Landscape of displacement. Alicia Chillida

Displacement strategies creates landscape and is landscape. It implies a turn of the gaze to memory and experience. Muntadas draws a journey through successive rhythms and mutations that begins in the lagoon of Venice, continues along the Guadiana River and the cape of Finisterre, and invites to wander through interconnected projects, from different periods, around the same idea: getting lost, disappearing and leaving. In this drift, the space-time of the works is given by the three concepts that overflow their meaning, impregnating the entire exhibition.

It is not possible to understand the current work of Muntadas (Barcelona, 1942), without taking into account his principles, it can be said that all his production forms a great internal architecture, an open conceptual framework, in process. In keeping with his trajectory, in this exhibition the projects are activated in interaction with the spectator, as the work states On Translation: Warning (1999-present) "Attention: perception demands participation". Thus, new readings of works that refract equivalences and reciprocities are propitiated: La Siesta / The Nap / Dutje (1995), Double Exposure (1998-2007), On Translation: Fear / Miedo (2005), On Translation: Miedo / Jauf (2007), Media Sites / Media Monuments: Buenos Aires (2007), Situations (2008), Dérive Veneziane (2015), Guadiana (2017) y Finisterre (2017). A total of sixty-one works make up this exhibition.

Muntadas has, since his beginnings, resorted to the strategy of occupying the space of the mass media to make the context visible and analyze the content of the cultural form. The artist edits his own wandering, a constant reviser of the social map in its geographic-political coordinates in relation to the halffocuses its research and discourse on this interstitial space: the in-between / in-between. betweenThe intersection of art, social sciences and communication systems.

Nowadays, landscape, as a sensitive projection on the territory, is once again a fertile domain for multidisciplinary reflection. Muntadas investigates what we understand today by vision and landscape. Already in the seventies the artist proposed the term "landscape". media landscape to name this new panorama that emerges in the field of urban spaces governed by the media. This media landscape has been, since then, the main object of his exploration, developed through projects time / site specific organized in thematic blocks that follow one after the other in time and feed back into each other.

How to map a place today, how to establish categories of spaces in the ambivalence of globalization? The evolution of spaces of consumption, communication and circulation is taking place at a vertiginous pace. The anthropologist Marc Augé goes so far as to affirm that there is no longer any territory, that it has become an illusion fed by globalization, in which contemporary art participates. Muntadas takes this ambivalence to its ultimate consequences and transforms it into an object of artistic initiative.

If we understand cartography as mapping a portion of land or sea surface, the exhibition internalizes the fluidity of water. The artist creates non-linear maps recorded through video and photography. In each work he generates synaesthetic cartographies that incite to read the image and look at the text through three geometries: labyrinthine-ondulating in Venice, intermittent in the Guadiana, horizontal-vertical in Finisterre. To lose(se). To disappear. To go.

From the crossing of liquid dynamics in solid territories, the will of absence emerges. Muntadas moves to look for traces in the landscape. A change of scenery. He chooses three emblematic enclaves in which he inscribes images / texts. The three films reflect an emerging critical space that manifests the loss of vision derived from acceleration. The artist films the deserted tourist Venice, the horizon of Finisterre in time lapses during the day and night, records from a satellite view the discontinuous course of the Guadiana, visible, invisible. (…)

Muntadas proceeds to a displacement in order to question us about landscape and perception. In his work the psychic dimension of the liquid points to the constant transformation of the social being. The concerns converge in his research, where the projects urge to flow (drift), to blur boundaries (codified cultural forms). The new meeting point (context) is a place of departure where contours are diluted and new figures move in the circulation of water in the lagoon of Venice, along the Guadiana River and in the Atlantic Ocean in front of Finisterre.

(Excerpt from the catalog, ed. Consellería de Cultura, Educación e Ordenación Universitaria / Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea (CGAC), Santiago de Compostela, 2018).