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2/4/2009

El pasado en el presente y lo propio en lo ajeno

LABoral Art and Industrial Creation Centre, Gijon

Curated by Juan Antonio Álvarez Reyes

The exhibition El pasado en el presente y lo propio en lo ajeno (The past in the present and the near in the far) seeks to investigate how the phantoms of memory wander through the present, influencing how we understand and construct it. Avery F. Gordon has studied how the phantasmagoric – a kind of memory accretion phenomenon – appears with renewed force in the present. The phantoms are not physical projections but are, instead, the way that the past lives in the present. The traumatic past, so frequently associated with apparitions from beyond this life, returns with urgency in our times. Andreas Huyssen speaks of present preterites and of how “one of the most surprising cultural and political phenomena in recent years is the resurgence of memory as a central concern for culture and politics in Western societies.”
Phantoms of memory, then, are those being called upon here. Not to be exorcised but to redress symbolically what has been silenced and thereby repressed by means of recollection and recognition. The phantasmagoric, then, is here congregations of spectres and apparitions that continue to wander in the hope of being a social force of memory.

The interrelationship between territory and memory – how they mutually influence one another and how they are resignified in a return journey – is what this exhibition aims to analyse through the work of a number of artists devoted to the concept of terrain and its social and historical connotations. Space – whether it be geographical, architectural or mental – is traversed by memory, inseminated by it. As such, there are numerous signs that speak to us from the more or less recent past and that explain to us what our environment is like. Some of them are not so evident, but they remain present, in a secondary physical layer or in the collective unconscious. Other, in contrast, because they are so present on the surface and in our lives on a daily basis, they cease to be perceived by our vision, having become completely familiar to us.

It is for this reason that a profound effort is being made to work with the local community in a double sense: work with the artistic community and with questions related to personal, collective and historical memory related to the place in which the art centre finds itself embedded. “the place” is here understood to be a territory traversed by its memory and its social, cultural and political definition. All of these subjects are inserted (and from here is taken the second part of the exhibition title) in a global context, in the sense of how similar topics and similar artistic treatments of them have occurred in other contexts.

Artists: Fernando Bryce, Maite Centol, Colectivo Escoitar.org + Enrique Tomás, Marta de Gonzalo y Publio Pérez Prieto, Ángel de la Rubia, Jeremy Deller, Fiumfoto, Andreas Fogarasi, Susan Hiller, Benjamín Menéndez, Tomás Miñambres, Deimantas Narkevicius, Susan Phillipsz, Juan José Pulgar, Martha Rosler, Avelino Sala, Hito Steyerl, Lucinda Torre, Jasmila Žbanić.

Image: Deimantas Narkevicius Lituania. Energy Lithuania (2000)

Comunicación:
Ana Botella Diez del Corral Teléfono: 985 185582 comunicacion@laboralcentrodearte.org

LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial
c/ Los Prados 121. 33394 Gijón Asturias
Opening Hours: Wednesady to Monday, from 12:00 to 8:00 PM

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