When the future catches up with us is the challenging title of this new exhibition by Avelino Sala at the Galería Gema Llamazares. The artist delves into current regions and issues (the failure of the Enlightenment, the predatory attitude towards the planet’s limited resources) predicting a future, perhaps inevitable, where things look complex and sad. It is a direct, unvarnished message that invites us to reflect on that unconditioned forward impulse of human improvement of yesteryear, where only the tired relics of forgotten cultures and values have remained in use; concentric layers of a system of symbolic practices redecorated and buried under an imperturbable faith in a global horizon of constant progress in the era of advanced capitalism.
Avelino Sala proposes, for one of the rooms in the space, a journey through a city ‘designed’ by fundamental classical references in the shaping of western iconography. These figures have unrecognisable books as their pedestal as a metaphor for the historical formations of ‘discourses’. The forms of discourse and the games of knowledge deified by their capacities for expansion lead, in many cases, to insensitive and ruthless behaviour that builds walls to ‘protect’ the great Western legacy.
The forms of discourse and the games of knowledge deified by their capacities for expansion often lead to insensitive and ruthless behaviour that builds walls to ‘protect’ the great Western legacy. It also brings with it relations of production and consumption in the welfare and developing regions of the planet that are based on a blind over-exploitation of finite resources and lead to environmental disasters unprecedented in human history.
The exhibition When the Future Catches Up with Us is also a reflection on the function of art in these times. Whatever humanity’s response to so many challenges, artistic creation and social commitment can no longer be reduced to its significance within the history of art and culture.
Avelino Sala’s proposal is oriented towards a search for liberation from certain forms of aesthetic attention, proposing a vision and reconfiguring subjectivities that come to us from a future devastated by inequalities that reach a high level of transaction and collision. Avelino Sala’s work, positioned in a cultural and social critique, not only for this exhibition but throughout his career, is defined by achieving, thanks to his artistic production, a greater impact on the awareness of essential human principles that can be cultivated from and for our present.
We are living in intense times. We are, we know, immersed in a change of cycle, the dystopias of the future, which have tormented us through science fiction, have already reached us. The nightmares of a place devastated by climate change, by the emergence of populist totalitarian regimes, by a stark, ultra-liberal human being, totally stripped of the collective, are already here. The times are, more than ever, unhinged. Walls are being erected to ‘protect’ us, to keep the West safe. The Mediterranean is a great cemetery, Mexico will pay for its barrier, the denialism of the Amazon deforestation is rampant, we have lived too long, Europe is crumbling……, a flock of vultures is flying over our heads, which does not bode well. Perhaps it is the end of a cycle of civilisation, the end of a time: the time of man.
Will ultra-liberal democracy be the ‘end of history’ as Fukusima claims? Will this be the last stage in the evolution of humanity and therefore of Western societies?
Here we present the city as the axis of this debate, an invented place where everything happens, where everything is theatricalised, a city, no matter which one, as a stage where dramas and joys, life and death, the strange locus, the unsettled space.
There are white cities, cities made of buildings that are in turn made of books, of buried, fossilised knowledge, a telluric image of layers and layers that crush each other, an impossibility of seeing things because of our own incapacity. It can be a global city. A city of cities. The skyline of a devastated world that has its own gods. A strange cosmogony that forms a new scenario, the possibility of an (invented) world that offers justifications of existence that, symbolically, satisfy us.
Where the words emerge on its walls, the words, the concepts, the past ideas of others appear in its spaces. We glimpse conceptual messages, in walls that are melting, it is the thawing of texts.
We find ourselves at the gates of an annihilating anthropocene that does not cease to be the angel of death, an exterminator of other worlds but also of this one. And suddenly doubts arise, those that hover over recurring themes… the need for Art, its function, the finiteness of life, questions and questions that accumulate… all that which is agglutinated in thoughts and reflections that leave us petrified, perhaps we can only free ourselves if we look into the eyes of the Gorgon, then the future cannot reach us, we will continue to flee forward in a time that is expected to be long, because the desert continues to grow.
