selijami writes: «Time does not heal wounds, nor does it even bring back tears. When it comes to pain, time is nothing but a failed attempt to forget».
Against the great monuments that praise lies, the small great works that open the doors to life.
…And against oblivion, the images.
Against insensitivity, art.
This is how we say it at Galeria Cànem, with this exhibition that is yours.