Sculto 2018

SCULTO Sculpture Fair
From May 30 to June 3,2018. Logroño, La Rioja. Spain
Espacio Olvera gallery
www.espacioolvera.com
Artist: Beatriz Castela, Jorge Gil, Chelo Matesanz, Eugenio Rivas, Paula Rubio Infante and Nuno Sousa Vieira.

Fuente de sombras
SOURCE OF SHADOWS (2018)

The project was born from the invitation of the historian, art critic and poet Pedro A. Cruz Sánchez to participate in the collective exhibition Fuente de sombras. Female visions about Duchamp and the urinal in the Párraga Center of Murcia.
In Fuente de sombras (2018) I propose the thesis that between some of the works of Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) and certain architectural solutions of the extinct Carabanchel prison, there is a relation of formal, conceptual and use equivalence. This relationship of similarity is established based on the construction of three pairs of images and their content:
– Fontaine (1917) by Marcel Duchamp / Masonry toilet in one of the cells of the 3rd gallery of men from the extinct Carabanchel prison. 1998. Paula Rubio Infante.
– Game of chess between M. Duchamp and Eve Babitz in 1963 / Press image of the 80s where a detail of the Surveillance Center and tiled floor of the Carabanchel prison is appreciated. The authorship is unknown.
– Nu descenddant a escalare nº2 (1913) by Marcel Duchamp / Press picture where the current Director General of Penitentiary Institutions appears, Mr. Ángel Yuste Castillejo, together with personnel from the Carabanchel Penitentiary Center. Date and authorship is unknown.

At the same time, the whole project pivots on two base ideas; The first will be the desire to organize the horizontal modules of the installation according to the layout of a checkerboard. And the other will be the desire to refer to the former Department of Agitated Psychiatric Penitentiary Carabanchel, which was built adjacent to the prison and was part of the same architectural complex, now disappeared, the city of Madrid. The mention is made in the placement of the handrail of the staircase tracing a vertical towards the modules arranged on the floor. This space is described by my father, an official who worked in that center, as: «It was the department where the inmates went, either they came in a situation of difficult psychic stability or they lost it … that first Department of Agitated, that was incredible … that can hardly be described … first you had to go down and then it was like a cage of animals, on the one hand, the animal was visible, it had its corresponding gate and then on the back it was all work of masonry, but each one of the cells where the inmates had their corresponding hole for their surveillance, all this in the round, all this is in a round building and you could circulate around there. difficulty and the light that I had was the light that came from the courtyards, which corresponded to little windows that were at ground level, the impression was that the one who was there was like a beast. I was there was a beast, the treatment I had was that of a beast (…) That was like a modern movie, which you put as a kind of house, you put it inside, as if it were in a vacuum. That was in a vacuum. Because to go down the stairs, really … they were not of these snail but almost they were … the official who was always upstairs: he had an exhaustive control … Then you entered as in a different dimension.» (Transcript of an interview carried out in 2014. Total duration: 40 «.)