No Memory

Sometimes the memory of the city and of past activity endures and resists oblivion as an indelible document, above all on the outskirts, in strange places or places of mere transit. And while these vestiges of memory nobly resist the passage of time, we strive to destroy them with an unusual force and violence, laden with frivolity.

“The Romantic cult of ruins is not only the expression of despair or the acknowledgement of human transience, but also the embodiment of a protest against an age — one’s own — regarded as devoid of heroic ideals” 1.

This frenzy of collective amnesia, driven by the great metropolises in their mercantilist and globalising desire, sweeps away every trace of memory, and with it the identity of small places. It is as if the presence of the vestiges of the past acted as ghosts of the present, troubling the consciences of the future. Ideological, social and urban disorders have been built on this collective forgetting. A process that has unfolded slowly, without trauma, free of conflict and even with a certain sweetness. “No Memory” is a gaze from the nearest, most immediate reality, yet it is common to disparate cities and places. It connects with other parallel lines of research such as “El sueño de una nación” or “Koningsbos”, among others, understanding the artwork as a process of permanent construction and research, in which the exhibition occupies only a specific moment.

In “No memory”, the shoring-up of part of the exhibition space is conceived as an exercise in resistance needed to accompany the documentary work. At 9 a.m. on 8 January work began on shoring up the CMAE exhibition space, located on the ground floor of a building in calle Llano Ponte in Avilés. Two hours later, as the installation progressed, several residents of the first-floor flats immediately above the space came down to ask whether there was a danger of collapse. It was as if private life had felt threatened, as if the nearby stability — the home, the house, the place — had been shaken. Perhaps the ghosts of the past, or the bewilderment and insecurity of the present, shook what is most intimate and close. And here I recall “El Temblor” [The Tremor], a poem by the writer Juan Carlos Gea referring to the earthquake that devastated Lisbon in 1755:

“Lisboa es lo que resta

después de que su suelo

se haya quebrantado con temblor nunca sentido,

y las llamas de decenas

de incendios reducido

las ruinas y los cuerpos a cal viva,

y el océano baldeado por tres veces la ceniza

y los muertos y el escombro

apagando los incendios y la cal.”

[“Lisbon is what remains / after its ground / has been broken by a tremor never felt before, / and the flames of dozens / of fires have reduced / the ruins and the bodies to quicklime, / and the ocean has three times swept away the ash / and the dead and the rubble, / putting out the fires and the lime.”]

1. Argullol, R. La atracción del abismo. Destino, Barcelona, 2000, p. 3