Manual del turista

MUSAC, León
January 27th, 2024 - March 9th, 2025
Piece activation November 30th, 2024

"Manual del turista" is a specific production in the context of the exhibition "Epílogo," curated by Gilberto González for MUSAC based on its collection. Gilberto suggested I work with the exhibition itself, using a methodology similar to the one I used in the piece "Castillete", shown in Epílogo. In Gilberto's words, "Epilogue, among other things, addresses the idea of heritage as a concept in which history seems to conclude. By objectifying a space, a place, a tradition, as the repository of history—of a specific history—it seems that in a certain way we close off the possibility of the multiplicity of meanings in the present. In this way, the work that is part of the collection, Castillete by Carme Nogueira, explores hidden meanings, the phantasmagoria that hover like intuitions in the form of stories that seem to find no place in this closed present."

In this way, my dialogue with the exhibition and with Gilberto is formalized in a piece that establishes itself like a stowaway in the exhibition brochure. It is a guide (a map, manual, script) that relates the exhibition to the different uses of the land now occupied by the MUSAC building. This guide is the size of the brochure published for Epilogue, so it fits into it like a stowaway.

It is screen-printed on tracing paper on both sides: on one side, you can see the exhibition plan with the location of all the works printed in silver gray. On the other side, which when folded cn be read like an 8-page booklet, you can see the successive uses of the land occupied by MUSAC up to the present day, related to the evolution of the city itself and the common, established dynamics of the urban. The piece is titled "Tourist's Manual" in homage to a manual written by Casto Alonso in 1952 and in reference to a certain logic of the function of museums in cities.

From there, the drawings in the piece take us from images of Eras de Renueva in 1910, when it was used for agriculture and formed part of the disentailed lands within the area of the Monastery of San Marcos, to the factory spaces that once stood there, to the working-class neighborhoods created from the subdivisions of private properties in the expansion of the city of León. Since it is printed on transparent paper, all the layers of the territorial transformations are in dialogue with the exhibition plan and the works on display, allowing each territorial transformation to be located in a specific location within the room. To spatialize the piece, a series of audio recordings were created that could be heard in the corresponding location within the room.

The piece is a limited, numbered, and hand-folded edition of 200 copies.