Sometimes in the Desert
Beatriz Alonso
I totally reject stories, because for me they only bring out lies, nothing but lies, and the biggest lie is that they show coherence where there is none. Then again, our need for these lies is so consuming that it's completely pointless to fight them and to put together a sequence of images without a story—without the lie of a story. Stories are impossible, but it's impossible to live without them.[...] That's the mess I'm in.
Wim Wenders
To shelter all the images of language and make use of them, for they are in the desert, where they have to be sought out.
Jean Genet
We see a sequence that comes to halt at a given point in the story: a portion of suspended space and time whose precise coordinates are of little importance in this case. As in dreams, familiar and strange atmospheres fuse in a marvellous contradiction that allows us to escape routine, shaking the very foundations of truth. Perhaps it is a yearning for what we have already lived—or for what is yet to come—or perhaps it is a necessary flight to a marginal state of consciousness where anything might happen.
The two-way journeys provoked by the experiences derived from our almost constant contact with film are not all that different. Personal experiences condition the emotions and thoughts that cinema stirs in us, while its images, dialogues and melodies happily mingle with the scattered recollections in the archives of our memory. This enormous influence on individual and collective imaginaries has—especially in recent decades—engineered an unprecedented proximity to a more imaginative, less constrained world through film, allowing other subjectivities to be reflected in those invented contexts Wim Wenders was talking about. However, these fragmented stories have had to fight a fierce battle in the midst of hegemonic film production, from which they have appropriated the power to shape social and ideological structures at will and whose quasi-epidemic screening around the globe has turned filmmaking into one of the most effective tools of the 20th century for constructing and disseminating the official version of history, creating ordinary environments and establishing the boundaries of expected behaviour.
By incorporating film in her work, Leonor Serrano Rivas compares and subverts fictions, appropriating them to demonstrate how the systems that currently govern and order our shared spaces are the product of the same principles of authority that shaped the great modern narratives. She does this by resorting to a device which the powers-that-be have often used in the past to legitimise and proclaim their ideals: state-owned art collections. But unlike the majority of these collections, which even today are still postponing the necessary revision and modernisation of their discourses, in Colección pública [Public Collection] the artist offers us a fragmentary, subjective process of composition more attuned to the present moment: a new way of collecting that is less about amassing objects and more about accumulating the multiple disjointed stories that can unfold from the recognition of an ordinary snapshot.
She does this by capturing abandoned suburban areas where nothing seems to happen and combining them with decontextualised film footage. Together they generate impossible compositions in which the foreground is no longer occupied by movie stars or imposed scripts but by the memories we reconstruct based on clues provided by the set location and background noises. In this way, she turns the city outskirts into a metaphor for the legendary invented atmospheres of the silver screen, those mental constructs which we have visited time and time again and are now an inextricable part of our shared cultural imaginary. Their collective ownership is crucial from a legislative point of view if, as the artist proposes, some of their most nondescript elements are to be designated Bienes de Interés Cultural, cultural heritage assets. Through this procedure, the air itself becomes the protagonist of a suburb which, thanks to the lack of explicit detail, can remind us of any of the countless architectural fabrics that weave themselves into our daily lives. Leonor Serrano's work therefore seems to call for a more creative relationship with the less visible aspects of our daily existence and to redefine the notion of a public collection as common heritage.
Although we do not know for sure where these phantasmagorical scenarios come from or what plots they weave, we do recognise them as signs of the decline of an era. They are symbols of (un)known places that represent the loss and void at the heart of a society which demands a response from this generation and from those to come. Undoubtedly, the principal challenge for future generations will be to rebel against a patriarchal organisation which, even in the face of incontrovertible evidence that its foundations are crumbling, still stubbornly clings to truths that were never true. Leonor Serrano Rivas invites us to use these half truths to invent new ones, to stand back and gaze upon the destruction of habitability in those new neighbourhoods where ruin is the product not of demolition but of the ashes of a dying paradigm. In the end, it is the citizens who will be responsible for reviving those deserts which occasionally furnish us with images, mental connections, comings and goings, and thoughts.
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