Stone Deaf

As the result of a petition made by the British Communist Party, Karl Marx’s remains were moved in 1954 from their original burial site (1883) to the main avenue of Highgate Cemetery in London. In 1956, a 4-meter-high bust of Marx was unveiled. The original graveyard can still be identified among the weeds, with a broken stone marker serving as a disclaimer, announcing to the visitor that Marx is not buried there anymore. The installation is composed of a rubbing made on the stone marker and a video showing ants, wasps and a snail crawling along the cracks of the stone.

The title of the project Stone Deaf obeys to a reflection upon the fact that the place where Marx was originally buried is currently empty, that the stone and the name of Marx there are the reminder of a void, a place of non-existence, a non-monument. At the same time the piece aims to pinpoint the place as a void in collective memory. That stone is not receiving mourning or visitors. In that sense the interest on that specific place is connected with the notion of the spectre. A spectre can move, is animated, but no one can grasp it nor touch it or have a relationship with it. Then, there is something that is almost material but isn´t there, is something that belongs to history but only operates as the traces of data, in this case ‘data’ being the death of Marx and the evolution of his image and legacy. History builds the anima, then this anima places its own reality within a grey zone. The spectral grave that was found comes along with those reflections.

In Bonilla’s installation, along with the video showing ants, wasps and a snail crawling along the cracks of the stone, comes a rubbing of the grave. This trace of something that is not the thing itself, is an archeological exercise over a ghost in a place where the animals and plants are still present, witnessing, not caring, growing and dying.

Tell me a Scorie

These collections of stones and hand-painted poems are arranged on ultra-contemporary glass and brushed aluminum shelves, evoking a certain collision of temporalities.

Stone is the starting point of the series: the sculptor’s raw material, it embodies all our fantasies of weight and eternity and refers to the artist’s more intimate collecting practice. Almost every day, whether he’s in Paris, Marseille, Los Angeles, Mexico City or even Tasmania, Mercier takes a moment to walk around, picking up stones — natural or modified by the hand of man. With their multitude of sizes, shapes and colors, they stimulate and accompany his thoughts and visions, becoming objects charged with music.

The collections of stones are also part of a long artistic tradition of curiosity cabinets or Chinese scholar’s rocks — these “natural ready-mades” as Malraux called them. In embracing the repertory work of collecting and classifying, Mercier embodies the figure of the archeologist and curatorial artist who not only creates but also extracts, orders and arranges. However, and this is his singularity, he does so without ever establishing a hierarchy: in his works, a vestige of the Roman forum can stand next to a polished pebble or the cobblestone of a Parisian construction site. There’s a kind of horizontality in values, between the natural and the artificial, the ancient and the contemporary, the vulgar and the precious. Here, the stones are gathered for their purely plastic quality and because they evoke a form of post-industrial geology ; together, they shape mineral landscapes that conjure up the great ruins of the past and the more humble ones of everyday objects.

Thus, Tell Me a Scorie diverts the notion of archive with humor and poetry, venturing into more personal territory in which the laboratory shelf becomes a musical score whose meaning seems to float between the lyrics of a love song and AI generated content.

Seis bloques de marés, Mallorca 

Following her exhibition at Es Baluard Museu d’Art Contemporani de Palma in 2020, Teresa Margolles decided to carry out a series of actions in the public space of the city. Her interest in the urban environments focused on highlighting the invisible borders or boundaries that divide the territories, neighborhoods and communities in the city of Palma. The preparation of the project led her to identify the areas known as Verge de Lluc, Corea and Son Gotleu, built as social housing for workers under General Franco’s dictatorship (1939-1975). These are buildings and neighborhoods built according to minimum quality and meager dimensions: bars of apartments without balconies and without vegetation or socializing spaces around them. Today, these constructions are home to communities and groups of workers displaced to the periphery of society.

Inspired by the formal parallelism between the buildings in these neighborhoods and the blocks of marès —a local sandstone typically used for noble constructions on the island— the artist placed a pallet with six of these stones in different locations, intending to promote the interaction of the inhabitants through the new object. In a dystopian architectural and urban context, the introduction of an anti-expressive and rough element such as these stones, created a new space, both symbolic and real, which the neighbors quickly appropriated, giving the marès new uses and functions.

The work generated from this experience and exchanges is the result of a collaboration between the artist and the participating neighbors. The blocks of stone functioned as an alien object, able to ignite new social and cultural dynamics, opening conversations and giving a platform for silenced voices, helping to deal with trauma, and allowing to imagine new opportunities for the community outside the restrictive frame of social constraint. As a result of these exchanges, the artist also made a series of portraits of women, in interaction with the sandstone blocks.

Trocheras cargando piedra de 50 kg

Trocheras cargando piedra de 50kg and Trocheras con pretal relate to a previous work by the artist: Carretilleras sobre el puente internacional Simón Bolivar (2017). With that documented action on the Venezuelan border, Margolles wanted to render visible the women working in the bridge transporting food and supplies from Colombia to Venezuela.

Ever since the artist took that picture, the political situation in the area has become more and more complicated, with a political crisis that ended up closing the bridge that linked the two countries. Rather than interrupting the traffic of people and all sort of merchandise, the blockage of the bridge has just diverted it through alternative ways. The “trochas”, as they are called in Spanish, are precarious paths through the woods. The former “carretilleras” have been forced to switch to this other system and become “trocheras”. Where the former action spoke of women empowerment beside the harsh labour conditions, this new series of pictures expose the consequences of State political decisions into people’s everyday life. It also underlines the determination and resilience of these women. The 50kg stone is a symbol of that constant struggle; like Sisyphus pushing his rock uphill.

Strata 1-24

From deep within the earth’s core to the farthest reaches of the atmosphere, the spaces that are most antithetical to human experience are being structurally re-shaped by technologies of seeing, surveying, extracting and mining. Strata 1-24 is a series of hand-cut, collaged works that layer personal and imagined narratives with the substantive political demands of oil extraction, fracking, colonial expansion, and aerial surveillance, bringing together the terrains of earth and atmosphere.

Referencing various technologies of mapping —satellites, GPS coordinates, star maps, and infographic scans— the work also reveals a palpable human presence between the hand-cut, sliced, or obscured image. This aspect of material intimacy runs counter to the machinic technologies that generate images, whether for surveillance or survey, entire devoid of human presence. Strata 1-24 situates the viewer in a speculative space drawn from the combination of an ethereal cosmology and the geology of extraction.

Volcanic Rock Sculptures

Migration routes are reflected throughout the visual language of Guadalupe Maravilla’s practice, including the autobiographical nature of the artist’s own migration story as a child. These Mochilas inmigrantes tell us about this experience. When he left El Salvador to begin a two-and-a-half-month journey that would take him across the border to the United States, he carried a backpack that contained everything he brought with him. The materiality of these works underline what a burden these objects can be —referring to the literal weight, but also to the emotional baggage one carries with him—, even a light backpack can become very heavy after traveling so many kilometers. At the same time, however, the backpack is like a sort of life vest and amounts all that one has, since everything else has been left behind.

This series of works is carved in volcanic stone from El Salvador, sculpted by an artisan in Mexico from models produced by Maravilla in an ongoing effort to create micro-economies through his artistic practice. The origin of the materials and their own “journey” is also significant for the works: the migratory routes from Central America to the United States follow a tectonic line marked by a large number of volcanoes. Somehow, both dynamics, both flows, converge symbolically in the artist’s vision.