In The Family of Things: The 13th Leandre Cristòfol Art Biennial at Centre d’Art La Panera

The city of Lleida is separated from Barcelona by only 158km. Thanks to high-speed trains, fruits of the ‘modernization’ and gentrification of the area, the ride is only one hour long (instead of the two-hour journey by car, nine hours by bike or two-day pilgrimage on foot). Even on a Sunday, Barcelona Sants train station is busy, filled with foreigners ready for their next destination as well as locals commuting to or from home. With the majority of seats on our train occupied, I look out the window to see fields beginning to emerge, followed by vineyards and castles passing by until we arrive in Lleida. Leaving the station, I’m greeted by the tallest medieval fortress I’ve ever seen, with a large mechanical elevator attached to one side; then views of the entire city and its river, a descent down the hill, and then, finally, almost from nowhere and a little out of place, the Centre d’Art La Panera.

If buildings, like trees or rivers, carry memories of what they once were, the space that holds the 13th Leandre Cristòfol Art Biennial could testify in favor of its theme: extractivisms. Dating from the twelfth century, the many functions the site had before becoming an art centre range from commercial (as an old corn exchange site) to religious (acquired by the Cathedral Canons in 1606) and even military (serving as cavalry barracks in 1860). As I learned, the Biennial used to be a site for artists around the region to showcase their work, which would then (hopefully) be purchased by the government – the current edition is the first to have a theme. Curated jointly by María Iñigo Clavo and Christian Alonso, the multimedia exhibition features artists from Catalonia as well as South America and aims to ‘respond to ecosocial crises with work[s] that offer an antidote to the utilitarian vision of nature’.⁰¹

It is sunny outside and, as I open the door of the two-floor exhibition space, darkness greets me. A white cube gone black – almost. My mind is buzzing with concepts and references I think I should know in order to understand the exhibition, considering the many forms a show with such an ambitious theme can take. I anticipate works of heavy criticism; inciting anger, denouncing injustice, calling us to action. Yet Ignacio Acosta’s two-channel video installation From Mars to Venus (2020), the work that opens the show, urges me to breathe and slow my pace in a very delicate ‘prologue’ to the rest of the exhibition.⁰² Acosta’s work invokes the distant past of iron-age Celtic rituals in the mountains of Switzerland as a critical parallel to current mining zones of extraction where nothing is sacred. The work has a meditative quality that both disarmed and fascinated me – a feeling that would recur many times as I made my way through the show.

Moving into the next space, there are drawings, paintings, projections and sounds; textures and techniques very different in nature but somehow in harmony. While each individual work can and should be perceived for itself, they also come across as interdependent and inseparable. I head to a corner and slowly move the needle on the record player to hear Embolismo por Soleá (2023), a work by Paula Bruna based on recordings of tree embolisms. Soft, rhythmic cries fill the space; a tree’s suffering rendered in sounds similar to the Flamenco rhythm, its demand to be heard providing an apt soundtrack for other works in the space . Still hearing the bulerías, I approach Rosell Meseguer’s installation Herbarium Minerale (2017–19). As I get closer, its blobs of colour and texture in hues of red, yellow and grey become hypnotic, cryptically abstract but visibly tangible pieces of paper affected by seventeen different elements on the periodic table. As beautiful as they are, the works in the series refer to the less-than-pretty reality of mineral exploitation and the moving forces of a market desperate for profit at all costs. The work prompts a question shared across the show: Can violence produce beauty? 

There is an undeniable beauty to every piece in the exhibition, even as they announce horrors. A strong pictorial component is common to many of the works, generating a pull to look at and not away from, to stay with and contemplate until the meaning comes to life. This, in my opinion, is one of the show’s greatest merits: the theoretical component of the works never outweighs the direct experience of them. On the contrary, each piece demands their viewer (or listener) to slow down and be present. In an accelerated, extractivist world, these works seem to ask us to come closer and look at what, in a first glance, might have gone unnoticed. To look with what might be the very opposite of extractivism: care.

The etymological linkage of curating and care may be a cliché, but a critical understanding of curatorial roles and responsibilities in terms of care is no less necessary. In other words, can an exhibition become both impactful, historically important and, at the same time, keep at its core the very essence of what it means to work with care and in community – as an essential aspect of exhibition-making? Through the one and a half hours I spent in La Panera, as well as on my way back, I tried to pinpoint what exactly had affected me so much in the exhibition, and why I felt so touched by the experience. It was only after arriving home and letting it sink in I realized it had to do with an almost imperceptible aftertaste; the feeling I took with me from Lleida back to Barcelona which, contrary to my expectation, was one of hope. Through its multiple and diverse  works – both in content and form – and its careful curation, the lesson I take with me from the show couldn’t be clearer: if there are different types of extractivisms, there must be different types of resistance. It is up to us to find alternatives; and there, in the Biennial’s twenty-or-so works, there are many.

There is the resistance that comes with the radical act of listening, as I found in Bruna’s Embolismo por Soleá (2023); with tracing back our roots, honouring our ancestors and revisiting other ways of relating to our own body and ecosystem, as in Carolina Caycedo’s beautifully provocative video work Fuel to Fire (2023). There’s keeping tradition alive through the smallest gestures, clear in the delicate collective embroidery of Marilyn Boror Bor’s Huipiles in Reescribir, releer (2018). There is the queering of resistance, the trans- resistance, that considers how the borders between natural and artificial are not as clear as we think, as in Seba Calfuqueo’s video work Tray Tray Ko (2022), where blue meets blue and human meets nature. Also the great resistance of inventing new ways of looking, of creating a genealogy of elements that have been at the core of empires and colonies and the prices paid for them – elements like guano in Raúl Silva’s installation Rays of South American Sun (2023–24), gold in Sandra Gamarra and Gabriela Bettini’s drawings, or sand in FRAUD’s installation Brown Jable (2020). There’s the resistance of understanding that nothing is given and everything is taken, that every extractivist gesture has an effect on the thin balance of the planet and society – with often irreversible effects, as in the playful devastation of Marina Plana’s large-format digital print Warlike Approaches to Tourism (2020).

All in all, I didn’t expect to laugh in an exhibition about extractivisms. I didn’t expect to feel relieved, happy, even, later, or to gain a new sense of urgency to fight. But I did, and as the memories of the exhibition echo in my mind I can only feel that, although it may be impossible to go back or reverse damages done, it may not be absurd to start over with a new set of eyes. While it is not up to me to say if or how nature might be restored, I have a sense that the artistic ecosystem is not past the point of salvage. If we take this exhibition for what it should be, a great example of how content and form meet; of how responsible curators are for the works they deal with and the artists they choose; and if we realize how much we need to talk about best practices for working in a financialized and often extractivist artworld … If, again, we go back to the beginning and remember who we are and where we come from, and proceed with care, we might not get everything back but it might be just enough to carry on.