At first glance it seems like an everyday scene, even banal. But it is a dark moment, an act of violence after contemplating which we will come away with our heads full of questions. An older man silently attaches explosives to his body while another, younger man mends a jacket and puts food in a can. Prayers from a nearby mosque can be heard in the background. What do you think? What horrors have they seen? Who will be his victims? The film by Lebanese artist Akram Zaatari is titled Nature Morte (Still Life) and was filmed in 2008 in southern Lebanon, in an area that served as a base for Palestinian resistance fighters in the late 1960s. The conflict between Israel and Palestine seen through the tense and contracted faces of its protagonists.
“What relationship do the two men have?” “Will pain be passed from one generation to the next?” adds new questions, Mei Huang, researcher, writer and curator of Desde la Frontera, an exhibition at CaixaForum that invites us to reflect on borders, geographical ones and also those that “ They are invisible or mental, which have to do with issues such as race, gender, religion or ideology, and they generate large gaps between the I and the you, and the them and the us.”
Nature Morte is part of the Comisart creation support program, through which a young curator, in this case the Chinese woman based in Barcelona, Mei Huang, is invited to develop a project from the funds of the La Caixa Foundation Collection. and those of Macba. Huang has chosen eight that talk about border conflicts (Zatari's video) and flags, “the symbol par excellence of national identity.” “Through them, pride of belonging and the sense of exclusion are fostered,” reflects the commissioner, who has distributed 19 televisions throughout the room on which flags of as many countries fly. It is an installation by the Brazilian artist Paulo Nazareth, Broken Flags, which forces us to lower our eyes to observe them, removing their solemnity and subjecting them to the whip of the wind as a metaphor for "the force of nature that flags, which represent geographical borders imposed by man, they cannot control,” he suggests. And in the background, presiding over the space, Not All That Moves Is Red (Curtain)
Red and black are present again in the Black Virgin with Twins, by Vanessa Beecroft, “which breaks the mental boundaries regarding the color of the skin that a religious image must have.” Next to her, on a mound of illuminated earth covered in bullet casings, we can see the curled up body of a child flanked by the Communist Manifesto and the New Testament. A historical piece by Francesc Torres, Construction of the Matrix, (1976), which symbolizes how “the new Spain was born from a pile of ashes and bullets. A high cost for the birth of a country.”
From the Border, which shows for the first time the work of Isidoro Valcárcel Medina, Graphics of the Border, also explores those everyday borders, those that separate childhood from adulthood (Duel Game, by Annette Messager) or the no less mysterious by Pep Duran, Esotro s/t, four suits hanging on hangers facing another, separated and alone. “Perhaps those who were once part of a community today seem separated by an abyss,” interprets Huang.
