December 2014
by Rosa Lleó (The Green Parrot)

Timelines

If there is something that characterizes the month of December is because we all tend to think that the world is ending and we make the yearly assessment: to look back at the past months and think how the next year is going to be like.
Trips, people, projects. What we left behind during the year and now has become urgent, learning how to say no, the recovered friendship.

In just a few words, thinking about the micro-future that is so close to us. However, it happens that the far-away and utopic future is also a worry; this time is generational. Almost thirty years after the crisis of Modernism, not only another one has come back but many more, that make temporality a constant preoccupation. Post-internet, meta-modernism, normcore, generation 2.0. If technology seems to be blindly looking forward, culture as usual distrusts and reconsiders what temporality is the most convenient.
As an example, is significant that these days in the city of Barcelona two group exhibitions talk to us about the future: The future doesn’t wait, curated by Sonia Feranandez-Pan in La Capella and Abandoned futures curated by Martí Peran in Fabra&Coats. The first one deals with the idea of the future through five complex research projects that poetically, and through ficition, analyse the future. The second it is framed as an exhibition that deals with the future from a social and political point of view.

Since the present doesn’t wait, it is necessary a performance in the here and now, visiting the exhibition With your own hands by Rita Ponce de Leon in Espai 13. An exhibition where there is a conscience of place through a series of objects that evoke a choice of personal narratives. Spectral Synthesis by Luis Macías in Blue Project Foundation deals with atemporality, keeping us in a no-place-no-time, through his film experiments with colour.

It is easy to look back at the past from our discipline; there is never any lack of retrospective gestures. In a literal sense, stands out the figure of Carol Rama and the exhibition that MACBA dedicates to her. How to deal with an artist who is known in relation to the work of others? From a very personal point of view, Gold by Lúa Coderch in Fundació Suñol also looks at the past. A beautiful reflection about the generation of value through a particular chapter in the life of the artist: the place where she was born. A film with an open ending, that provides a review to some elements already used in previous works that precisely made use of the idea of temporality. A way of seeing time without following the linear.

Maybe this is the most sensible way to start contesting the ghost of time.

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Text by Rosa Lleó (The Green Parrot) for GRAF