Noise, dust and uncertainty

The Fabra i Coats: Centre d’Art Contemporani of Barcelona is moving house. In February it left the space where it opened in 2012 to move to the other side of the building. If all goes well, May will see the opening of the new Art Centre, next to Carrer Gran in Sant Andreu.

In this traffic, three artists have worked around what the works generate: noise, dust and uncertainty. The project is called Uncomfortable, in allusion to these three discomforts inherent to any construction or renovation work that Laura Llaneli (Granada, 1986), Mireia c. Saladrigues (Terrassa, 1978) and Anna Dot (Vic, 1991) examine through three temporary interventions that enrich the frontier between the material and the intangible, and that reaffirm the idea that contemporary art is often uncomfortable.

Too cryptic or too critical, art today often confronts us with the need to understand everything, and to be able to be quick and easy, without making our heads too hot. In this discomfort, art has found its playground, probing its own limits and those of society.

In Remor renou, Laura Llaneli proposes until 29 April the installation of canvases around the Art Centre with texts describing the sound produced by the works; in other words, a sound that is both sonorous and silent at the same time. In addition, the artist will lead a collective creation process with a group of students from the Escola Municipal de Música of Sant Andreu to interpret this text and the idea of noise with conventional instruments.

In Polvere che gira, Mireia c. Saladrigues sets up a dusting machine on the stairs of the old Art Centre, so that the dust of rock will gradually fall and cover the entrance. Whoever passes in front of the glass door will see until 29 April how the building is being dusted, metaphorically and literally.

For her part, on 25 March, Anna Dot will be giving a very special Site visit. The artist conceives the works of the new Arts Centre as a "translation zone" similar to the Tower of Babel, both because of the diversity of languages of the people who work there and because of the provisional signs, which do not follow any unified system. Based on a conversation with Amador Hernando, the works manager, and a study of the Towers of Babel by Athanasius Kircher and Pieter Brueghel the Elder, the author uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) to depict the current difficulties in technological research to achieve universal understanding through a perfect translation system.