Looking becomes an exercise in mathematical precision when the focal distance is measured in millimeters. Space, object, and eye merge into one. Corners accumulate more than they can hold, threatening the straight line. Excess risks blurring the shape of things, and the opacity of the atmosphere doesn’t help at all. If only it were penumbra, a moderation of light, we could see some stars peeking out among the shadows. But these are dazzling darknesses, a white so cold it almost looks blue, flash-colored. Penumbra requires longer exposure, but brightness too demands accommodation. When material is packed too closely together, it tends to behave like a block, but without adhesive the union is fragile and the agglomerate easily falls apart. Matter gets disoriented with alarming ease. What remains to be seen is whether this loss of form can be harnessed to reconfigure a new one, a form that opens possibilities. El vuelto / The Return (Julia Spínola – etHALL) as a generous, non-extractive dialogue with sculpture. Gathering small acts, gestures, and arrangements that allow your gaze on the world, your gaze of the world, to turn ever so slightly.

Julia Spínola, El vuelto. Courtesy © etHALL

Keep tracing the corners, invoking tiny interventions. Collecting, compiling, pointing out, marking, inhabiting passageways, spaces for everyone and for no one, searching where there is nothing (LUCE – ProjecteSD). Where everything is, only hidden, as life hides in an embrace. The ephemeral, which no longer exists. That which exists but is condemned to disappear; that ceases to be protagonist or even supporting character, to become part of the stage, to integrate and fuse with it at a molecular level. The power of looking life in the face and preserving it at the back of the eyes until they dry out. Stroking weeds as if they were the body hair of the world. Combing ditches and massaging rubble. What good is it to stroke a cat? There is no material production, no surplus, no accumulation. This is about something else.

Nothing in impulsive life seems truly gratuitous. From the moment interpretation directs the very process (the struggle of emotion to endure against the instinct of propagation), evaluation intervenes, that is, the price; but the one who bears all the costs, who will in one way or another pay, is the agent constituted by the place in which the struggle unfolds, where a possible or impossible compromise is trafficked or negotiated: the body itself^[1]Klossowski, P. (1998). La moneda viviente.

There are bodies that are people, and others that carry the imposed struggle of reaching that status. Being the one with no name, the one nobody cares about. Speaking with mirrors and building floats out of cotton, curious about the stars that emerge. The burden of the male weighs too much, even though all bodies are strong. The back gives way, the shoulders collapse, the legs tremble, the hand breaks. That broken little wing that carries a dirty, sticky, rich inheritance, inflated with life, with orgy and perverse play. Neither shame nor respect. Fight. Solidarity with a people who, even if not your own, stand exactly at the level of your eyes. A hinge bears all the tension of two structures, of their opposing forces that struggle for sovereignty. To be the “in-between” is to have a heart broken into pieces and scattered, but also to have many homes. The trap is the moment when, no matter how comfortable you may be, you cannot imagine other places to project yourself toward. Options shrink, one by one or drastically, and your body becomes both refuge and prison. Entering, out of desperation, into an “inter-animated” space, or between souls, trying to remember who said “freedom,” amid convulsions. Trapped in the gears of history. The problem is to create, to create now, to create beauty, to create something, to create something that has to do with you, that has to do with the now, that has to do with bombs, with everything exploding and with the end of the world. The honesty of a child, the frankness of a rifle, the fatality of a small piece of metal. The body split open, all colors bursting forth. La monnaie vivante / The Living Currency (Ocaña, Wifredo Lam, Niki de Saint Phalle – Mayoral) in a moment of acute inflation.

Staying together, repeated at least twelve times, as a mantra. Against the commodification, militarization, and dispossession of life’s basic elements. Despite having the tongue inflamed and still being obliged to speak, even knowing that every phoneme mistreats and corrupts. La glossia (algunas urgencias) / Glossia (Some Urgencies) (Lauren Gault, Ariadna Guiteras – Dilalica), demanded by the present moment. Who can stop? Against the denial of otherness, embrace and transformation into a monstrous, marvelous collectivity. To feel the core of the mist and find the concealed, warm night; a heart of darkness so dense it seems like an onion of black velvet. To look with the fingertips and not be afraid, to let touch speak to us and practice the rhythm of the heart. To confuse and be confused with, instead of trying to signify what is ungraspable. To be, in movement. To avoid the single, reductionist purpose dictated by clarity as a dogma of higher understanding; or, put another way, to close your eyes from time to time and let things unravel and their boundaries blur.

(Featured image: Lauren Gault, Ariadna Guiteras, glossia (algunas urgencias). Courtesy © Dilalica)

---

11th Barcelona Gallery Weekend, 18 – 21 September
24 galleries in Barcelona and L’Hospitalet de Llobregat + more than 50 artists. Complete list of galleries here.

All galleries exhibitions + new section FLASH open their doors on Thursday September 18, and they will be on display all weekend. Check exhibitions program here. 

Parallel activities: meetings with artists, performances, talks, guided tours or family visits. Check the parallel program here.

9th edition Acquisition Program, all info here.

ADN Galeria during Barcelona Gallery Weekend 2023 with Bouchra Khalili and Abdelkader Benchamma. Photo © Eva Carasol