¡Disfruten un Año Nuevo sanos y seguros!

¡Disfruten un Año Nuevo sanos y seguros! [Enjoy a healthy and safe New Year!] is the outcome of a research project in which, starting from a specific territory, the artists Carlos Suárez and Juanjo Palacios reflect on Asturian industrial identity — how it was formed, how it disappeared and how it was erased — from the social dimension and the current situation of the ALCOA dispute.

On 21 December 2018 the media published the letter that Alcoa’s president, Roy Harvey, sent to all the workers at the Avilés and A Coruña plants — less than a week before closing them — to wish them happy holidays. Drawing on this text, Carlos Suárez and Juanjo Palacios offer a political, sociological and aesthetic reading, creating a sound and physical piece that invades the exhibition space at a time and in a context where the noise of the protests against the closure, the abandonment and the relocation of the company — and of the whole social fabric it represents — still echoes. A slow process of social dismantling that is increasingly common in twenty-first-century Asturian society.

Here Carlos Suárez uses photography to build a story of memory, an investigation, a political note and a debate about the present. In the photographs of San Balandrán there is no human figure, only the housing blocks, as if we were outside time: a stigmatised place that few want to approach, its streets gradually emptied of life, though the voices that kept alive the pulse of desire, the invention of hope, still resonate in memory… It is no coincidence that the images and texts are printed on tarpaulins reminiscent of the workers’ banners at the protests, revealing a political anger at so many lies told in the service of speculative interests that grew rich without any ethics, with workers treated as numbers that could easily be subtracted…

Juanjo Palacios’s sound piece unfolds in three different settings: with the residents of the San Balandrán estate, in the clamour of the protests, and in the silence of the factory, with no workers and the machinery switched off. These sound settings follow the fragmentary rhythms of the visual piece, keeping the same connections and dialogues, in a climate of collaboration in which both proposals give up part of their autonomy to merge into a creative and campaigning discourse.

The project delves into processes of relocation, financial networks and speculation that sweep away the history and collective memory of neighbourhoods and territories. Consensus manages to make the sensitive disappear, shedding everything deemed surplus. And that is the achievement of this project: to stir up the present and give us back memory, making visible the injustice done to those who are outside, the excluded, who nonetheless belong by right to this space of images, to this soundscape.

— Jaime Luis Martín