Vida Gallega

Vida gallega.

Carme Nogueira.

CENTROCENTRO, Madrid

Curated by Tamara Díaz Bringas

19 October 2018 – 27 January 2019

Pictures by Javier Fernández Pérez de Lis

 

The memory of place is the basis of this exhibition focusing on the work of Carme Nogueira (Vigo, 1970). The artist’s new intervention evokes modulations of work spaces carried out by two architects of Galician origin linked to the construction and usage history of Cibeles Palace: Antonio Palacios, responsible for its design and construction between 1904 and 1919–along with Joaquín Otamendi–, and Alejandro de la Sota, who worked on the building from 1961 to 1984 as a civil servant in the Directorate-General of Postal Services and carried out refurbishment and remodelling works. Nogueira's interpretation of the two functional interventions takes the shape of an exhibition screen-device which is a response to the space’s current use as an art centre and serves as an element that's both modulating and exhibitive. Like a screen whose various parts gradually unfold, the exhibition also offers an overview of some of the artist’s investigations, methodologies and poetic works. Vida gallega (Galician Life) focuses attention on the stance of Carme’s work, which is always situated and incarnate, and her concern with giving visibility to the place of enunciation itself. Her works often cite other texts, voices or discourses, they usually do so in the first person, emphasising the processes of translation, dubbing and interpretation that play a role in the construction of a place. A questioning of experiential and discursive mediations that shape a space or landscape runs through her work, as does inquiry into a present made up of numerous plots, discontinuous stories and memories that conflict with each other. In addition to striking up a dialogue with the building, Galician Life presents projects from the past two decades of Nogueira's career, in which investigations of spaces, landscapes and cities often conjure up the memory of work and workers’ struggles, of feminist or anticolonial emancipation practices. The idea is to welcome contradiction rather than to quell it. Thus, sometimes works that are "objects of spatial interpretation", "site-specific interventions” or "room devices", as the artist calls them, can become a place for meeting, a plaza, an agora.

Tamara Díaz Bringas