Jordi Colomer, between the street and the theater

Barcelona,

Seven years after he represented Spain at the Venice Biennale with the project pocket citywhich was then curated by Manuel Segade, the Barcelona MACBA will review the career of Jordi Colomer from the late eighties to today in “Façana Foto Festa Futur Fideus”, an exhibition curated by the critic and curator Martí Peran that will feature projects in multiple disciplines: this artist, who lives and works between the Catalan capital and Paris, is the author of a diverse body of work in which photography, video and staging within the exhibition space predominate, although his works are always endowed with a clear sculptural sense.

It was from the exhibition “Alta Comèdia”, which he starred in at the Sala Tinglado 2 in Tarragona in 1993, when he began to merge in his creations that technique, sculpture, with elements of theatrical scenography and references to architecture; Later, especially since he developed a high interest in German avant-garde cinema of the 1930s, he added video to his production, the main mediator in the relationship he would maintain with performance, theater and sculpture itself. . Later, at the beginning of the 2000s, his scenographic investigations gradually opened to the urban space, exploring the different scenarios of social life (the street, the neighborhood, the rooftops) and its inverted model, the desert, while his Most recent proposals analyze the relationships between utopias, dystopias, fiction and history.

These are, broadly speaking, the milestones of Colomer's career, but this MACBA exhibition proposes us to analyze it in a unitary way, emphasizing the scenic aspect (that is, located between the real and the illusory) common to most of his pieces: sculptures, collages, photographs, videos, installations and live actions in which he raises the relationships between the palpable and the imaginary that can be established in different scenarios: from moldable material to urban territory; Colomer is interested in the mobile and the nomadic, the peripheral, the imaginary of popular culture, humor and utopias.

The projects brought together, in most cases, make sense when taking into account their production in specific cities (such as Barcelona, Bucharest, Sanaa, Mexico City, Istanbul, Tetouan, Modena, Palermo and Buenos Aires), in which The artist has carried out actions of diverse scale: starring a single actor (Anarchitekton, right? Future! and Medina Parkour), aimed at broad communities (Argentine alphabet) or to any potential spectator as a citizen (Crier sur les toits, New Palermo Felicissima either Modena Parade/Corteo Modenese). Both have in common to propose an event, of a different type, humble or noisy, as a touchstone to raise relevant questions for these populations: how and who builds communities, what times guide their development, what imaginaries they articulate and why.

This anthology will not be structured chronologically, but rather by concatenating scenes regardless of their dating, although most of them correspond to the last two decades. It was then, approximately 2002, when Colomer decided to start working in the street field; However, these scenes will be exhibited punctuated by previously dated sculpture-objects intended to emphasize the theatricality inherent to all of his projects. We will observe how some and other actions are related: New Operetta (1992) or Wonders (fragment) (1995-2004) anticipate the fabulation that will emerge in L'Avenir (2011), X-Ville (2015) or Join up! Join Us! (2017), with utopian drifts; and his first projects can also be read as an advance of his will to materialize fictions on the street, be it through simple gestures (STANDARD MEX2019) or rituals of necessarily group participation (La, Re, Mi, The Feast of Brute Robbery, 2014). Many of these proposals offer, in turn, political implications: this Barcelona author understands that it is possible to debate community life while he imagines and structures it.

When selecting his settings, the places where he can prefigure individual and collective lives, he tries to select those that offer enough ambiguity for the imagination to come into play: we are referring to the peripheries of large cities (which appear in Ixtapaluca (Houses for México), Poble Nou, Anarchitekton), the terraces (The Istanbul Map) or the aforementioned desert (in the pampas).

Regarding time, and given that the stage can only develop in the real chronological framework of its implementation, the past and the future are fictions, daydreams that feed the present, that stimulate events (Prototips 1).

To these previous projects, presented favoring various possible routes and attending to a montage that, through cardboard, wants to emphasize that these proposals have not yet been finalized – insofar as they may have an echo in the current ways of understanding the city, the uses of the architecture and urban spaces -, three new productions are added: the aforementioned Argentine alphabet, Spanish Coast and The Balco.