- Exhibition program
- We will keep each other company when it grows dark
- Artist
- Alba Mayol
- Dates
- —
- Place
- Espai 13
- Curated by
- Irina Mutt
Taking as its starting point the short story 'Bloodchild' by the African American author Octavia E. Butler, the exhibition crease not enclosure posits a space-cum-body impossible to limit either linguistically or by means of taxonomic categories. 'Bloodchild' features T'Gatoi, a non-human alien that regularly visits the home where a teenage boy lives. These encounters stir ambiguous emotions and reactions that make it impossible to grasp the nature of the relationship between these very different beings.
As Mayol puts it, 'like the ambiguous magnetism and unease that emanate from T'Gatoi, the character in Butler's story, the fluidity of desire is an enlarged you/I/we, an immersion in a multiplicity. It is something that embraces and dissolves, that generates fabrics that move without us seeing the perimeters, without us ever quite understanding what they are made of. A body formed by an intrinsic undefinition, a divergent familiarity, with curves, spores, soft minerals. To enter this body is to negotiate; it is to enter a circularity in motion; it is to settle into not knowing.'
With this installation, Mayol aims to kindle a sense of fellow-feeling and strangeness, of atavistic memory, as well as imagination and utopia. Longings and fears come into play, blended with a desire for contact and for feeling skin. The various formats present in solc i no clos - sculpture, mural pieces, and drawing, among others - inhabit or exist in the space but with no intention of occupying it. Together they form a unitary body made up of fragments. Or rather, they invoke a spectre, a presence that pulsates, breathes, and speaks in a circular murmur with no beginning or end.
Mayol's referencing of poetry and literature is also reflected in the exhibition title, a quotation from Maria Mercè Marçal's poem 'Freu', number XII in her book Sal oberta. The ambivalence between 'clos', meaning closed, motionless, and 'solc', which points to something that is open, that flows, generates another layer of tension in an exhibition in which contrasts and thresholds are blurred in a constant fluidity. A space where forms and textures, lights, shadows, and smells evolve, like the emergence of a language that is simultaneously a condition and a limit of that which we can understand.
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