In this edition of Art Nou we asked the artist Claudia del Barrio to contribute a personal vision of the festival. The proposal consisted of a series of videos about some of the exhibitions. The proposal, with the appearance of an interactive game, is inspired by the primitive and pixelated aesthetics of the scape room and horror video games of the early 2000s, as well as the universe of the “Choose your own adventure” books.
The accompanying texts suggest stories that complement and derive from the videos, transformed into chapters or scenes of this video game.
First chapter: El sielo
On Andrea Herrera’s exhibition “Faré de l’hàbit un niu”, in which the artist combined chronology and image.
They say that there is a day outside the calendar, where the clock does not mark the hours and a month is three, that to enter you have to take an unusually long nap, never without lunch, twelve steps from a window where you can see the sky. Once in the dream, you’ll know you’ve entered if you wake up to the sound of jingling bells in the air. This “day” is a room where a pigeon has been nesting for at least a handful of millennia, which at first began to keep track of the months and years, but since there were so many, it let it go and devoted itself better to collecting twigs and other materials to build the perfect nest.
Second chapter: Chiquita Room
In Alba Yruela’s exhibition “Sembla tot com un sol dia”, the artist establishes a personal and subjective relationship with the environment, nature.
A secret diary and at the same time visible to the eyes of the world. I fly and perch on a leaf, and I am aware that you are looking at me and that your body, so different from mine, does not want to hurt me, despite the cries of my instinct. Your body moves slowly and observes everything around you, listens to the sound of the wind, and of life and death hidden under the grass, among the trees, in the sap of the flowers. You want to absorb everything, you record everything in your diary. To move forward, you just cancel all action and let what surrounds you act for you.
Third chapter: Ana Mas Projects
In the exhibition “Dalt, la serra”, the artist Rita Sala reflects on landscape from an expanded perspective.
If there is no eye, there is no landscape. It is the eye, then, that says that this view is a landscape. Inside the eyes there are many stories, many people, many images. Thus, when I look at a mountain range I see the forests and the roads, and above or below, the figures. And the whole image, built up in layers, appears and disappears, doing a kind of dance. Like stories and people dance, between the landscape and the foreground. With all this dance, it is difficult to say that this is this and that is that. So who is to say that a figure cannot become a landscape, or a landscape become a figure?
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Art Nou is a festival of emerging art organised by the Art Barcelona association of galleries, which aims to stimulate young production, vindicate the galleries as spaces for meeting and debate, and bring art agents and the general public into contact with each other.
