Madrid,
One of the exhibitions with which Telefónica commemorates its centenary this year can still be seen on the fourth floor of its Foundation Space in Fuencarral and goes beyond the review of the collections that the firm has in relation to the history of telecommunications (telephones, distributors, cables, photos and period films) to fuse these technologies with contemporary art in a very broad sense, from plastic arts to cinema and theatre.
The visual artists Eugènia Balcells, Daniel Canogar and Isidoro Valcárcel Medina, the experimental collective Cabosanroque, the theatre company La Fura dels Baus-Pep Gatell and the filmmaker Nuria Giménez exhibit installation projects based on certain pieces linked to Telefónica’s heritage (there are 85,000 of them) and on the possibilities of their relationship with sound, colour, image and light to generate new meanings.
It was these same authors who selected the objects they worked with: Balcells, who has been using technology in his creations since the seventies and has also sought to bring together scientific and philosophical research in art with light as its axis, is exhibiting in Madrid The common threada project focused on copper cables, the pillar of communication networks until the generalisation of fibre optics. Today we can see, without a doubt, that the millions of kilometres of cable deployed by this company since the year 1924 when it was founded contributed to structuring the territory of our country in a social sense; evoking this idea, this Barcelona-based designer has woven a web of fabrics that alludes to the typologies of nodes and communication networks. Cable, light and sound give rise, here, to a poetic experience by emulating the journey of voice waves in space.
As for the Cabosanroque collective, made up of Laia Torrents and Roger Aixut, their career has focused, precisely, on investigating the performative options of sound, although we cannot say that they materialize these in a single category: in their installations, and also in the one we can now see at Telefónica, theatre, music and visual arts come together. However, they tend to build sound devices from objects that practically become sculptures in their hands, and their concerns also include politics, poetry and the links between both with play.
His work in this exhibition is called Polytones: Using the Telefónica icon as a starting point, they have designed a sort of topography using two hundred and fifty terminals from different eras, highlighting the extent to which telephones were milestones of industrial design, but also of popular culture and the emblem of every living room, from the wheel to the buttons and voice dialling. The installation emphasises the sound capabilities of each terminal, giving rise to an orchestral suite whose sound merges with movement and light and which lasts about a quarter of an hour.
Canogar’s proposal is called Intervals. His presence was more than predictable in this exhibition, since throughout his career technology has always been a tool for creation and a center of reflection; he usually investigates the tension between obsolete devices and advanced digital media and the way in which these technologies, their emergence and disappearance, end up having to do with our identity. Intervalshis work at Telefónica, has recovered a small fragment of a distributor, that is, the framework that supports the intricate tangle of cables that made the circulation of voice and data possible: he has therefore reinterpreted an obsolete telephone system to show it to us as a living entity that sheltered a living network not very different in its operation from a brain with its neuronal pulses.
The section of equipment used and the cables come from the Pacífico telephone exchange, one of those that managed communications in the centre of Madrid. It was built in the 1950s and its dimensions exceeded 3,000 square metres.
The theatre company Fura dels Baus, whose stage designs usually incorporate a technological aspect and are deployed in unconventional spaces, has designed C0MUNIC4ND0an installation in three acts that proposes an approach to the documentary and object archives that the firm has been collecting for a century. The first episode begins with moments that illustrate, through anonymous faces and objects, the advances that made voice communication possible during the first half of the 20th century. Next to a forest of poles, we will see images by photographers Alfonso and Marín, who, in the 1920s, documented the deployment of telephone lines on behalf of the firm, as well as a powerful shortwave transmitter, which between the 1920s and the 1960s enabled intercontinental communication with America. In the last act, a section of Rotary pays tribute to the longest-lasting switching equipment in the history of Telefónica, machines that automatically connected two telephone lines for seventy years without the intervention of an operator.
For her part, filmmaker Nuria Giménez, whose films intertwine experimentation and intimacy and tend to be based on archive material, shows us here Dialogues in time. He has accessed a section of the Telefónica Historical Archive and a selection of short films related to the history of telecommunications, as well as resources linked to social evolution in the last century, to compose a quintet of diptychs that pose dialogues between pairs of screens with different frames, shapes and tempos. His purpose is to pay homage: to the archives as a source, and to cinema and television as icons.
The last work in this exhibition, by Valcárcel Medina, is the only non-unpublished work on the tour: Telephone conversations It dates from 1973. It is one of his conceptual actions aimed at activating art’s capacity to introduce situations into everyday life that can generate spaces for reflection. That year, the Murcian artist called eighty randomly selected strangers to inform them of the number corresponding to his then newly installed telephone. The reactions on the other end ranged from astonishment to disbelief, but there were also some trusting interlocutors willing to play along.
It was at this time that domestic and family use of a device was becoming widespread in homes, calls were becoming frequent and Valcárcel Medina called for the possible artistic conception of an act that today may have taken a step further to become, for some, physiological rather than habitual.
“Looks that communicate”
TELEFONICA FOUNDATION SPACE
C/ Fuencarral, 3
Madrid
From June 11, 2024 to January 12, 2025
