Happy everything. Here we are again, at the gates of a new year that will unfold in front of our feet, with the surprise of discovering which steps we will take. I have been thinking about the question that our beloved artist, Laía Argüelles Folch, borrowed years ago from the colossal poet, Wislawa Szymborska: How to live? And although I still do not have an answer, since we reactivated Laía's project by reprinting her postcard, I am determined to believe that there might be a possible method (or several) that will help us on our way, and in the possibility of creating the conditions to glimpse it and put it into practice. This year that now begins, Chiquita Room collectors will also have the opportunity to on that same question and share their thoughts by postal mail.
What I think I do have some answers for is how not to live. And in preparing the project we are about to inaugurate, some of those no's have become even clearer. Let me know if it's the same for you when you find out. I am very excited that the first exhibition of this year 2023 is a project by Eduard Escoffet, which we present in collaboration with The Green Parrot. The two spaces have joined forces to present Growth and Degrowth of Howard Roark, a double exhibition by the poet and sound artist that entails his first solo show in Barcelona. After two years of research on rationalist architecture and degrowth, Eduard presents the result of his experimentation around sound and everyday objects.
The exhibition is divided into two parts: the first one at Chiquita Room, under the subtitle "Fable", which opens next Wednesday, January 18 at 7 pm, and the second one at The Green Parrot (Vilamarí 57, Barcelona), under the subtitle "Events", which opens on Saturday, January 21 at 12 noon. Composed by different installations, the whole project addresses the myth of indefinite growth and the material limits of life on this planet. We are looking forward to welcoming you in both spaces and sharing reactions.
And below, as always, a few more tidbits to tell you.
👉 Last January 5 we celebrated, for the fifth consecutive year, our usual Night of Queens and Tarot and we went back to look through the cards at the values that can be useful for the new year. Who will mourn the stones that have fallen? In this written summary of the evening you can consult details of the collective reading around a dynamic 2023. It seems that the cards invite us to take action and to trust our own instinct, the knowledge we have been distilling from our own experience, trusting that we should get rid of what no longer serves us, without further regret. From here, special thanks to Cecilia, Saya and Susanna for opening the windows of the arcana and unfolding the symbolic map of this new year. The invitation is that we, dear people, actively decide which routes to take.
👉 I am also grateful to be able to accompany today, Wednesday, January 11, my beloved and respected, Xavi Rodríguez Martín, in the presentation of "El cielo está enladrillado…" which opens at Casa Elizalde from 7 pm. Part of this project is a series of sculptures that we previously presented at Swab contemporary art fair, and that now expanded. For its creation, Xavi pushes the matter to transform itself from the automatic. These are pieces that do not start from a predetermined idea or sketch, but play with the magic of the present and open spaces that allow air to circulate between them, using the raku technique. Come and see them, they are wonderful.
📎 Today I say goodbye by honoring the figure of Robert Filliou, who also considered life itself the most important thing. His is the phrase "Art is what makes life more interesting than art", which for me has something mystical, like a kind of good-natured joke that lightens the burden on the shoulders. That proper distance, that sympathetic poetics were a constant in Filliou, who without much concern for his reputation or the commercial value of his work, was committed to living life as an art work and putting it into practice, remaining true to himself.
Today I bring you a concept he developed with George Brecht that all artists be considered part of an Eternal Network, uniting all creative effort, without competition, even outside the concerns of the media ant the art establishement. This is an excerpt from Research on the Eternal Network written in 1973.
There is always someone asleep and someone awake
Someone dreaming asleep, someone dreaming awake
Someone eating, someone hungry
Someone fighting, someone loving
Someone making money, someone broke
Someone traveling, someone staying put
Someone helping, someone hindering
Someone enjoying, someone suffering
Someone indifferent
Someone starting, someone stopping
The Network is Eternal (Everlasting)
