Concha Pérez
Shelters/Absenses/Abandonment
September 20th to November 3rd
During six weeks, ADN Galería is proud to present the third solo exhibition of Concha Pérez (Valladolid, 1969), artist in permanent reflection on the urban contemporary space and on the temporary re-appropriation of deserted spaces with transitory architectures.
With this selection of photographs produced during this year, Concha Pérez not only tries to capture urban realities but she also investigates them in a very socio-political way, emphasizing the synergy between disused and reinvented spaces.
The artist investigates again the locus, in all its dichotomous essence of emptiness/fullness, past/present and real/virtual, in a very powerful visual and evocative meaning. “The structure that organizes and governs the space is something that influences us” says the artist and the spaces that she represents are “new spaces with new uses” that “create new residencies”.
For the first time, the photographic exhibition will be accompanied with a video-installation of Concha Pérez and ADN Galería Editions will publish its first monograph catalogue written by Silvio Saura
REFUGIOS / AUSENCIAS / ABANDONOS
Nomads in this city, of whom we can guess the traces within the “shelters / absences / abandonments” of the exhibition’s title, may not be the result of misfortune, neither exclusion nor of the alienation process foster by capital itself.
Nomads of this city look like deprived people, but maybe on a time where there is nothing to posses. Improvised housing made out of plastics and boxes, graffiti signaling, meeting places resulting from secret articulation, are the marks left on a landscape in which, instead of re-appropriating it, the supposed subjects seem to avoid in a voluntary and deliberate way.
According to the registers imagined by Concha Pérez, the city here appears in its collapsing moment: its ultra-conservative orthogonal structure seals with concrete not only its geometry, but the significations and the uses of space as well, just like behaviors, orders and discipline of the social fabric comes to a such confused phase that it’s about to cast away any possible identity from its enunciating space
We are dealing here with series of impossible places, which articulate urban elements and categories fairly insisting on malfunctioning issues. The discursive dimension of architecture here disappears with the alteration of accessibility and segregating codes, the carelessness of control points, and confusion between what is planned and dumping fields, what is accidental, what is under construction process and what is already disintegrating.
Disorder sometimes can appear subtly, but in some way is generalized, undermining in the series of images a sensation of deep worry towards the nearest and identified presumably as natural.Is this what all these scared people are running from?Would that people afraid of representation just run away from it? Nomads who try to inhabit the inevitable, activating ghostly spaces in a city that is losing from itself.
If there is any explanation about the breaking down Concha Pérez´s images describe, this could be found in the logic that the nomad unleashes with his own escape. The adulteration of spaces is exactly the result of a creative process, of a challenge to the holding anchors maintaining the vigor of the incarcerating city. Both architecture and habitat dilute their course until becoming one to avoid existence beyond the limits the subject define with its own action, desire, and necessity.
With her pictures the artist allows us to glimpse what remains of this persistent and subversive trip.
Oriol Fontdevila
