Madrid,
After completing, last year and the hand of Olga de Soto, his initiative Fissuresthe Reina Sofía Museum has announced its willingness to support, already within the framework of its usual programming, to artists in its middle career stage and also to give greater room in this programming to the performance: from today we can visit in its fourth plant , together with the production of Huguette Caland, the “Hello Everyone” show Spain most important of its generation, that of those who are around forty.
With this exhibition the MNCARS wants to claim, according to Manuel Segade, the radical imagination and the risk of an author who has worked on what is usually called expand the epistemological field of artovercoming, in short, the expectations of what we understand today by creation and taking the pulse to the present in a living way; also emphasize the role of independent commissioners, such as the two members of Latitudes (Max Andrews and Mariana Cánepa), who have been opening their activity to experimentation: this exhibition is not born from a queen Sofía, but of a proposal of this team, responsible for the design of the route as a passable warehouse, according to an idea and in force in some of his previous works, and of the very explanatory posters, conceived so that the public can understand the motivations of Estruch.
As we said, “Hello Everyone” collects all the works that it has developed from 2011 to the present, through the materials with which it generated them, and that is the first originality of this presentation: until now the usual thing is that each of These proposals will articulate their own sample, in museums and especially in galleries. These are almost thirty performative creations and adapted to the two rooms of Reina Sofía in which this exposure is structured: they have been reinvented, modified, in some cases recycled, again in segade expression, as bodies in interaction. They sew them on the viewer’s route a sound piece created for the occasion and representative of the constant vocal inquiries of this Barcelona artist, represented in Madrid by Ehrhardt Flórez.
The germ of this exhibition is found in a move from Struch: when author and commissioners saw the materials generated by these works stored, they found a form of beauty at their rest and in that storage and imagined what would happen if those pieces then sleep Joint way in a space, in a single environment where they overlap and dialogue. Estruch, Cánepa and Andrews met precisely in 2011, by the hand of Hello Everyonepiece in which the Catalan appeared to her audience, and since then they have closely followed their overflows between voice, body and sculpture and the ties that are weaving between physical bodies and sculptural bodies.
Laia explained that, when contemplating the result of this assembly, in which its great Slammer Before exposed in the National D´Art Museu of Catalonia, curtain has become work and bodies, and seeing how both pieces reverberate with each other, it has gained greater awareness that its work is fundamentally performative and that the objective or that the object or sculptural is inserted or subject to it; Also of the body of the voice, the most performative that claims to know, because of its ephemeral character and immateriality beyond the records: in Reina Sofia we can listen to all its vocal developments for the different projects.
Struch’s trajectory would have been another of not having come, in 2010 and while studying his university studies, the Cooper Union of New York to receive the teachings of Sharon Hayes (who writes in the catalog) about performance, sound art and sculpture; Since then he learned that this performance, if you do not practice it, you cannot know it; That if there is no public, there is nothing to revolutionize, because the public’s body is also performance; and that the documentation of the same, its records, are not, however (again) performance.
The Catalan of each project that generates collaborations and spaces for learning, circuits and dynamics that promotes places for research, a scenic laboratory that arouses sounds, voices and that is also score. He explains not to interpret or reinterpret, but to undertake searches in which he ensures nothing and plays it a lot; Nor does it try to perform any concrete action beyond its investigation. For the same reason, their expectations regarding this exhibition in Reina Sofía reside in the incorporation to their practice of new gestures, other lines of analysis; Looking ahead to the viewer, this can discover to what extent practical notions affect their work: the materials must be easy and fast, cheap to move…; But they do not determine the final result: while being used as a accommodator in the Auditorium of Sant Cugat, he perceived that his sculptures could lead to scenographies and light certain movements without necessarily counting the participation of a choreographer. And working in public or open spaces, he became aware of the body, gravity, his liquids, his potential channel condition and his temperature management, strength or stiffness. In the background, yours is a task of persecution of limits: for Struch, in them is the action.
Among the fundamental pieces collected in Reina Sofía, the aforementioned stands out Slammeroriginally exposed in the MNAC, in which for the first time it explicitly raised the possibilities of interaction of its production with the public: the one that was long braid with intertwined tunnels, of resonant interior, which we were invited to cross to perceive it As an air channel, sounds, fluids and also people and data has been transformed into the aforementioned retractable curtain, bridge, awnings and petates; The latter house the residual material of that process. WASTE He has also called two sculptures, as metallic as sinuous, that evoke slides and contain – and they will not be the only ones – numbers, letters and symbols; The artist wanted to inhabit them temporarily to explore how they would interact with her voice and with the movements of her body; The title refers to a compilation of texts by Samuel Beckett. And in a similar sense we must understand the textile sculptures that make up Kite: comets with which to study the relationships between wind currents and air flows that the human voice articulates.
If that work has to do with air, they arise from water Crol, Sibina and Siren. In the first project, he immersed himself in the municipal pools of Montjüic – as a typically human space where diverse bodies intersect and intersect – to know the expressive potential of the voice in the aquatic environment; From that action it shows us inflatables and sculptures (dry) that mimic the railing of the pools or deformed ballet bars on the wall. As to Sibinathese are three painted steel sculptures similar to abbreviations that are associated with the sinks and sources of the Garraf (to hydration, ablutions and tears), while Siren It is a sculpture similar to an industrial bathtub designed to keep alive or transport one of them.
Another chapter of his work directly explores the movement: it is the case of MoatPlatform-Parture-Instrument that allowed him to move and check his voice at height; Moat-1structure, this time modular, which is activated from postures and sculptural forms of the author’s body that, in turn, affect the expansion of her voice; Moat-3which carries the rigid forms of an urban playground to a soft body; or of Gavinetmetal sculpture in the form of two heads that is inspired by the poems-object of Joan Brossa and that sheltered performances, promoting its ramps inputs or stage outputs. It is, in all cases, testimonies of now sleeping performances, but Estruch will activate some of them on several occasions while the sample lasts, until next September.
Laia Estruch. “Hello Everyone”
National Museum of Art Center Reina Sofía. MNCARS
C/ Santa Isabel, 52
Madrid
From February 26 to September 1, 2025
