España, Día 4: La Reina Sofia

Weird day.

I spent 8 hours in the Reina Sofia art museum. I was not unhappy about this, but I wish the kids had been there for part of the time.

Nina and Mari ran errands with Gimena. The boys hung out at the house. Emi made a solo run to the supermarket and asked an employee to help him find pita bread (they were out).

The collection of the Reina Sofia was recently reorganized and rehung. Most of the photos I took while visiting feature my hand. I may post them elsewhere.

I did take a few other photos of works that attracted my attention in one way or another.

Above: "Woman Leaning on a Table" (ca. 1915) by Olga Sacharoff
(Tiflis, Georgia, 1881 - Barcelona, 1967)

Sacharoff was in her twenties, when she and her photographer husband left France to escape the conflict of World War One. They settled down in Barcelona, which was becoming a kind of "second-hand Paris." It was about this time that she finished the painting above.

The outrage communicated by these posters is inspiring. I don't know when they were published.

Period films are projected without sound on the walls of many rooms throughout the museum. Above: That's my shadow with "La Revoltosa (The Troublemaker)" (1924), directed by Cesar Fernandez Ardavin (Madrid, 1881-1974).

Above: "The Unaccounted: A Tryptich (Variation)" by  Mapa Laboratoria de Artistas (Colombia)

Concept and creation: Heidi Abderhalden and Rolf Abderhalden

Installation formed by four self-contained spaces, video and sound projections, automatized soundtrack, Loop (15:33).  Previously mounted at the Sao Paolo Biennial (2016).

The installation piece above was comprised of multiple rooms. In the photo above, I am in one room, looking through the second room, into the third room, where I entered the exhibit. Sometimes the curtains between the rooms close. When I was in the first room and the curtains opened onto the second room, I didn't realize that the back wall was glass. I was later disconcerted by the realization that someone could have very easily been on the other side of the glass, watching me in the first room, thinking myself alone, watching the automated band play in the second room. It was an unsettling reminder of the porous boundary between spectatorship and participation. 

According to the Reina Sofia’s notes, the project is “about the relationships between festivity and violence in Colombia” where “guerrillas, drug traffickers, paramilitaries. . . use festivities and the vulnerability of bodies as a device of celebration, both of life and death.”

The room that I walked into first features a video of “a unique carnival in Guapi, a largely African-American community in which men dress as women with rubber masks and strike their neighbors with [whips] to remember times of slavery.”

The second room is comprised of “the scattered remains of a party in the intimacy of a home, where an automated music band emerges from a cloud of smoke, in reference to the ‘bands of war,’ comprising children and highly popular in Colombian schools."

The final room is "dedicated to the spectator."

Above: an English translation of Brecht's poem "Questions of a Reading Worker" (1936).  I have heard Gene Richardson say something very much like this.