One of the most frightening enigmas of abuse against human integrity is the story of Kaspar Hauser, the 16-year-old disgraced teenager who in 1828, as if he were an abandoned dog, appeared seemingly out of nowhere in a German city square. from Nuremberg. He was dressed in rags, could barely walk and was only able to pronounce one sentence: "I want to be a rider like my father." Kaspar had been locked away in a tiny, dark dungeon since he was six years old, never interacting with anyone beyond the perceived but never seen presence of his captor, who regularly left him bread and water and taught him nine words. Five years later, that unhappy semi-savage that German society welcomed as if it were a fairground attraction – educating him and then abandoning him to his fate – was stabbed by an unknown hand in the gardens of the Ansbach Palace.
The artist Èlia Llach (Barcelona, 1976) learned about the story of Kaspar Hauser through Peter Handke's theatrical production, in which the protagonist is subjected to violent linguistic training by the prompters, who continually correct his way of speaking and walking until make you want to be like everyone else. “I thought that this story would help me talk about my drawings, which, unlike what happens to Handke's character, are not corrected, but resist, always looking for a way not to get caught in a common place”.
In the Sala Miserachs of the Virreina Center de la Imatge, Llach has arranged more than seven hundred originals, gestural lines that never capture an image, with which he recreates a mysterious room dimly lit by a light bulb. It could be the room where Kaspar Hausser was held captive, but it could also be Virginia Woolf's room, Marguerite Duras' room or the one where Xavier de Mestres wrote his Journey around my room during his 42 days of house arrest. In any case, it is the space where a creator creates and from which, through a window, there is visual access to a second room in which we once again observe his drawings, these the size of the walls of his own studio, reflected in a black lagoon
"It is the best installation that has ever been done in this space," says the director of La Virreina, Valentín Roma, regarding Escrito en el agua (until October 2), a scenographic proposal that the artist has devised in complicity with the curator Frederic Montornés to be experienced and to be lived. "Like an open book that recounts a journey without leaving a room," says the curator, for whom Llach's drawings are like "an infinite, endless gesture, an attempt, a diary of something that is being done..." and that here they rebel in silence against the prompter's voice that sounds every eight minutes and they grow in the water.
