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HISTORICAL BUNKER

DEMOLITION 09/11/06

[…]The following is the way in which they conduct their mournings and their funerals:- On the death in any house of a man of consequence, forthwith the women of the family beplaster their heads, and sometimes even their faces, with mud; and then, leaving the body indoors, sally forth and wander through the city, with their dress fastened by a band, and their bosoms bare, beating themselves as they walk. All the female relations join them and do the same. The men too, similarly begirt, beat their breasts separately. When these ceremonies are over, the body is carried away to be embalmed.

 

HERODOTO.- Euterpe, Libro II, pag, 67

BLAST HOLES

The title blast holes gathers together a series of photographs of industrial sites before their complete demise. Abandonment, chaos and destruction unfold before our eyes, the blast holes in the floor announce us that the end is near. These buildings and many similar ones will be or have been demolished until the achievement of the complete demise of those industrial estates that remained in the heart of our cities. ©

HISTORICAL BUNKER (1998-2007)

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FERNANDO GOLVANO

Historical bunker (1998-2007) is an installation that is part of her project Fictional Industrial Archaeology, in which she documents industrial spaces and constructions that are already obsolete or in ruins. Such spaces, reduced to sinister residues of worlds of life, work, dreams and disparate hardships, are the object of a reminiscent appropriation that turns them into scenographies of memory and melancholy. A cold store has been fitted out, like an imaginary museum of the social, as a documentary archive, a memory for the future. It also includes two brief films, Ghosts of the present and Story of a crime, made based on photographs from the 1950s, which reconnect the real and the imaginary. In the future, this bunker will play a role analogous to the one played in the past by Cabinets of curiosities, one of the origins of memory and museal logic. “Collecting -Benjamin observed- is a form of practical memory and among the profane manifestations of  proximity the most binding one”. As for Linarejos, she seems more interested in collecting times and spaces dense in imaginary social meanings whose memento mori is near. She activates an entire poetics of the historical and miscellaneous archive that could become new cultural heritage. Linarejos self-defines her project with the following words:  space retention, telling, ruin, industrial space, scenery, instant, pseudo-science, mathematics, narration, mimesis, heterotopian spaces, psychodrama, psychologism, scenography, theatricality, thresholds (2006). But we could add another one that underlies all of them: poiesis: production/invention of a presence (even in its delayed form: absence) and of a reflective memory. These fictionalized or dramatized spaces, all the more in dialogue with the photographs from her series Wailers (2007), can also be perceived in their atopian (out of place, bound to the past and the present) and heterotopian condition: spaces where the phantasmagorical, the dreamlike and the utopian fluctuate. The sinister is thus transmuted into a fraternal space. These works are, she comes to tell us, two poetic acts of resistance to loss.©

GOLVANO, Fernando. 2007 Valencia biennial catalogue

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