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FANTASMES AL MUR

foto xavi br nova17.02.2017 – 12.04.2017
Exhibition by Xavi Bové, Miquel Garcia and Andrea Gómez
Curated by Imma Prieto
Opening, Friday 17th February at 7 pm

Activities related to the exhibition [view]

Program of the exhibition [view]

Ghosts on the Wall creates a discussion space based on a series of questions originating from the ideas of “the ​​ghost” and “the wall” related to the politic, social and economic space.

The origin of the project goes back to the famous phrase enunciated by Karl Marx in 1848, A spectre runs through Europe: the ghost of communism. With this celebrated phrase, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels began the Communist Manifesto. But if we ask it today, can we allow ourselves to adopt Marx's hopeful attitude, and believe in a new ideology?

The ghost is a metaphor for an unknown, invisible evil which knows no boundaries. The idea arises from the romantic conception of a spectre for which there are no physical or metaphysical barriers, a threatening presence, holding a great deal of power over us, generating terror. The ghost takes on a timeless quality, allowing the past to feed into present processes, and to gestate the future. All this is established as an allegory in relation to our contemporary condition.

The project starts with three questions. Who are our ghosts today? Who can cross the walls? Who is invisible?

The idea of ​​power, with all its controversies and paradoxes, lies in the background of these questions. Each question points towards core ideas which are opposite in principle. We may think of ghosts as spectres from a past, or as entities shaped by our contemporaneity. We may think of walls, in terms of the human beings who have blocked the way, or we may consider them in terms of the free circulation of the individuals who have generated them. We may ask whether invisibility refers to the real power which governs the world, or the group of people who need to cross a border.

Ghosts on the Wall is intended to take place simultaneously in several centres, in order to create a sort of cartographic axis through its realisation. The reason why it is necessary to resort to a certain simultaneity is because it reflects the intention to emphasise the idea of ​​multiple and shared fear or terror.

Assuming globalisation as a stigma of our time, we must consider new constants which spread in a globalised fashion: manipulated wars, terrorists, drug trafficking, dictatorships. A generalised state in which the fear generated by the manipulation of information and the invisibility of the truth, provokes a state of global terror.

The wall, present in space, becomes an element of separation, and takes on a quality which appeals to its physical nature as to limit, threshold and border, but also to all its multiple meanings and signifiers, which lets it be considered as a living subject. Thus, it presents itself as an organic element replete with movements, memories and multiple voices.

The project consists of four phases, the first to be presented at ACVic, constructed as three interventions; Xavi Bové's audiovisual installation, Àrea de seguretat, the only one among these interventions which will be present in all spaces; Andrea Gómez's installation, Perifèria; and Miquel Garcia's project, Oradors.

foto xavi brÀrea de seguretat (Security zone) reflects the huge amount of information that we recieve about the specific conflicts of the world, observed from a confort zone and with certain doses of manipulation by the media. Bové's interactive installation presents a world map with the real transits of the thousands of people who try to cross borders on a daily basis. Visitors to the installation discover, according to their movements, the degree of suffering in various parts of the world. Security zone, succeeds in creating a controversy between sound and image, juxtaposing the silent movement of the satellite image with the real sounds of bodies and anonymous voices. Within the whiteness of the empty wall, in silence, everything is hidden. It is the spectator who discovers, by overcoming her paralysis, zones which appear according to the intensity of the real pain anchored in each territory. When we are in front of an empty wall, everything is hidden. And the artist with this installation wants to ask you about the fragility of the limits, and if we are really safe? 


periferia andrea gomez br nAndrea Gómez's project uses virtual reality, highlighting error as a shameful mark of human action. Periferia reflects upon identity, and its loss. We are placed within the environment of Second Life and, from there, we identify with a virtual subject who tries to reach the edge of the digital platform. The interesting thing is to see the way that, as the subject approaches the boundary, it disappears and disintegrates. Gómez creates a metaphor for the situation of people who must cross a border. The virtual world becomes a mirror of the structures that condition our future.





vinil 1 miquel garcia brIn third and last place, Miquel Garcia presents the installation Oradores, an installation made from the speeches of different dictators and heads of state. Voices of a past time overwhelm the space, appealing to phantom presences that occupy the present.







The objective of the project is to discuss the relationship which maintains power with invisibility in the present day, and to explore the ways by which the citizen relates to the fear that this generates.

It is worth remembering Siegfried Kracauer's already mythical cinematographic text, From Caligari to Hitler. If the thinker was capable of revealing certain forms of the German expressionist cinema as forms coming from a subconscious that somehow culminated in Nazism, it wass because his essay became a compendium of the ideological, moral and social evolution of a convulsive age not only in Germany, but throughout the world. The idea of monster as a metaphor of power.

We point to the necessity of changing the structure by which we think of ourselves. If we understand that language is above all a structure which organises our ways of thinking and being, we will realise that the lack of alternatives is what characterises our environment. It may seem easy to fight against capitalism, but it is more complicated to fight against ourselves. For, as Louis Althusser writes, In order to change the world, we must change our basic thinking.

Xavi Bové. Lives and works in Girona. Artist and audiovisual composer, Artistic Director of FIMG, International Mapping Festival of Girona. Having trained to be a Telecommunications Engineer, he soon made the leap to artistic expression, always seeking to build bridges between art and technology, and between artistic disciplines, primarily visual and musical. Researcher on the relationships between emotions and mathematics, as well as stimuli and senses, the known synaesthetic effect. His projects have earned him a long list of awards and recognitions, such as the best international DVD of the year for the opera Le Grand Macabre, awarded by French critics.

Miquel Garcia. Lives and works in Barcelona. Graduated in Fine Arts from the University of Barcelona. He has mounted exhibitions and given residences both on the national and international stages. During his teaching experience, he has set up workshops with young people in Medellín, Manizales, (Colombia), Bolivia, São Paulo, Palestine, Barcelona, Bilbao and Buenos Aires. In parallel with his practice as an artist, he works to encourage cooperation, research and support in contemporary artistic practices with a view to to improving the sector.

Andrea Gómez. Lives and works between Bogotá and Barcelona. Andrea Gómez's practice encompasses a wide repertoire of media, from drawing and painting to video, sound experimentation and collaborative practices. Her recent interest has focused on the transformations of language characteristic of digital media taking as a starting point the material/immaterial critical dichotomy. Her work exhibits the tension generated by the difficulty of reconciling the analogue and the objective with the dematerialisation of information in the Internet era. Andrea Gómez is also curious about the intersection between scientific and magical discourses, in which she displays her interest in the language of the symbol as the visual representation of something invisible. She is cofounder of L’Automatica [www.lautomatica.org], Todojunto [www.todojunto.net], Dinou [www.dinou.net] and Joystick [www.jstk.org].

Imma Prieto. An independent curator, art critic and teacher of Contemporary Art and New Media at the Eram University School of the UdG. Collaborates with several masters and postgraduate university students. She has curated both national and international exhibitions. She is a collaborator to the Encuentros supplement at the Diari de Tarragona, and to La Vanguardia's Cultura/s supplement. She writes for the online journals A*Desk, Campo de relámpagos and Artichoke. She was manager of the European research group ELAA (European Live Art Archive), formed by the University of Girona, the University of Oxford and the residence of artists Glaugair of Berlin, and is a member of the Chair of Contemporary Art and Culture of the UdG

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