'Fantastic interior' exhibition cycle at La Casa Encendida

Fantastic interior, the annual exhibition cycle at La Casa Encendida opens on January 27. Until January 8, 2023, it will present four chapters on the inner world of artists.

Fantastic interior, an exhibition cycle at La Casa Encendida curated by Rafa Barber Cortell, consisting of four episodes that take place throughout the anus. Four artists: Ad Minoliti, Marina González Guerreiro, Eva Koťátková and Korakrit Arunanondchai have been invited to think about intimacy, the importance of self-care, the creative potential of solitude or the role of bodies in building communities. In short, to look at each one towards their "inner world".

Cover photo and on these lines: Ad Minoliti, Cuentos peluche, La Casa Encendida, 2022. Photo: Bego Solís.

Reality is not thinkable without a subject of experience, without a self, for this reason the interaction between the external and internal world is delimited to the extent of human beings. The image of intimacy, being with oneself, subjectivity are part of the inner worlds, but also the sense of belonging and the creation of communities and collectivities. Emotions along with what the mind projects has no end. That is why Fantastic Interior exhibition cycle at La Casa Encendida, through each of the scenes addresses the "interior" relating to the different moments in which emotions have shaped our existence.

Ad Minoliti, Cuentos peluche, La Casa Encendida, 2022. Photo: Bego Solís.

In chronological order, the Ad Minoliti exhibition has to do with the political construction of childhood. While the one by Marina González Guerreiro deals with spaces of transition such as adolescence. Eva Koťátková's exhibition will try to build places of understanding and empathy from maturity. Finally, Korakrit Arunanondchai's proposal approaches the forms of collective healing after traumatic processes with the figure of his grandfather as the common thread. A journey through time through the intimacies of artists through their artistic expressions.

Ad Minoliti, Cuentos peluche, La Casa Encendida, 2022. Photo: Bego Solís.

Fantástico interior takes its title from a collection of short stories by various authors compiled by the writer Pilar Pedraza. According to the curator, "Now that we return to speed, to the gathering of bodies and to a way of life that lets itself go, perhaps it is time to look at a present full of individuals who are more connected than ever but more alone than ever." before. Time to look at how the walls that delimit our intimacy have been built today, at the changes they have undergone and at what private means in times of hyperconnection”.

Fantastic interior, 1st intervention: childhood. Ad Minoliti's Stuffed Stories

The first intervention on this tour is Ad Minoliti's Stuffed Stories (Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1980) which takes place from January 27 to March 27. This first stop towards the interior proposes a return to childhood, to that starting point of the subjects. The exhibition imagines a childhood that does not branch off in two directions, but carefully seeks its options, because as le artiste says "perhaps the time has come for children to stop being the future to be able to decide their present" .

Ad Minoliti, Cuentos peluche, La Casa Encendida, 2022. Photo: Bego Solís.

Teddy Tales is an immersive installation that subtly navigates through the symbolic strategies that the system uses to shape and assign an identity since we began to exist within a binary system. Minolti creates for Fantástico interior an exhibition cycle at La Casa Encendida a fictitious geometric forest in the room. A forest like the one through which Little Red Riding Hood walked. In this scenario, a different narrative is witnessed than the one we were always told and we will meet a Little Red Riding Hood who has become a CAP and who meets Lobe in the forest.

Ad Minoliti, Cuentos peluche, La Casa Encendida, 2022. Photo: Bego Solís.

This wild space that Little Red Riding Hood feared to walk alone becomes a multicolored landscape inspired by the geometric art and domestic design of the 1970s and 1980s. Minoliti, who trained in the field of painting, understands this technique as an expanded field that is capable of creating immersive atmospheres like that of this fabled forest in which large murals coexist with small works on canvas. Le artiste proposes rebellious alternatives in which the soft, the tender, the childish and the soft are protagonists.

Ad Minoliti, Cuentos peluche, La Casa Encendida, 2022. Photo: Bego Solís.

Once the environment is created, CAP and Lobe meet and decide to meet and walk through this forest that is no longer a dangerous place but quite the opposite; here there are no prejudices or imposed moralities. This story is told in space through a fotonovela that receives us in the room like a storyteller and includes the actions of a performance performed by Hapi Hapi and Marcus Massalami that will be activated live twice.

Ad Minoliti, Cuentos peluche, La Casa Encendida, 2022. Photo: Bego Solís.

Two figures receive us in this space wearing the same dresses that CAP and Lobe wear during the performance. The outfits are the work of Feli Quispe with a tribute to Susy Shock. They are furries, well-known characters in pop culture characterized by imagining a trans-species with an animal appearance, but with human capabilities.

The exhibition tries to question a system of representation where concepts such as innocence or tenderness are depoliticized to become tools with which, on occasions, children are denied authority over their bodies.

Fantastic interior. Subsequent interventions: adolescence and maturity

After Minolti, Fantastic interior exhibition cycle at La Casa Encendida welcomes spring with Marina González Guerreiro (A Guarda, Spain, 1992). From April 20 to June 19, Marina's work focuses on the beauty of routine moments that sometimes do not receive all the attention they deserve. Washing, ordering, sweeping are small acts that become central and claim a relationship with objects and with time that confronts, without violence, the acceleration of the present.

Marina González Guerreiro, A Promise (2019). Rosa Santos Gallery. Photographer: Guillermo Etchemendi.

For his first solo exhibition, he presents a new body of work on the emotional grammar linked to adolescence. The change of stage or the beginning of something new, coexist with the referents of a spatial or visual nature characteristic of her work. The idea of ​​intermediate spaces that connect other spaces, such as a bridge or a window, work as starting points for an exhibition that starts from the small to build a large installation.

In the middle of summer, Eva Kot’átková (Prague, Czech Republic, 1982) presents from July 6 to October 2 a walkable installation. The artist uses pieces of clothing sewn together on a large metal structure. The piece becomes an organism that houses and represents animals, people, plants and objects, analyzing their relationships with each other.

Eva Kot’átková, 2019. Machine for Restoring Empathy

An example of Koťátková's participatory approach is the activation of this piece through sewing and storytelling workshops. In them, different groups of visitors share their experiences. And they tell stories while they carry out these tasks, giving rise to elements that shape the work itself. A piece of encounter with others, empathy and listening. Also, a space to 'put oneself in the other's place', a human quality that is often only achieved in maturity.

End of cycle: Korakrit Arunanondchai. Traumas and collective healing

Fantastic interior, exhibition cycle at La Casa Encendida ends with Korakrit Arunanondchai (Bangkok, Thailand 1986) from October 19, 2022 to January 8, 2023. Arunanondchai examines the healing capacity of Shamans after the 1948 Jeju massacre in South Korea. Personal narratives centered on the recently deceased artist's grandfather and popular cultural references from the film trilogy The Hunger Games are combined against the backdrop of ongoing student protests in Thailand.

Korakrit Arunanondchai. Songs for dying, 2021. HD video one channel, color, sound. 30:18 min. Co-commissioned by the 13th Gwangju Biennale, Han Nefkens Foundation, and Kunsthall Trondheim

A turtle surrounded by local flowers serves as a symbol of the artist's dying grandfather. A floor made of earth mixed with latex paint, resin, and dried seashells forms the landscape of the installation. The installation features a profile of Boychild, an American queer performance artist and one of the artist's main collaborators. Korakrit Arunanondchai combines historical narratives with his personal cosmology. Drawing from there a new story that is not linear and that exists between different topographies. His installations question Western culture and how it is built, inviting the viewer to open up to new ways of narrating, more transversal, horizontal and inclusive.

Korakrit Arunanondchai and Alex Gvojic, Songs for living, 2021. HD video one channel, color, sound. 20:51 min. Co-commissioned by Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst and Kunstverein in Hamburg with the support of FACT, Liverpool

The interior is understood as that space in which modernity taught us to keep delicate and vulnerable feelings. Those that are not shown in public, and that it is increasingly important to talk about.

Through these four scenes, as well as different activations of a performative nature and an epilogue in the form of a publication that collects the entire process, Fantastic interior exhibition cycle at La Casa Encendida seeks to create a polyphony that, like one of those leisurely conversations that are held in private, aspires to weave a network of empathy from which the visitor to Room A of La Casa Encendida can feel part of it.