Informal Kindness
Artists: Bárbara Sánchez Barroso, Blanca Gracia, Enrique Radigales, Fito Conesa, Irene Pe, Julia Puyo, Luz Broto, Marc Herrero, Radia Cava-ret (Samu Céspedes, Patricia Del Razo, Violeta Ospina Dguez i Yazel Parra Nahmens), Tau Luna Acosta, Xesca Salvà i Marc Villanueva
Curated by Pilar Cruz
Kindness is one of those concepts that everyone seems to clearly understand but no one is capable of accurately defining. We lack the vocabulary and can only think of examples. We tend to define kindness using one or another form of politeness: smiling at someone, holding the door open, please, thank you, not a problem. Forms of politeness (a good upbringing) are standard requirements for living alongside others and are often customs that reflect social structures. These forms change over time, responding to how what is social is structured. They are by no means universal, nor are they exercised in an egalitarian or bidirectional manner.
But kindness, in the sense of letting oneself be and letting others be, goes beyond standard formality in our relationships with others. We think kindness is subservient and indulgent, even naive, but it has an enormous ability to disarm power and therefore enormous political strength. For the philosopher Byung-Chul Han, power is centralising, it tends to itself and whatever is left out must be suppressed. Kindness disarms this tendency and provides space for what is multiple. For there to be multiplicity, the quality of kindness must not only guide behaviour but should also serve to foster physical, mental and symbolic spaces that make existence possible.
If the forms of kindness belong to obsolete physical and mental spaces, we cannot expect to continue using them without questioning them. Kindness is sovereign when people share a space; we should let it govern the rules we live by. Expanding spaces of kindness is a critical, present-day task. One that must go beyond the confines of these spaces and recognise every single subject in the new space as worthy of kindness, as worthy of existing in themselves and being recognised within it.
When the artworks in this exhibition were created, their main intention wasn’t, a priori, kindness. However, they are all full of it and it oozes out of them. The artists reflect on kindness as a critical praxis, as a way of doing and showing, as a starting point and even as an inevitable consequence. They give it meaning and adjectives, broadening its semantic field and, therefore, our imaginary of what is kind. They provide us with clues to rethink and update the ways that kindness takes shape. They land it in the present and their proposals become symbolic places of relationships with others, almost like small antidotes against pessimism and dystopia.
The first piece in this renewed praxis of kindness is Fito Conesa’s Our Own Path Remains. After an artistic and personal crisis that led the musician Arvo Pärt to break with his previous production, and after several years without composing, he restarted his work from scratch with Tabula rasa, a composition that launched a new musical genre. Fito Conesa was inspired by this gesture and created this acoustic shell, a device that makes listening a transcendent experience. Conesa suggests leaving prejudices and platitudes behind and starting from nothing. The acoustic shell represents the beginning of a journey to do away with preconceived ideas about the meaning we give to words, as well as to question the categories within which we have moved until now. It allows us to invent new genres and resume our place in the world. It helps us become aware of our individuality so that we can recognise that of others. This structure is a kind space, even if it causes some vertigo, like a portal to a new kindness.
Un CUERPO doliente en un MUNDO herido by Irene Pe is a series of mixed technique pieces that stem from poems the artist wrote when she began to notice the first signs of the chronic illness she currently suffers from. Each poem and piece are mutations that correspond to different states of the illness and its development in the artist’s body. They explore the feelings and reactions it provoked in her, from anger, grief and uncertainty to acceptance, understanding and exploration. The artist compares all these processes to the world as a body, sickened by the violence of the capitalist system. Kindness towards the body – not as a productive entity but as a sustainer of life itself –, the anti-ableist vision of the human being and the anti-utilitarian vision of other beings, are postulated as a necessary resurgence, as Donna Haraway would say, to live in a “thick present”.
Since the signing of the peace agreement in 2016, Colombia has confronted the systematic assassination of people, both social activists and former FARC combatants. Latencia by Tau Luna Acosta is an installation comprising of a textile piece of art that represents a map of the departments of Cauca, Valle del Cauca and Nariño, in Colombia. The embroidering was done in collaboration with relatives of people murdered in these departments that were particularly hard hit by the violence. Where there was a murder, they placed a light, which lights up when a heart rate sensor is connected to your pulse. The memory of these people is illuminated by the beat of your heart. The installation is completed with a booklet containing a list of people murdered and missing between 2016 and 2019 and a video in which we can hear the voices of their relatives as they embroidered and created the heartbeat-light circuits for memory, mourning and restitution. The recognition of pain and reparation are processes that must be completed before coexistence can once again begin after a situation of extreme violence.
Blanca Gracia’s work is inspired by a mediaeval form of legislation that punished nonconformists and those who had committed petty crimes. They were condemned to “civic death” and lost their status as humans and, therefore, had to live in the forest like animals, with no rights and exposed to unpunished violence. But, it was in this position of greatest social defencelessness, on the periphery of society, where, paradoxically, they achieved the highest level of freedom. With Antidotum Tarantulae, the artist offers a proud and carnivalesque parade of a series of dissident characters who celebrate themselves as they are, without dictates. The audio, with a fragment of Paul Lafargue’s The Right to Be Lazy, places us in this forest of exile as a space of kindness, as if we had been momentarily expelled from today’s regulatory and hyper-productive society.
On the second floor, before entering the room, there is a sculpture bench by Enrique Radigales. Sensowifi is a piece on which you can sit and when you do so, contact microphones send your movements to a database that returns sounds similar to the clicking that plants make to communicate with each other and with other species. You will also hear, at random, an exhalation, like a proto-vocal language, as well as the sound of a baroque composition that imitated birdsong, distorted to remove any recognisable connection. Sensowifi rejects the centrality of words and visuality. It asks you to activate the revolutionary sense of attention to your surroundings and focuses on other possibilities of communication and connection with what surrounds us.
Inside the room, other pieces also replicate connection and non-linguistic communication, such as the work by Bárbara Sánchez Barroso. Her piece is an adaptation of the recording of the action Los nudos que anudamos, which the artist carried out together with Adriana Vila Guevara at ARBAR (La Vall de Santa Creu). This action consisted of a group of participants, tied together with a rope, on a walk to the sea. The walk had to be done in absolute silence, therefore, non-verbal communication had to be used to adapt to the rhythm of the group and to avoid obstacles. If one person fell, there were repercussions for the others; no one could go “at their own pace” without affecting the rest. That invisible thread that links us to each other and to the environment became tangible. The action generated co-responsibility and made clear the interdependence among us and with the environment. This connection is the basis for understanding that, to live alongside each other and to survive, we have to be more of a collaborative community than dominant individuals.
Another piece that resonates with connection and kindness understood as the creation of a space of co-responsibility towards the other and others is El pensament salvatge by Xesca Salvà and Marc Villanueva. It consists of a Petri dish, which, shortly after the exhibition opens, will be inoculated with several hundred of the microorganisms that live on our hands. By the time you read these lines, the microorganisms may have grown and reproduced to form a small planet inhabited by millions of unknown beings, whose incomprehensible buzzing is picked up by a sensor. Or perhaps this planet may already have become extinct, in which case you will see a photographic record. This small world makes us rethink the primacy of language – and all the civilisation that has been generated around it – as the apex of the communication pyramid. These microorganisms question our way of being in the world, they teach us more responsible practices of coexistence with the environment and, ultimately, they place us before the great question of what life means and what its limits are.
Next to this piece is Degrowth by Julia Puyo. This is a sculpture made of copper tubes, the quantity necessary to transmit a message. Copper is a conductor of energy and is essential for electronics, telecommunications and transport. These are the basic pillars of today’s production system. Bruno Latour suggests we become “interrupters” of globalisation: that we start to imagine small insignificant or sweeping gestures against this system, not to modify it but to get away from production as the only possible means of relating to the world. Is it possible to start thinking with kindness about everything that supports our lives? There is no doubt that the planet has been kind to humans. Will we be able to return that generosity and think of the material as an entity to be acknowledged and respected?
Is there a kinder social place than a karaoke bar? It is a space where coexistence is forced through the voices of others, where you become someone else and you sing the song of others. A place where you live together festively, respecting each person’s turn, in not only the acceptance but even the celebration of the normally scarce abilities of others and your own, of your performative skills and those of others. You live and let live in revelry. The collective Radia Cava-ret (Samu Céspedes, Patricia Del Razo, Violeta Ospina Dguez and Yazel Parra Nahmens) presents an appetiser of their project (Orquesta vacía) Karaoke inmigrante, which will take place as a participatory workshop-performance in the first quarter of 2025. This action shows the most recognisable elements of karaoke and invites you to sing the lyrics of hits already hacked in previous actions by the collective, which reveal concerns and demands regarding migration control, racism and immigration laws.
In the centre of the room is Estructura amb cúpula de la Terribilitat de la carn, where Marc Herrero has recreated an updated version of The Last Judgement inspired by that of Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel. If during the Renaissance the end of time was represented as a rendering of accounts before God, in this case, the ultimate judge would be the goddess Gaea. In a dome-like structure, which is also reminiscent of a gymnasium, a panopticon or even a cage, Herrero presents an iconographic repertoire typical of contemporary times: instead of apostles and saints on the dome’s panels, he depicts allegories of the abuses committed by humans, which will more than likely provoke an apocalypse in the not-too-distant future. Consumerism, liberalism, exploitation, extractivism... are manifested as mutant bodily symptoms, in a manner unclear as to whether it is one of harassment or a plea for forgiveness. In contrast, at the base, he swaps angels and penitents for a series of situations in which nature triumphantly breaks through, recovers its agency and infiltrates the traces of civilisation. In a situation of ecological collapse, we can only achieve salvation if we allow nature to invade and collapse all spaces, both earthly and those in the world of ideas.
Finally, closing the visit and on the other side of the room is Luz Broto’s installation Contactar cristales enfrentados. The starting point of the project was the window of the artist’s childhood bedroom in a small village, which coincided with that of her neighbour, just opposite. Luz Broto brought together this pair of windows and then went around places in Barcelona asking people she knew and didn’t know, “Is there a window opposite your window?” This is how she got the other pairs of windows shown here (in the houses they were replaced by new ones), from people who, perhaps, had never spoken to each other in their lives. Placing the panes of these pairs of windows with the exterior sides touching, brings the neighbours closer. It removes the distances and therefore the differences between them in a figurative but also real way, through the exchange and dialogue the action created. Knowing who lives across the street from you is a very radical gesture of coexistence in a big city. Symbolically, it reinforces the idea that what we have in common is actually more than what separates us, that the urban space can be one where the multiple can coexist and that what we build to protect ourselves can also be used to unite us.
Pilar Cruz Ramón