ABOUT THE ARTISTS AND THEIR EXHIBITED WORKS

Carlos Álvarez Gil (Vigo, 1985)

Carlos Álvarez Gil explores the world of childhood and uses children's images to speak about violence, power and inequality from a critical, ironic point of view. The materials are very varied, although there is a recurring use of toys (the real object and its representation), which are used to reflect on and give a critical view of today's world. Dad, when I grow up, I want to be a policeman! (2013) is an installation made up of toys which, when lit by a lamp, project the silhouette of a violent theme on the wall of the hall. The interesting part is not only the use of a child's object to deal with the subject of violence, but also the idea of play itself, implicit in the process for assembling the parts. The work is presented to spectators as an apparently casual game, but it is very elaborate and carefully planned.

At a time of a crisis of values and great social movement, this piece refers to the state security forces. A state which uses fear and force to muffle the voices caused by its own distrust and poor management. The presence of childhood seeks to awaken a feeling of guilt regarding the legacy we are leaving to future generations. This piece has two levels of perception: one corresponds to the object and its accumulation; and the other corresponds to the projected image, the shadow. "In the theatre of shadows, light projects the reality that hides our innocence."

Carla Andrade (Vigo, 1983)

Geometry of echoes (2013) is a non-narrative project that uses landscape to reflect on the representation of the void in space, symbolised by the colour white. Emptied landscapes as an allegory of sensorial deceit and a metaphor of fragility. Study of the limits of matter: absence, invisibility, unintelligibility and mystery... The investigation this proposal puts forward is a kind of tautology of John Berger’s words: "the real content of a photograph is invisible because it does not come from a relation with shape, but rather with time". Meaning lies in the awareness between these two poles of absence and presence. Furthermore, it presents a contradiction since light, which is what makes it possible to reveal things, is white; however, here there is a play between what is legible, which is not light (the colour white) but rather the parts in colour, and what is illegible, what is not revealed for spectators: the empty part, the non-shape. Thus, the object is divested of the image and priority is placed on the relation between shapes and the combination of colours as a method for finding the intrinsic rhythms of the image and the essence of the initial emotional response.

Arrieta/Vázquez
Usue Arrieta (Arrasate, Gipuzkoa, 1979) / Vicente Vázquez (Tarragona, 1976)

Arrieta/Vázquez use the artistic and cinematographic context to publish their activity, which they define as a long-term project with a visible form they see as transitional and transitive. They understand their practice as a way of investigating and experimenting with the possibilities of collectiveness. Their work, in film sequences, texts, slideshows or other space-time devices, seeks to remake society. Their recent projects, closely linked to territory, flirt with the notion of choreography. These works allow them to reflect on post-industrial production relations. In Canedo (2010), a family portrait in front of a tree is used as a starting point for a process. The main line of the process is the Vázquez family and the past and present fabric of production in their town (Quintela de Canedo) in the province of Ourense.  

Pablo Barreiro (Meaño, Pontevedra, 1982)

The series titled Empilhamentos (2013) is based on a stay in Lisbon in the context of clear references to the past. In everyday life, when walking around the city, the structure and spaces of the shops, bars and streets… including the base culture, the Fado, are laden with (ultra)past, melancholic transcendence... saudade. Accordingly, almost unconsciously, these objects from another time are apprehended and we are unable to ignore the contrast of times in past objects laden with references we are now perhaps unable to decipher.Empilhamentos gives rise to disorder when it tries to understand these forms, in constant series, composing new collages of forms that oppose the basic nature of each object. Porcelain, with its pure, subtle white and glaze, gives them a new neutrality and new interpretations while it maintains the weight of the past.

Misha Bies Golas (Lalín, Pontevedra, 1977)

Misha Bies Golas presents a set of recent works distributed in different spaces of the exhibition, working as footnotes, as clarifications or comments on the works opposite which they are located. A sculpture positioned in front of the facade, at the museum entrance (a block of granite "for sale" taken from its natural context and placed next to the institution); a minute leaflet made of three monochrome elements collected during the day; the spines of two books brought to the museum from a shop window thanks to the plasticity of their slogans; two books (black-and-white) that came into contact at the workshop and, in the exhibition, are capable of evoking the Malevich of Black square on white background; a nail through the great essay on Romanticism by Rafael Argullol; or a boulder… All these pieces reflect the author's interest in modest, contemporary materials that are commonly used and work as object-poems, as open works, with references to the history of painting and the appropriationist dynamics of Dada.

Olmo Blanco (Boiro, A Coruña, 1982)

Olmo Blanco's proposal for the Veraneantes exhibition (Untitled (2013)) is part of the series of works he has called, with a certain dose of humour, instalodecoración (‘installadecoration’). It is a specific project for the MARCO developed by the artist in the place itself, using a chisel as his only tool. The cuts in the wall (admission of the building's past function as a jail) create a work that is almost invisible or imperceptible at first sight, but which is large-size and involves a certain amount of violence.

Olmo Cuña (Vigo, 1983)

Title: Solago [Galician: asolagar: to submerge; to flood, to cover with water or another liquid; to drown] is an investigation project that looks at the Galician myth of vilas asolagadas. The stories maintain a deep-rooted bond with events that are constantly rewritten, such as the Flood or the myth of Atlantis, legends that appear to define a perpetual balance between development and ruin, narrating enigmatic water disasters that lead to the terrible collapse of a people; the end of a cycle. Through an exercise of deforming memory, the project establishes relations between these stories, which have been manipulated by time, and the way in which we inhabit a territory that is ever-changing and complex. More specifically, the work focuses on Isla de Toralla in the estuary of Vigo, interesting owing to the fact that it is an island and because its 10 km² make up a landscape palimpsest that includes an important hill fort from the Iron Age, a Roman necropolis and, literally built on the remains, the “Torre de Toralla" building.    

Manuel Eirís (Santiago de Compostela, 1977)

The smallest events, in other words, those that emanate from or move towards the intimate interior, and their analysis constitute the subject-matter and study focus for the artistic practice of Manuel Eirís. He focuses his attention on specific contexts, which metaphorise the impermanence in which he considers individuals live through the analysis of the different layers of which they are composed. His work in general reveals an interest in dismantling operations and the opening-up of spaces through actions (regressive or from the past, overturns) that place importance on what is removed or falls from the sites, what is dislocated and what we discover through the actions. The installation he presents in Veraneantes comprises two monochrome pictures and a fanzine, which works as a title for both pieces, which he employs to recreate scenes related to the process used to obtain the paintings. Here, the title dismantles the presence of the images not only through its volume, but also to the fact that it stands as an independent piece, as a magazine, which is dislocated.

David Ferrando Giraut (Negreira, A Coruña, 1978)

David Ferrando Giraut's work is an animation video produced by the MARCO for this exhibition (Catoptrophilia, 2013) and it places us before the encounter between two objects that belong to historic moments that are distant from each other in time, but which have complex symbolic functions and, to a certain extent, are closely related: an Egyptian hand-held mirror from the New Kingdom (15th century BC), commemorative of Hathor, the goddess of beauty, and an iPhone 4S Elite, launched on the market by Apple, California, in 2011. In a narrative that crosses different civilisations and moments in history, the work shows how human beings' tendency to create images has depended from ancient times to present day on the supply of minerals, almost always creating a chain of slavery in which a powerful class (in the past, the aristocracy, and today, citizens of the so-called first-world countries) accesses the creation of their image, which, in turn, exercises another type of submission or dependence on them.

Pablo Fidalgo Lareo (Vigo, 1984)

Memory Material makes up a cycle of performing arts and cinema in the Veraneantes exhibition, curated by Pablo Fidalgo Lareo. The MARCO must be capable of transforming itself into anything, into a stage, into a dynamic space where the works always move towards one place or another. A space of intervention and radical transformation of society, of living bodies and words for a present time in which everything is decomposing. The white room offers head-on, direct communication, taking the public as part of the work itself, fleeing from artifice and baring the space. All the guest creators work with the word and family, generational and political memory as the main line of their work. They act with the conviction that we will be able to leave behind the present chaos only by remaking our history. They act to re-appropriate the language and reveal the intra-history of the countries of southern Europe. The works that are presented offer a different view of social reality. They place the (real or fictitious) family as the epicentre of problems and propose transmission between generations as the only hope for change.

Amaya González Reyes (Sanxenxo, Pontevedra, 1979)

Origami requires patience and time and is related to the relaxation of the mind and the exercise of spatial thought. Each piece in Días soleados (Sunny days, 2012) involves three work phases: the creation of a paper figure by folding the shapes as shown in books on origami (sculptural act), exposure of the figure to sunlight for a long period (photographic gesture) and the subsequent unfolding and exhibition of the results (linear compositions and planes of colour on paper laden with picture). Aristotle said that time is the measurement of movement between two instants. Días soleados is the register of some of the movements on a small piece of paper, since the work tool is basically the passing of time. Time registered, fixed, where each work contains two traces: in the folds, that of the time in which it was made; and in the colours, that of the time during which it was exposed to sunlight.

Rubén Grilo (Lugo, 1981)

Rubén Grillo presents three works from the series titled Pattern Free. Ripped from Zara, 2013, which consists of torn denim fabric exposed to a laser process to produce wear and tear. In this case, they reproduce patterns of jean collections by the Zara Brand, with three different versions: indigo I, indigo II and light blue I. The laser technique is used by 'fast fashion' firms to give denim fabric an artificial worn appearance. Denim fabric, which appeared in the eighteenth century as a hardwearing fabric for workers in the western states of the USA later became a symbol of individual freedom. Subtle differences which, by openly exhibiting the fabrics and their rapid, artificial ageing process, turn the work, body and time into mere simulation. The pieces illustrate the artist's interest in the beginning of industry as a point of inflection in our relationship with technology, which has moved from being a reconciling duality between nature and artifice to a new paradigm which, today, in the post-information society, challenges the frontiers of human subjectiveness and cognitive capacity. Ultimately, this work connects with one of the artist's long-term projects related to plagiarism and the understanding of objects in an economy based on the exploitation of "intangible" capital.

Enrique Lista (Malpica de Bergantiños, A Coruña, 1977)

The Teresa de Villar project for passing on culinary knowledge is the result of a lengthy process that did not arise initially for any specific artistic purpose.The matter of interest is the culinary techniques and practices of my grandmother, together with the stories she tells about them or the resources she uses to record them. Based on this initial interest, Teresa was asked to write down the recipes of some of the dishes she had cooked on many occasions in her life. The successive revisions of the document that was obtained and the work on the art project titled Seoanes Posibles (Luís Seoane Foundation, 2013), which also took some of the texts written by Teresa as references, gave rise to the idea of a new art project focused specifically on the texts of her recipes. The specific formalisation of this project has three areas of action: the exhibition in the hall, the museum restaurant and its website. Some of Teresa de Villar’s recipes will be served at the MARCO museum restaurant and three of them will be included in the exhibition hall, transcribed as accurately as possible into the graphic language of the exhibition. These actions include various additional documents, some of which will be included in the exhibition hall, with the rest being available online on the museum's website (marcovigo.com).

Loreto Martínez Troncoso (Vigo, 1978)

Loreto Martínez Troncoso constructs situations based on texts, on the written or spoken word, on language and on silences. His letters, conferences, speeches or stories address a necessary visitor (an audience without whom there is no work) who acts as the recipient of the word and its transpositions. His work is essentially intangible and adopts different appearances depending on the context in which it occurs, but it almost always maintains one common element: the permanent questioning of language and its established forms and audiences. His proposal for Veraneantes includes [sin voz], an audio sculpture (2013), and a letter from the artist to visitors to the exhibition, which each visitor has to request, writing his/her address on an envelope if he/she wants to receive it at home.

Joan Morera (Vigo, 1984)

Artist and investigator, Joan Morera works on the contemporary conception of landscape from its dynamic condition and its coding. Toldscapes (2011) is a photographic work on places of repression, more specifically, “walks” and shootings during the Spanish Civil War in southern Galicia, in the districts of Vigo, Pontevedra, O Condado and O Morrazo, with which the author has a personal bond: they make up his habitat. This series of 12 photographs was taken on the basis of indications given by experts and local people. Over the years, these places have changed, disfiguring the real scenarios on which the events took place, often leading to their complete or partial physical disappearance. However, despite the important changes to the territory, the symbolic values and meanings remain in the social and collective memory. He uses these images to construct a notion of landscape that goes beyond the physical territory, a search for intangible landscape: he photographs what is no longer there, what cannot be seen but what can be told in an exercise of poetic palimpsest that portrays oblivion.

Doa Ocampo (Areas, Lugo, 1986)

Doa Ocampo refers to this set of works as “algures en ningures/contramapas”, a name that works better as a footnote. She uses maps and geography as a resource, a diagram that helps answer questions on the unknown side of the where, like enquiries and trial and error that arouse her curiosity. In all her work, there is a continuous play of relations between space and void; between being in the space and/or being in the void; between the existing voids and the filled spaces that make them possible. The empty spaces and the possibility of everything since they offer space for everything. Her research is directly related to perception and represents a step further in the process that removes ambiguity from the reality of which we all form part, in the search for limits between what is person and what is space.

Her intervention in the exterior perimeter of the MARCO building consists of using the blisters on the wall (paint "voids") to form her fictitious geographies, her geographies of the nothing, a nothing which, depending on the point of view, can become everything in that reality of the wall. The resulting scene is a map in which the where is a void that shows something beyond; in which everything and nothing are, ultimately, the same thing.

montenoso (www.montenoso.net)

montenoso is a collective whose aim is to develop a project on the local, shared mountains (MVMC) of Galicia, an example of one Hundred years of shared use. Defining the theoretical, practical, political and legal profiles of the MVMC is an urgent and promising task owing to the fact that the ecosystem is being threatened by industry and public administration is often ineffective.

Xeografías do mancomún (2013) seeks to facilitate enunciation processes whereby the production and distribution of knowledge is presented in relation to the context of people. The installation shows the results obtained from the fieldwork carried out on several local shared-use hills in Galicia. By showing the shared uses as diverse, unique, disperse, variable and extensive, the exercise is one of criticism, showing the actual situation using different tools. Geolocating the conflicts, resources, procedures and other knowledge will make it possible to understand how the communities of people are capable of working together with one resource. Xeografías do mancomún relates knowledge that is varied and similar at the same time, such as knowledge related to open software and the open culture and the shared local mountains.

Gemma Pardo (Viveiro, Lugo, 1976)

Most of Gemma Pardo's works reveal the tension between nature and industry, local and global, and they question the consequences of these changes and their influence on identity and culture. Sen límites (2013) is a video installation that interprets relations between time cycles and those of human beings with their environments and memory. The installation has a slant of irony, search and find, memory and acknowledgement. It shows the conflict involved in interpreting externality, which makes it impossible to see beyond the subject itself and its experiences, which are none other than an instant in the passing of time. Sen límites focuses on time and on the traces of perceived memory, with a quality that is ecological and symbolic, where the self is no longer the self or has no sense if it does not belong to the whole. The installation explores the ideas of connection and unity with space, the sense of belonging, presence, the need for manifestation, challenge and measurement. It is a symbolic piece that leaves one thread open for interpretation by the spectator. However, it includes a direct message and emphasises the sense of awareness of our environment, the observation of space/time, the transformations of nature and its different cycles, with a pinch of humour and romanticism.

Lois Patiño (Vigo, 1983)

In Patiño’s film (La Imagen Arde, 2013), the slow-motion image of a fire allows us to dissect its movements, analyse its fleeting, ephemeral shapes and its many flashes of light. Fire, which is image without matter, image without form: a succession of flashes in the void of the night. The extremely slow speed underlies the hypnotic character of fire, its capacity for attracting attention. "Fire is only time speeded up" [Koldo Artieda]. The long duration of the shot raises the image to the category of icon: an element that goes beyond its specific reality to represent a symbol. Opposite the fire, the human figure appears, ready for hand-to-hand combat with the flames. Here too, the slow motion underlines the epic, heroic character of the fight against the natural elements, the danger involved in trying to put out a fire that is hard to extinguish. However, as the initial quotes suggest, La imagen arde does not focus on what we see on the screen, but rather on the spectator viewing it. This is where the film is situated, in a play that alternates between image and spectator. […]The film was recorded on Costa da Morte, in summer, when the fires start.

Marta Peleteiro (Vigo, 1988)

Gezellig (2013) is made up of three hundred and eighty words in Dutch and an audio track that both come from the materialisation of linguistic process. One hundred and eighty days' handwriting by the artist, one word a day, like a systematic diary. Then, one hundred and eighty days' handwriting by two people who are close to her and whose mother tongue is Dutch. The relationship between the words written by the artist, those written by two people who are close to her and an audio track that is completely alien and impersonal generates three levels of presentation in the piece. The unconscious relation with sounds in our collection of images, related, for example, to the Galician “gheada”. The complete distortion and distancing of the context and language with an audio track that loses the personal nature of the handwriting. Repetition as a fundamental part of language learning and understanding.

Kiko Pérez (Vigo, 1982)

Kiko Pérez's new sculptures continue a series of pieces carved in wood, which he began in 2012. The objects are organic shapes that create a series of postures or expressions, mainly passive, casual but everyday, which border on the absurd from the point of view of ambiguity. The function is to indicate the poses, a call to idleness. The resulting objects treat the voids left by the body as objects themselves and, at the same time, they appear with sinister familiarity.Despite the fact that they represent the absence of body, they have a marked objectual character, yet they appear as the remains of an action which, interestingly, has not happened.

Miguel Prado (A Coruña, 1985)

Comedy Apories (2011-2013) is a composition of canned laughter and digital silence that lasts ten hours. It seeks to objectivise the experience of making noise, the disaffection of canned laughter stands as a clear example of noise understood as inference in communication. Externalising the intimacy of laughter through any event such that the television "laughs for us" reveals not only the passiveness of "Another" who represents my real situation (as Žižek suggests), but also alienation as maximum estrangement. The estrangement of the things we consider natural, in art and in situations in general, shares the way in which noise contemplates alienation as a positive condition. How it counters our capacity for ignoring certain aesthetic values or, more importantly: it represents a challenge for the impossibility of a neutral or "natural" position regarding the current discourse on the state of affairs.

Federico Vladimir Strate Pezdirc (Buenos Aires, 1983)

This artist's work is rooted in the documentary and relates intimacy and privacy with more extensive historical discourses, investigating the contexts that have marked his recent family and personal history. In the Future we will all be Deer (2013), in collaboration with Zemer Peled (Israel, 1983), is an installation that stands as prologue and epilogue to the feature film Un Galón de Espuma de Monstruo (A Gallon of Monster Foam, 2012). This exhibition presents a "museum" display (reminiscent of a history museum or a natural science museum) with display cabinets, documents, photographs and moulds of parts of the body of a mysterious creature: the Humanimal. Halfway between deer and human, between reality and fiction, the Humanimal tells us that we need to re-learn to read, to identify ourselves with hunter and prey, to develop nocturnal vision so we can anticipate the bullet. Otherwise, in the future we will all be deer.

Ismael Teira (Boiro, A Coruña, 1987)

In Marche (2013), the reference is a photograph of the transfer of the sculpture L’Homme qui marche, by Auguste Rodin. Ceo español (2013) reproduces, in the same dimensions, the space painted blue in the false hollow between the tail and back legs of the silhouettes of the Osborne bull. In both proposals, there is a certain amount of interest in landscape, monument and interpretations of the blue sky drawn between the legs of the walker who walks or the static figure of the emblematic Spanish bull.

Mar Vicente (O Valadouro, Lugo, 1979)

Columnas (Composición II) (Columns (Composition II), 2013 is a piece made specifically for the entrance hall of the MARCO, a place through which visitors often pass. At first sight, the space appears to be filled with columns, but its perception as an architectural element is then replaced by that of painted fabrics and the pictorial connotations somehow eliminate the idea of column and structural function. On the one hand, there is an interior-exterior movement, since the columns are hollow and the spaces between the fabrics show the interior space and the reflections caused by the colour applied to each of the monochromatic surfaces, which varies depending on the natural light in the hall. Furthermore, in a continuum of stimulus-response, the spectators’ presence makes the fabrics, which hang from the ceiling, move lightly as they walk past: thus, the movement (the spectator's) generates movement (that of the columns). In addition, the intervention "forces" the spectator to move in a way that is not usual in this space.

Diego Vites (O Grove, Pontevedra, 1986)

The work by Diego Vites explores the limits of painting by analysing its aesthetic context from the point of view of the History of Art. Columna sin fin (Endless column, 2013) is a piece made specifically for the MARCO panopticon. It is a review and update of the column of Brancusi of 1938, a tribute-monument to those who fell in the First World War, which based its forms on the repetition of stylised funeral pillars. The rubble pipe, with all its aesthetic and symbolic power, is used here to raise an endless column, a funeral monument to our time.

Concetto spaziale (2013) is a review and update of the work by Lucio Fontana. As a continuum of the “homage to” series, in this case, it is the turn of the spatial concepts of Fontana. The expression, which is repeated insistently on a block of polyurethane foam, opens up an escape road: the same repetitive expression used by the prisoner as he escapes. Artist and prisoner share expression and escape in the prison that once stood where the MARCO is located in a piece that is minimalistic, bland and absurd. Sculpture, action and painting mix together to insert a real space inside the work itself.