28.06.2023 02.09.2023

I’ll show you everything that I’ve seen

Living matter, that mutates, matures, moves. They change place, time, shape. Matter absorb these mutations, generating memory. One of these living matters recounts experiences, narrates them as a way of giving shape to itself, but not all matters are capable of being narrated. Although they do all mutate, get old, rot. Perhaps that is simply the experience that they narrate to us. They teach us what they have seen. Each one does it in a different way. It will be our experience with that matter and our ability to narrate ourselves, that compiles that story and absorbs it as another change of place, time, and form. Based on the questions: what does it mean to be a new, young, emerging artist? And in seeming opposition, what is ageing? What does it mean to grow old as an artist? How to grow old whilst facing the threat of uselessness? In this era of apocalyptic eco-social crisis in which it seems that we will not reach old age, how do we visualize our ageing? Alba García i Allué will investigate various experiences, encounters and landscapes from her perspective as a young artist. She will experiment with the possibilities of narrating herself as a method of subsistence through the video of a YouTuber searching for the meaning of life. Accompanied by ancestral landscapes and decomposing natural materials, the artist will project herself into her future as living matter in a context where what is considered useless, is seen as invaluable in the eyes of a public that enters rarefied artistic spaces. The exhibition by Alba García i Allué will be accompanied by a piece from the series “”School of Ageing”” by Ana Gallardo. It is a video in which Mariani – an older woman who learned to work in ceramics after retiring and became blind due to macular degeneration – together with Ana makes works in mud and clay with their eyes closed and without seeing. Accompanying the video, a blackboard gives us the instructions to paint a mud mural with our eyes closed. In turn, a bucket with this mud/clay invites us to intervene on the Dilalica wall to create a mural adding layers of collective experience. In this way, the dialogue between these two artists -at opposite ends of their careers- revolves around the forms that material bodies can take. In different pieces, hands or language shape these bodies to represent the memory of those encounters, times and places. In the exchange with Gallardo, García i Allué will explore, in journeys of (self) knowledge, the drifts of a human body. She shows us everything she has seen surrounded by other materials, that at the same time show their own experiences of maturation.