An exhibition born from Antoni Hervàs’s collaboration with artists deprived of liberty

Experiencing time and desire in a suspended territory like prison. Time Machines is a conceptual and visual framework that invites us to reflect on prison as a self-absorbed space, a place where reflections on the past and the desire to travel back in time emerge, but also the desire for time to pass quickly, as well as fabulations about future scenarios for the individual and society.

The exhibition addresses the peculiarities of working from artistic creation in a hermetic context such as the penitentiary system: being confined, the accumulated vulnerability and the sensation of a passage of time outside the course of normative society arouse a viscerality that – fuelled by desire – translates into an urgent need for expression through drawing, painting, ceramics and other artistic languages.

Time Machines shows in all its exuberance the results of the creative and emotional relationships woven by the artist Antoni Hervàs in various penitentiaries. Hervàs’ work is characterised by a methodology of intense engagement with groups outside social normality of various kinds, which promotes the emergence of representations from inside (that is, produced by the collective itself). Hervàs has established relationships with inmates through drawing and has found a common language through mutual empathy and sincere dedication. In an exercise of expanded drawing, Hervàs regurgitates this plastic give and take to give birth to a series of totems: they are the conversations and affections that have taken on a monstrous body.

The exhibition consists of two parts: the main installation (on the upper floor) that displays the conversations that have become a body, and a prelude (on this floor) that details the participation strategies that had to be activated in the penitentiary context to carry out this exhibition. This effervescent compendium of experiences has been possible thanks to the complicity not only of the inhabitants of the prison universe, that is, the inmates, but also of the artistic technicians of penitentiary centres, which are a fundamental key to entering into contact with artists in confinement in Catalonia.

As an exhibition, Time Machines becomes its own time capsule that embraces these incursions into the prison universe by Antoni Hervàs and curator Mery Cuesta over ten intensive months. This time capsule is packed with treasures: it contains the keys to the interpretation and understanding of the prison world, but, above all, it contains a whole variety of deeply symbolic artistic expressions that establish a powerful mirror effect between our own daily lives and the lives of those deprived of liberty. Our time machines are brilliant masses of pure humanity.

Mery Cuesta, exhibition curator