Convocar las ruinas [Summoning the ruins]

Having a memory is beginning to be dangerous in a world dominated by a social Alzheimer’s that turns into reality Jean-Luc Godard’s unsettling film «Alphaville» (1965), in which a voice constantly announces the removal of words from the dictionary, seeking through their erasure the disappearance of what they name. And in this exhibition Carlos Suárez (Avilés, 1969) takes the risk of digging into the past, a heap of industrial ruins where we can find the traces left behind by a capitalism that piles up, as in the vision of Walter Benjamin’s famous angel of history, «wreckage upon wreckage». Ruins, which have attracted artists since the Renaissance, gained renewed interest from the 1970s onwards, when industry began to decline in the West, leaving the remains of a Fordist economy: industrial structures photographed by Bernd and Hilla Becher or walked through by Robert Smithson.

In recent years Carlos Suárez has followed an artistic path from the intimate to the political, from painting to photography and documentation, becoming one of the most interesting artists on the Asturian scene, combining reflection and risk, critique and research. The exhibition «Tierras de Koningsbos» (2008), photographs of abandoned agricultural landscapes, marked a turning point in his career, and his proposal «Promesas de Bucarest», for the group exhibition «Espacios de memoria» (2012) at the virtual gallery Gloria Heldmound — with the populist texts of the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu printed over photographs of the wall surrounding the «Palace of the People» — was a further step in his work’s engagement with memory, ruin and the social, essential elements of a discourse that continues to open new lines of commitment, as in the series «La escultura en el olvido» (2012), as yet unexhibited.

«No Memory. Cities in the world» is a reminder. In recent decades we have lived dazzled by consumerism, forgetting where we came from; we have wanted to erase ruins and embrace amnesia; we have become tourists without memory, strollers without references. In Carlos Suárez’s proposal there is a global vision, and in the photographic diptychs, beside the industrial ruins, we find people from London, Vigo, Madrid and Avilés strolling or enjoying their leisure time, «consumers in the city without memory — as Abel H. Pozuelo notes in the catalogue — placed artificially beside vestiges of what was there just before, now reviled». But a local reading is also possible. The photographs of the monumental ruins of the Térmica power station, demolished in a capricious and senseless act, are a treasure that serves to activate memory — a past of «Koreans», of men killed in the «bells» during the laying of Ensidesa’s foundations — a landscape of time that the new city, with its immaculate architecture, lacks.

This documentary part coexists with an intervention in the Art Centre. The ceiling of the exhibition room has been shored up, producing a sense of disaster and risk of collapse, placing the space in the moment before the collapse reflected in the photographs. The installation becomes a metaphor for this era, in which catastrophe and the resulting desolation shape an unstable period. But the props also stand as symbols of resistance against the demolition of identity, the dismantling of democracy and the blowing-up of social rights that a savage capitalism has been carrying out in recent years amid general passivity.

With his forceful photographs and his apt intervention, Carlos Suárez has managed to summon ruins in order to conjure the present, to corner those who repress the past and to call for the construction of a future that perhaps, above all, must attend to what has been silenced, reclaiming the memory of the common, of the defeated.

La Nueva España. 16 January 2013