Barcelona,
Almost fifteen years ago, in 2010, Georges Didi-Huberman commissioned at the Reina Sofía Museum A continuation of that sample was able to contemplate it until a few weeks ago in the same center and has now traveled to the CCCB Barcelona, again devised by this French philosopher whose studies revolve around the history and theory of images from the aesthetic and philosophical point of view and from the Middle Ages until our time.
“In the moved air …” takes his name from a verse from Lorca in the Moon romance, moonand precisely the original manuscript of the same begins the exhibition, and with it the reference to the gaze of the child, of those affected by conflicts and migrations: from that approach the theoretical and graphic reflections of philosophers and artists are collected around the evocative power of the images and the transformations that can raise emotions when they transcend the individual to become collective.
We will see that Lorca’s and its poetic management of the duende will not be an evanescent presence in the tour, which consists of three hundred pieces of almost half of artists and that precisely dives, through free associations, in that transition from individual emotion to group or social shock; Huberman defines the latter as a concatenation of emotions, an event capable of affecting a set, an environment, a relationship and not only an isolated psychological subject.
Seven thematic sections structure this circular sample, which has the nanny of the big shrimp horse from the island in the background: Children, thoughts, faces, gestures, sites, policies And again Children; In them paintings, sculptures, facilities, audiovisuals or documentation are deployed.
When deepening the depth and astonishment of the world in child The spirit of the hive From Erice, photographs of Robert Capa and Val del Omar, the film Ten Minute Older of Herz Frank, compositions of Frank, Goethe, Goya, Lorca, Miró, Rossellini and even a montage of poems and images of Bertolt Brecht related to the children’s condition of wars. Together with those children, another protagonist of this section is the moon that the Andalusian poet looked, continually appealed in his verses and also in Goethe drawings; In fact, in the notion of demonic of the German it seems that Lorca was based on writing his game and theory of the duende of 1933, also on the exhibition, and remembering it here is located here to our author with the greatest figures in the history of ideas in Europe, poets-philosophers such as Schiller, Nietzsche and Georges Bataille. From that perspective, the elf would be another aesthetic category, linked to the shock, so difficult to explain, that generates the Jondo.
Graphic, musical, literary, photographic and audiovisual works are linked in that second chapter around the thought, the most theoretical of all: the essays of Descartes, Kant or Darwin are associated with the drawings of Charles Le Brun or Lavater. On the one hand, we seek to offer rational explanations to emotions from organizational principles or method rules such as dictionaries, grammar or alphabets; The documents gathered were formulated, in addition to the aforementioned thinkers, by Aristotle, Camper, Comenius, Irara, from Villafranca, Duchenne de Boulogne, Dumas, Esquirol, García Hidalgo, Gómez, Ignacio de Loyola, Janet, Lersch, Londe, Michel, Richer, Rousselet and Spontone. On the other, chaos and implicit complexity are underlined to those feelings, so claimed in romanticism, through Teethoven texts and images Nono, Saint-Simon, Scarlatti, Schiller, Spinoza, Warburg or García Lorca himself.
The great scenario where these emotions are reflected is the human face, never impassive in the face of pain, madness or sexuality. We will contemplate the faces of “El Chocolate” and Inés Bacán in the photographs of Michel Dieuzaide, two images of Albert von Schreck Notzing mediums or the very silent Auschwitz survivors interviewed in a video of Esther Shalev-Gerz. Last gestures will not be missing, through the mortuary masks of Hegel and Nietzsche, or other pieces of this type that crystallized powerful gestures, such as the Montserrat Criant Masque Julio González. We will enjoy Picasso’s drawings, photos of Plañideras by Franco Pinna, drawings of almost surreal faces of Lorca or very expressive sculptures of Medardo Rosso; We will also discover the mirrors of Oscar Muñoz, in which the viewer can exhale about his reflection to return to life the effigies of deceased people.
The whole body, in fact, participates in the gestures, to which Huberman refers to as Fossils in motion. They can also become wind, air and space when giving rise to choreographies and their great vehicle are the hands: we will appreciate it in those of SUSE byk, Nijinksky, Israel Galván, the dancers portrayed by Man Ray or the drawing of the drawing Sevillian bullfighter Of, again, Lorca. Automatic gestures, linked to the alleged madness or experimentation with psychotropic substances, will be represented by the hand of Artaud, Salvador Dalí, Henri Michaux or Unique Zürn; And the section is completed with the work of Auguste Rodin, Pedro G. Romero, Kafka, Yves Klein, Oriol Maspons, Bellmer or the recording of CASTROUR À LA RUE D’E ELEby the Greek filmmaker Maria Kourkauta.
As for the sites, these are not explored in a physical sense, or as possible containers of objects or experiences, but as critical spaces that can be impregnated with the psychology of the human being, their obsessions and desires; therefore, as a means affected by the pathos Or, according to Huberman, by The moved airs. Two paintings of Miró as a very simplified composition, but vibrant through points or flashes, coexist with a large canvas of Simon Hantaï, with whom the commissioner published in the nineties The star. This author folds and folds the fabrics before painting them, so that the support between contact with himself; As the philosopher explains, in his case The canvas is a dialectical field, an agitated field for battles that take place everywhere, both in extension and thick.
It contrasts that piece with the sculptures with threads of Fred Sandback, subtle wounded in space, and with the oscillations of the fluids, the skies, the mists and the winds to which they allude to gather Salmon, Sjöström, Tarr and Trouvé.
In the political chapter, remember that revolutions begin by shocks, often related, as a consequence, with mourning and struggles. We will see photographs, drawings, engravings and films of films in fixed and moving images (Turin’s horseby Béla Tarr) about regrets and duel, as well as public speeches and events, books, image and word photomontages, engravings, drawings and films conceived in response to injustices and pains. Among its creators, Brecht, Capa, Esteva, Goedhart, Goya, Hibakusha (Survivors of Hiroshima), Jahnsen, Picasso, Pinna, Friedrich, Guareschi, Heartfield, Kollwitz, Masotti, Michel, Pasolini, Rimbaud and Tucholsky.
It ends “in the moved air …” with a return to the beginning, to the children who seek their language between the real and the imaginary and that, according to the commissioner, are worried about the presence of spectra while throwing around as many elves as possible. Trust sculptures of Pascal convert dialogue with drawings of the Guayaki children compiled by the French anthropologist Pierre Classres; We will contemplate testimonies of small affected by various wars and defend Huberman the option of adopting an ethic with a “minimum of joy”. Returning to Lorca, This laughter is my laughter, my childhood and field laugh, my wild laugh, which I will always defend, always until I die.
The liquid terrain of this extensive sample is, therefore, that of emotion and the astonished look, hence there is no one other than their target audience.
It is completed in Barcelona, by the way, beyond the CCCB rooms: the Filmoteca de Catalunya has scheduled a cycle around Huberman, from May 15 to June 29, which replicates the sections of the tour.
“In the moved air …”
Center for Contemporary Culture of Catalonia. CCCB
C/ Montalegre, 5
Barcelona
From May 8 to September 28, 2025
