Just over a year ago, the project ‘Beats of oblivion’ was born from a simple idea which has given a return in a rewarding and undreamed way. Our visit to VILLARIJO –an uninhabited place in “Tierras Altas” in Soria where the first artistic interventions were done- meant the starting point. Aware that abandoned spaces are places full of life, our strategy was the ‘re-appropriation, the crea-occupation… As we have said: ‘It’s an archeological task which leads to reflection…’ All the interventions done in Villarijo turned out to be resurgences of something already existing. Twisted figures took shape on semi-ruined walls; energetic figures -fibrous like twisted wires- emerged from chipped limes. Fossilized voices that become light and ink, got yellowish on the walls of the empty rooms and –in haylofts- accusing words (heavy like adobes) were reveled. On the other hand, everyday life was shown compressed in every item that belongs to the inner history of common people; on the friezes created by the glaze tiles in the kitchen, a geometrical pattern which has bred in our mind a certain idea of home.
At the same time, some friends felt involved in the project and wanted to collaborate, which encouraged us to carry on and to open this experience to all of them, convinced of having established a firm communication. The following step was the intervention of a meat factory where the feeling of devastation was even greater. Boots from factory workers, guts and books still stayed there leaving them to stand like the life that becomes interrupted by a diagnosis of a deadly disease and the time remains suspended… until a blocked door is demolished and the clock starts working again. And it worked. In ‘MEAT: RAW MATERIA. GUTS’ the interventions were organized around the most full of material space in the factory where quartering operations were done. Hooks hanging from the ceilings, blood draining pipes, cold and humid glaze tiles faced us up to a harsher reality. A metaphor of the horror and dehumanization of our world but also a metaphor of the foolish beauty of light among the atrocious things. ‘We are flesh; tortured classified and branded flesh; potted flesh to be consumed. And we are also incarnated beings that love. Flesh that loves.’ 5