Espai 13. Preventive Archeology exhibition program. 19/12/2013 — 16/03/2014
To demolish a concrete building by hitting it with a mallet.
To forge the grandeur of the copy.
A tourist is an interpreter in a constant state of suspicion, someone looking for signs that will certify his experience as real.
The story must be reliable.
In the past, they used to say that Barcelona was built entirely with stone from Montjuïc. People came to believe that, for that reason, the mountain had an infinite capacity for regenerating itself. Today, however, that capacity has been transformed into a virtue, that of providing the meaning the city requests for its development. As with the International Exhibition, the Olympic games, the project for the Esplanada dels Museus, the Font Màgica, the Mies van der Rohe’s Pavilion, the mountain has proved to be an unending resource of arguments and imagery for building the city.
The Magic Mountain is a story divided into 72 chapters that stretch the 72 days of the exhibition. Each chapter is an attempt to figure the circumstances surrounding what is known as the “historic present”, that is, the ways how a community constructs living in the present moment in order to trigger memorable experiences. Like Montjuïc, the exhibition presents itself as a boundless source of transmutations that show, in this case, how passion and the building of expectations are the unavoidable factors that provide experiences for the present, together with disappointment, frustration and a feeling of lack. Paradoxically, present time is a historical requirement. It is —in Lúa Coderch’s words— a “stupid time”, unable to be meaningful by itself.
Lúa Coderch (Iquitos, 1982) lives and works in Barcelona. Recent Exhibitions: Bacelos, Madrid and Vigo; Capella Sant Roc, Valls; Pavilion, Bucharest; Espai 2, Terrassa; SMART Project Space, Amsterdam; Arts Santa Mònica, Barcelona; La Capella, Barcelona; among others. Recent grants: Fundació Suñol’s PAIR; Fundació Guasch-Coranty’s grant for artistic production; CoNCA’s grant for research and creativity in the field of art and thought; among others.
Preventive Archeology: The projects that Oriol Vilanova, Lúa Coderch, Lola Lasurt, Antonio Gagliano and LaFundició will show at the Arqueologia preventiva program, propose a series of displacements on the superficial layer of memory. More than exploring the past, they conduct a tracking of the forms under which, at present, history is presented, narrated and shared in the public realm; a mapping of the legacies that we have inherited and that engage our relationship with times past; and paths to a number of places from which to question our collective memory.