They are presented at the same time in three venues located in the same neighborhood, just a few meters from one another: four works displayed in three storefronts, to be enjoyed directly from the street.
Breu: Clara Abi Nader (Lebanon) and Pepe Reyes Caballero (Spain)
Seara: Todoporlapraxis (Spain)
Nua: Melanie Smith (USA)
BREU.
Sin_título.mp4
What is love? How do we build connections in our context? On the basis of the ideas that are defined and imposed? How can we build an intimacy that is oppressed by large social and political structures?
Human beings are naturally communal. We feel comfortable when we share a feeling of belonging, shared ideas. Through some writings many traditions were born. The word is what stays. Traditions, which are often constituted as the totalitarian identity of the individual.
The era of individualism does not exist, we live constantly trapped in the human need to create a community.
Intimacy, the way we relate, is learned from the context and from others. Only in an era that tries to break with the canons and the idea of an imperishable and always stable love that has been imposed, a willing for a new way of loving is activated. Intimacy changes from the collective, the personal becomes political.
The work of Clara Abi Nader and Pepe Reyes Caballero questions the dynamics of relationships from an intimate perspective given by personal experience without blankets, through a window without curtains.
Intimacy is a public screening in an showcase. You can’t intervene, you can observe, but what can you change?
Text: Rebeca M Urízar
NUA
Trilogía de parres
Cuando la distopía se hace visible
«Parres» is a series composed of three performative videos, developed in a 35mm film format, evoking—in an almost poetic way—the Italian neorealist movement. This movement, with its extensive videography that attempted to emulate an endless sequence shot, sought to capture the most immediate and raw reality of a society. Just as Italian neorealism reflected a country trying to reconstitute itself after the war, Parres attempts to capture, with a performative and documentary approach, the reality of the workers on the margins of Cuernavaca, Mexico.
In the work «Parres» by the artist Melanie Smith, the camera not only focuses on the inhabitants, but also their daily tasks. Away from large cities and their overcrowded jobs, these workers seek to survive with informal activities, such as washing windows. This activity fills the screen and stands as the epicenter of a community that, like many decentralized points in Latin America, lives its own reality, a distant dystopia that, similar to Orwell’s stories, reveals that inequality and state abandonment They transcend the pages of a book.
Another crucial aspect in this audiovisual composition is the choice of the soundscape, which acts as a dream tear. Instead of romanticizing poverty, it seeks to portray it, mimic it and transform it into a metaphor for the crack and tear that it means to inhabit a dystopia forgotten even by the Mexican government itself. In the photographic section, it is fascinating how Smith uses the craft of window cleaning to show that Parres exists, is on the map of Mexico and needs to be seen. However, it also suggests that its history, like window dressing, can easily be wiped clean and forgotten. In these brief moments, the workers come to the foreground and, with a subtle but powerful gesture, soap and erase the screen, symbolizing that although this performance is exhibited in London, under the critical gaze of those who consider art as a mere museum object, they will continue there, inhabiting the border, walking through the dystopia of Parres and continuing with their work, perhaps hoping that their community will finally be discovered and helped.
Text: Nicolás Ibáñez
SEARA
Artista: Todoporlapraxis (esp)
Black Box
We have created a housing device that reflects on the living conditions of temporary/undocumented workers, alongside a lifestyle that has been disguised under the concepts of entrepreneurship and adventure—within a neoliberal and atomized labor system. Through an ironic reflection on housing as a market product, we have attempted to build a fake—which is not so far from reality—where the shack is turned into a marketable consumer good, using the same sales and distribution platforms that underpin the exploitation of precarious migrant labor.
In this instance, the piece is auctioned on the eBay buying and selling platform, adding a conceptual circularity to the project.
In addition to the creation of this “house-package,” accompanied by an assembly manual loaded with irony, the work includes a series of elements that customize this paradoxically residential space. Seven watercolors and a table made from signage taken from the Spanish border—as part of the European Union—are included in the sale and staging of this device. It also features counter-advertising pennants created with texts derived from Mike Davis’s phrase “housing is a verb,” combining it with various verbs associated with the realities we address. The activation of this set continues over time through its circulation in public space.
Because this project, more than a housing solution, has been conceived as a tool to challenge and interrogate the precarious living conditions of these communities and their reproductive elements—with the package acting as a powerful symbolic object that, in many ways, dominates the iconography of the migrant experience.
This mirror, centered on the package, opens cracks and fissures from which to establish dialogues between realities that are not directly connected, but which stem from the same power structures that shape a shared history. The imagery of the package—as something they carry and inhabit—becomes a constant in the lives of migrants who travel through a journey of expulsion and subjugation, pushing them to live in a state of permanent transience and nomadism. Its contents become its container—to the point of living inside it—in a symbolically perverse production.
For this project, Todo por la Praxis collaborated with art historian Fidel Villar Barquín (ES), who led the research; visual artist Fernando Ossandón Zubieta (CL), who created the watercolors that are part of the project; and Sergio Cabrera (ES) as a contributor.
