àngels viladomiu

Terra ferma 1991

0 Art Biennial, Lleida.

Curator: Glòria Picazo

Site-specific intervention / Roser building facade and plot being rehabilitated

Mixed materials, audio recording

Anchor: 2,5x3x0,5m Chain: 23m long.

 

An anchor adrift in a nonexistent sea, a tiny fragment of blue sea, a chain of perennial grass, the sound of a distant port...the nature of things go astray. Build an unusual object, place it out of context, and allow the imagination to transport us beyond reality to fictitious travels such as in the book by Jules Verne. Stage an ironic twist, an inverted world, the dream of transmutation.

<Terra ferma, Angels Viladomiu's contribution exhibited outside El Roser's apse is a step ahead on the discussion she has established between the artificial things becoming natural and the natural things becoming artificial; everything told with an always risky and often misunderstood ironical accent.

In fact, her work proposes a series of transpositions, among which the most substantial is the one established between what is natural and what is artificial; although this relationship does not invalidate other ones, such as the importance of the scales which monumentalizes and magnifies what might have been hidden by its own triviality, or she cunningly jumbles up form and function, or she simply takes the question of in situ as the starting point and begins her work from a very broad-minded viewpoint as for suggestions; her work then may include architectural characteristics as well as other insinuations related to what a place might mean; such is the case of Terra ferma since Angels Viladomiu started from the poetical image of Lleida and the Seu Vella created by Salvador Espriu: «a ship stranded on a Stone wave».

The great chain, sea element, is made of lawn, obviously artificial, in order to emphasize the antogonism natural-artificial and it even introduces a new element implying a dissonance between sea elements and earth ones, in the same way, the anchor poses as a bearer of a fragment which wishes to be natural but it again shows the certain degree Angels Viladomiu's nature always contains.

Her proposals always keep a link with reality; once this link is obvious the only wish left is the one to subvert what at the beginning seemed unquestionable>. Glòria Picazo, 1991.