WALL

If the things locked inside walls suddenly came out into the street and shouted, they would fill the world (Federico Garcia Lorca)

 

Wall: Structure that supports the weight of a building or vertically limits its interior. (Institut d’Estudis Catalans definition).

A wall also serves to isolate spaces, to impede passage, to isolate, to protect or isolate things or people. Its proliferation has traced safe, fixed, stable routes, but it castrates others, impeding or limiting free circulation, delimiting the areas with the consequent spheres with the consequent loss, whether wanted or not, of freedom to move through any space, whether physical or mental.

Walls speak to us of silences, stifled cries, hidden beauties and treasures, forbidden spheres, hidden treasures, forbidden spheres, silenced words, untold ideas… anything or any thought that is not allowed to show itself and that is relegated to ignorance.

For this reason, the wall has the use of an impregnable hiding element and does not allow us to see or access the things it hides. What this isolation entails is a loss of freedom, either intellectual or material. People are not allowed to move from one side of the wall to the other. It is a limit, that restricts the freedom of those who are locked inside against their will and of those who are on the outside because they cannot enter.

In this case, I use the concept of a physical wall as a metaphor for the deprivation of freedom. It is an image 8 m long by 1.20 m high. It is made up of a total of 240 fragments of walls, found in different places, which form a whole.

This project began in the summer of 2016 and will last until the spring of 2022. During this time, I have been looking for fragments of walls that for one reason or another have caught my attention. Sometimes, the random shapes formed by time, or structures fixed by the ideas of architects and decorators, or the colours or textures or any mixture of these elements, seduce me and I take pictures of them. The places where the photographs are taken are many, I would like to remark that there are photos taken from Peru to Austria.

Like all my work, it is based on a first-person experience. As a lover of freedom in all its forms, whenever I have had the opportunity, I have always stood up against all kinds of repression: be it absurd social conventions, religious repression, abuses of any kind or any kind of injustice. The struggle to achieve a milestone always requires a collective effort. For this reason the installation I propose requires the complicity of the public that visits it.

This proposal involves the spectator in a living installation, inviting the audience to rebel against the WALL, which in this case, symbolises the unwanted lack of communication. The idea is to tear it down so that each visitor can select a photograph of the wall and take it away. This gesture of taking a photo of the WALL will symbolically help to bring it down and overcome the repression it symbolises.

Throughout the demolition process, the WALL undergoes different changes of form. After each subtraction of an image, the shape of the wall changes into a new shape, thus generating an infinite number of new WALLS. The possibilities of the WALL changing in different ways, depending on which picture each person chose to take and in which order, are truly amazing. If we are to listen to scientists who are used to calculating probabilities, there are exactly 4.067885363636470581204935759214869 x 10468 possible WALLS. To this end, the scientist explains that trillions of trillions is a much smaller number (1 x 10³⁶) than this. The figure obtained is approximately 400 orders of magnitude larger than a trillion of trillions.