Informal kindness
Artists: Bárbara Sánchez Barroso, Blanca Gracia, Enrique Radigales, Fito Conesa, Irene Pe, Julia Puyo, Luz Broto, Marc Herrero, Radia Cava-ret (Samu Céspedes, Patricia Del Razo, Violeta Ospina Dguez i Yazel Parra Nahmens), Tau Luna Acosta, Xesca Salvà i Marc Villanueva
Curated by Pilar Cruz
Kindness is one of those concepts that everyone seems to clearly understand but which no one is capable of accurately defining. We lack the vocabulary and can only think of examples. We tend to define kindness using one or another form of politeness: smiling at someone, holding the door open, please, thank you, not a problem. Forms of politeness are standard requirements for living alongside others. They are often customs that reflect social structures. A good upbringing.
Kindness, in the sense of letting oneself be and letting others be, goes beyond standard formality in our relationships with others. We think kindness is subservient and indulgent, even naive, but it has an enormous ability to disarm power and therefore enormous political strength. For the philosopher Byung-Chul Han, power is centralising, it tends to itself and whatever is left out must be suppressed. Kindness disarms this tendency and provides space for what is multiple. It’s not (only) about behaviour but about encouraging spaces for decompression.
When the artworks in this exhibition were created, their main intention wasn’t, a priori, kindness. However, they are all full of it and it oozes out of them. The artists reflect on kindness as a critical praxis, as a way of doing and showing, even as an inevitable consequence. They give it meaning and vocabulary, broadening its semantic field and therefore our imaginary of what is kind. They land it in the present and their proposals become symbolic places of relationships with others, almost like small antidotes against pessimism and dystopia.
