Habitaciones

Travesía Cuatro presents the group exhibition Habitaciones. A polyphonic portrait of Spanish contemporary creation, through the work of six artists: Laia Estruch (Barcelona, 1981), Eva Fàbregas (Barcelona, 1988), Sara Ramo (Madrid, 1975), Claudia Pagès (Barcelona, 1990); Marina González Guerreiro (A Guarda, Galicia, 1992) and Nora Aurrekoetxea (Bilbao, 1989).

Each artist occupies one of the six rooms of the Casa Franco, designed by Luis Barragán in 1929. This exhibition comes after 11 years of Travesía Cuatro’s presence in Guadalajara, and represents a milestone in a trajectory focused on building bridges between the Iberian Peninsula and the Mexican scene.

The exhibition opens its gaze to decentralized production centers within the Spanish geography. Except for Sara Ramo, who divides her time between Madrid and São Paulo, the rest of the artists live and work outside the capital. Not only do they come from different regions (Catalonia, Basque Country and Galicia) but most of them have studied and lived abroad and their careers are marked by important international exhibitions.

Although the set of interventions covers a wide range of disciplines, including sculpture, painting, video installation and performance, there are several aspects that connect the practices of these artists, including an interest in the dichotomy between the organic and the artificial, the exploration of the intersection between desire and memory, a commitment to expand sculpture through the relationship with space, the body or sound. There are also coincidences in an approach to art from research and process, understood as a result in itself.

Interested in the physical structures of urban spaces and how they affect everyday life and its patterns of social relations, Laia Estruch’s work is often presented in the form of sculpture-scenarios. In the exhibition we find two devices in which she frames her performances and her experimentation with orality and the archive, her main working tools. Crol (barana II) is an iron sculpture based on swimming pool handles, which the artist activates with voice, performance and body. While in Ocells Perduts (Windsock) Announcement and wind poem (Ens han canviat el cel a ple vol. / They have changed the sky in full flight), Laia uses the idea of advertisement as both continent and content. The work is simply composed of a piece of nylon and a fan, which with its power makes the wind arm stretch and shrink, allowing us to read the text every few seconds. In Laia Estruch’s work everything is sculpture, since she understands performance as an act of volumes. When our body moves it generates fullness and emptiness, in the same way that sounds create materialities and textures in space.

This way of moving and disconcerting the viewer through volume and the somatic power of sculptural objects is also present in the work of Eva Fàbregas. Oozing #4 is part of a series in which the artist uses elastic and inflatable materials, reminiscent of membranes, cells intestines or sexual organs and whose gentle colors and softness appeal for their innocence and perversion. The installation gives the impression of a huge living organism that obeys its own libidinous and cannibalistic logic, a desiring machine with uncontrollable growth potential. For the most part, the sculpture is composed of air and therefore breathes. The act of breathing is one of the few we share with all living things on earth. In her recent interview with Anna-Catharina Gebbers, published in the catalog of the exhibition Devouring Lovers at Hamburger Bahnhof, Eva says:

“I guess what I am trying to reach is a more somatic and embodied way of learning and communicating with the world around us. In its hierarchy of the sensorial, Western modernity deems touch and tactile experience as being a base, primal or even “primitive” sense - that is, far below sight or hearing. We have been educated in a cultural environment that undermines our ability to learn in an intuitive manner.

In general, we pay little attention to anything that does not happen in front of our own eyes. How aware are we of the inner rhythms, affects and cadences of our own organism ? Have you ever felt a song in your stomach?”

The gaze of the humans towards nature and their relationship or distancing has been a constant interest in Sara Ramo’s work since its beginnings. For this exhibition, the Spanish-Brazilian artist presents an unpublished body of work. Her collage-paintings on cardboard are tributes to nature’s capacity for reproduction, multiplication and transformation. They could be snapshots taken through the lens of either a microscope or a telescope, playing with the perception of our own scale in relation to the universe. They are portals to the place of origin, of light or darkness. Instead, her sculptures in the form of funerary meta-urns remind us that Sara Ramo’s work delves into how art occupies memory. Overcoming the expected condition of objects, and endowing them with magic and ritual, Ramo creates inlays in clay, occupying the negative spaces, the crevices and fissures, opening circuits in which the senses silenced by the dominant versions of history find ways to reveal themselves.

If in Ramo’s work memory is latent, in Claudia Pagès’ work we find it in a confrontational dialogue with the present through the gerund in which certain institutional spaces, such as ports, trap us. Pagès delves into the concept of “architectures of containment,” dissecting structures that sustain power through the fluidity of commodities and capital, while proposing worlds made of language and movement that create uninterrupted flows. The video sculpture Walking the Gerund Mountain (Montjuic bando port) shows the artist walking through Montjuïc, the mountain that dominates the port of Barcelona. During 11 minutes we accompany her walking through different moments of the past and present history of the place, loaded with violent symbolic structures. Gardens with imported palm trees, viewpoints for tourists, a 19th century cemetery for the bourgeoisie and a mass grave from the Civil War; on the other hand, scattered clothes, clippings, radishes and cruising stalls. At one point in the walk, Pagès squats behind trees to urinate, the stream runs downhill or stops in a puddle, defining its own particular trickle of time.

From the public space we jump to the intimate ecosystems of Marina González Guerreiro.

In her installation, the artist makes small essays that refer to minor practices, models and very precarious constructions from the imagination that are taking weight in reality. Among the materials she uses are plastic, wood, paper, rope, wax and more recently ceramics, all of them mixed with waste that she treasures in her studio to give them a new place and meaning.

Marina manages to make time become dense by placing the different architectures, games and still lifes in a timeline that runs through the room, in the transit through this line appear moments that activate our memory or transitions between one and another. There is an interest in staying in that in-between, between chaos and order, past and present, control and chance.

The figure, or its absence, is a fundamental aspect in the work of Nora Aurrekoetxea, who also incorporates texts, objects and performances in her sculptural practice. In this exhibition Nora proposes an investigation on domestic objects and their relationship with bodies, through an experimentation with the material and formal properties of the inflatable mattress, an object intimately linked to the idea of the encounter with the other or with oneself. Un cuerpo de aire is also an exploration of the given architecture, from floor to ceiling and wall to wall, and of the body that traverses it.

— Travesía Cuatro