àngels barcelona

Located in Barcelona's Raval district, àngels barcelona operates as a platform for contemporary artistic manifestations, with the aim of transcending disciplines and promoting critical thinking by developing a programme that brings together collaborations with artists, curators and other cultural agents at a local and international level. The gallery is a space where historical, social, political and media discourses are rethought. àngels barcelona builds, promotes and explores new cultural bridges, as well as experimental artistic practices.

Represented artists:

Pep Agut, Daniel G. Andújar, Cecilia Bengolea, Lúa Coderch, Peter Downsbrough, Marcelo Expósito, Harun Farocki, Esther Ferrer, Joan Fontcuberta, Ion Grigorescu, Daniela Ortiz, Claudia Pagès, Mabel Palacín, Jaime Pitarch, Mònica Planes, Oliver Ressler, Jorge Ribalta, Pedro G. Romero, Michael Snow, Ania Soliman, Oriol Vilanova, Richard T. Walker

The garden is a place of reunion with nature. The dust garden is a place of reunion with memory. Dust is linked to time and abandonment, to the origin and to the end: everything is born from dust, everything is returned to dust. Dust is a cloak that blurs vision and fades memory. With Élevage de poussière (1920), Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray opened the way to turn dust into a poetic and conceptual substance.

In this new project, Joan Fontcuberta goes from the organic in the process of disappearing to the artificial about to emerge. Two bodies of images articulate those walks through the dust garden. In one, Fontcuberta exhumes damaged photographic documents that microorganisms have reduced to crops of mold and dust to then “portray”, with the help of an electric microscope, the microorganisms causing the degradation. The images that are now the subject of this dramatic deterioration were originally majestic alpine landscapes captured between 1902 and 1904 belonging to the Italian national archives. In the opposite series, other representations of natural forms appear, landscapes devoid of memory, without history, non-existent landscapes which are the result of the generative processing of algorithms. These visual artifices are the consequence of another type of dust: the infinitesimal graphic repositories, that is, the enormous contingent of pre-existing images that the A.I. cannibalizes in order to give light to new images.

The exhibition therefore illustrates the transition from the ancient arcane alchemy to the new algorithmic alchemy at a time in which A.I. is replacing the camera in the centrality of our visual culture.