In the courtyard that separates the Macba and the CCCB, a strange black car is parked with a confusing illuminated sign, right? Future!, which asks and at the same time answers, reactivating the old Sex Pistols slogan without reaching any conclusion. Jordi Colomer (Barcelona, 1962) circulated it at night through the streets of Le Havre and Saint Petersburg. And already inside, presiding over the atrium, another flashing light that seems to have been rescued from a circus or a casino, struggles unsuccessfully to spit out the word Maravillas (the vowels are missing, it is not known if they have been torn out or still I didn't wear them), leaving the ambiguous feeling as to whether what it promises is actually not that much or whether they will last forever. Illusion mixes with reality.
We are at Façana Foto Festa Futur Fideus, the “wonderful” anthology that the Macba dedicates to Colomer (the adjective comes from Martí Peran, its curator), and before entering the exhibition hall the nomadic artist has been leaving traces of that way of doing so much his own, which has to do with the power of imagination and the idea of utopia, and which on this occasion will even take him to the balcony of the museum, an unknown space (“no one has ever left”) from where this afternoon a giant with only one eye (or a giantess, again the ambiguity) interacted with another located in the square. The museum and the neighborhood dancing together in an action (El balcó) for which the collaboration of the children of the Casal dels Infants del Raval has been necessary, who are the ones who have designed the paper mache figures (The action will be repeated on the day 18, within the Night of the Museums, and for the Mercè). For those who are not familiar with Colomé's work, more clues: the relationship between man and the city and the importance of creating real collective experiences together. And the humor, of course. Like that wooden fireplace that we will see later and whose impossibility of being is moving.
Façana Foto Festa Futur Fideus will have an extension in La Infinita de l'Hospitalet, a space that Colomer created in 2018 together with the artist and producer Carolina Olivares and which today is a pillar of younger creation. The one at Macba is the first major exhibition that Barcelona dedicates to the artist (he represented Spain at the 2017 Venice Biennale and exhibits and works around the world) and is the most important one he has held to date, with more than fifty pieces. that cover their entire career from the eighties to today. It had been scheduled by the previous director, Ferran Barenblit, but it turns out that Elvira Dyangani Ose also arrived with her name on the priority agenda. Colomer thanks her for her “joy,” her “generosity,” and above all her “wisdom.” “It seems to me that you are a wise person, and I want this to come out in the press: Macba has a wise director, the first woman in addition, and I hope that from now on there will be many others.”
Façana Foto Festa Futur Fideus, the title of the retrospective, already gives a certain idea that the “wonders” that Martí Peran spoke of have not been neatly placed chronologically, but that the whole thing is like a large environmental, scenic installation , as if it were a city with streets, its squares, its alleys and its shortcuts, “in which there is no possible map to visit it, as in Kafka's story in which the protagonist consults the map at the top of a mountain and says: 'ah, of course, we are there in front'.”
It is difficult to find an axis that runs through the entire exhibition, the curator admits, that when choosing a unifying feature in Colomer's work is its scenic dimension, “so generous that the power of the imagination, instead of being channeled to generate spaces of fantasy, It is projected onto real spaces, in real time and generating real actions.” Without being an explicitly political work, adds Colomer, it has great political effectiveness because it generates experiences that allow us to think about other ways of being together, of occupying the territory and of generating common experiences with the most emancipatory weapon of all: the imagination.
Along with emblematic works such as Anarchitekton, exhibition includes pieces such as Forbidden to sing. Didactic work for the founding of a paradisiacal city, in which from the Rise and fall of the city of Mahagonny, by Brecht (three criminals flee from the police and arrive in the desert. Since they cannot go back or move forward, they decide to found right there a city dedicated to pleasure) invented his own city coinciding with the Eurovegas project. “One of the clichés when talking about his work is to underline his interest in the peripheries, which he obviously is, but as they are available scenarios, blank pages where it is easier for the imagination to occupy them,” concludes Peran.
