Elena del Rivero's transformative fire arrives in Barcelona

BarcelonaThanks to the work of the Archconfraternity of the Immaculate Blood of Barcelona in the Basilica of Santa María del Pi, the memory of people who lived on the margins and were condemned to be forgotten endures. After years of silence, the archconfraternity, whose history dates back to the 16th century, revived in 2022 and resumed the task of burying the cremated remains of people left alone, without a home or family, in the basilica, as explained at the time. Silvia MarimonNow, from the art world, new remains have entered the basilica, those of a series of paintings from the 70s and 80s that the artist Elena del Rivero (Valencia, 1949) burned last year with the residents of a small Galician village, San Pedro Fiz de Vilar. The cream, which comes to Barcelona in a project by the Museu Tàpies within the Grec festival.

Del Rivero was left completely empty-handed when she closed the twenty-year project with which she transformed the catastrophe of the 9/11 attacks into art, making and unmaking works with all the paperwork and debris she found in her destroyed apartment at the foot of the South Tower. And in The cream It was she herself who initiated the destruction of innocent and naive paintings she created during difficult times and which she barely showed publicly. "I transform things into other things, and I create metaphors," says the artist, somewhere between alchemy and miracle. "Burning itself means many things," affirms Mateo Feijóo, the exhibition's curator. "In a way, burning is a regeneration; it's not the end of anything. It's a transition toward a new life." In the Basilica del Pi, the ashes can be seen in small bottles kept in an old rabbit cage that some students from the Eina School converted into a sacred object by painting it gold, near the mark left on the floor by the organ fire during the Civil War. Thus, a gilded rabbit cage becomes "a traveling chapel" with a celebratory character.

As happened last year with the artist Serge Attukwei Clottey, Del Rivero's project, now titled Transit 'The Cream' It is displayed in many spaces and has the support of numerous institutions. Until November 23, the Museu Tàpies is exhibiting a series of works, including nine of the artist's work diaries and a neon sign on the façade with the motto Letters to the mother (Letters to the mother). In addition, La Capella hosts an installation with some sixty photographs of the process of The burning. And the gardens of the Teatre Grec, three sculptural interventions with slogans such as Fear.

The opening ceremony of Transit 'The Cream' will take place this Tuesday at 7:30 p.m. in the Rubió y Lluch gardens with the concert The freed space, curated by Llorenç Barber, a pioneering musician of sound art in Europe who created a portable bell tower, using which he developed his own performance technique. And in November, the Senda gallery will exhibit all the project's diaries.

A round trip between scenography and sculpture

Also among the Grec's plastic arts proposals, the set designer Alejandro Andújar (Cáceres, 1979) presents the installation in the Margarida Xirgu square Total work of art, the result of selling several fragments of the scenery he made for the work of the T de Teatre company The ghost woman, premiered at the Teatre Romea in 2023, and turn them into "a great ready-made", as Andújar himself says. "This project begins a more autonomous and personal path that I want to take alongside my career as a set designer," he explains. "This installation is not a ready-made of an object, but of a scenographic apparatus, and I think it generates some friction that has to do with the fact that this element is not an everyday object like those that are usually associated ready-mades, but in this case it is a pseudo-artistic element that comes from the symbolic field of theatre."

More specifically, Total work of art It's made up of several parts of a staircase placed in an impossible path. And, to drive the point home, they're covered with a plastic that's also part of the work. "Over the past twenty years, I've experienced a certain dissatisfaction with the compendium of different creatives that are needed to make a play, led by a director, and in this case, I want to be the one who gives the ultimate meaning to this element. That's why I find it interesting to take an element that has caused pain, that frustration, in my work as a set designer," says Andújar, who developed the project with Valentín Roma as curator. To make Total work of artAndújar received a Leonardo scholarship, and after the Grec, he will present it at the National Drama Center in Madrid, until he returns to perform the stage design in Malaga and other cities in Spain.