Many Roads

MANY ROADS

CONTEMPORARY IMAGES OF THE CAMINO DE SANTIAGO 2 October – 26 November 2017

MANY ROADS

CONTEMPORARY IMAGES OF THE CAMINO DE SANTIAGO The exhibition “Muchos caminos. Contemporary images of the Camino de Santiago is inspired by the scenic, anthropological, cultural, historical, spiritual and/or religious reality of the Camino de Santiago and the pilgrimage that drives it, but above all by the lived experience of these features as captured in a number of contemporary works of art. Some are directly linked to the pilgrimage and the landscape of the Camino, others illustrate the mystique, the history of religions, of art, the historical events and the current critical reality of the rural areas through which the pilgrimage route passes.

These issues are raised in the exhibition, which includes the works of 31 artists arranged into four thematic areas: the direction and the destination of the pilgrimage (Roland Fisher, Humberto Rivas, Peter Wüthrich, Xurxo Lobato, Roman Signer, Andrés Pinal, Vik Muniz and Mariona Moncunill); the experience of walking to transcend oneself (José Val del Omar, Esther Ferrer, Rubén Grilo, Francisco Felipe, Pedro Garhel, Gabriel Díaz, Zoulikha Bouabdellah and Javier Codesal); the dialogue between oneself and the world (Enrique Carbó, Peyrotau & Sediles, Nina Rhode, Natividad Bermejo, Eugenio Ampudia and Mapi Rivera); and finally, the events that have marked the history of the Camino (Gerardo Custance, Bleda y Rosa, Javier Ayarza, Jorge Barbi, José Luis Viñas and Rosendo Cid).

The exhibition is a joint production by RAER and MUSAC as part of the Remover Roma con Santiago festival organised by the Spanish Embassy in Italy. The exhibition is displaying works loaned from cultural institutions along the Camino de Santiago (CDAN in Huesca, ILC and MUSAC in León and CGAC in Santiago) as well as works that have been lent by the artists themselves.

The Camino is in fact many different routes, not only because it branches out into many pathways that have varied its structure and because it has seen fluctuations in the number of people walking it over time, but also because the experience of it is as varied as the motivations and the beliefs of those who have travelled it since its medieval origins during the expansion of Christianity, through to the present day. This multiplicity of pathways and ways of understanding what it means to follow them have, historically, generated a pilgrimage that has modified the landscape, people and towns along its many routes, impacting on the streets and buildings linked to the Camino, the artistic and cultural contacts, the ways of showing hospitality and the visual configurations that have arisen continually over time. The Muchos Caminos exhibition seeks to offer a portrait of the Camino and its place in modern life through a series of representations and images produced by 31 contemporary artists.

The Muchos Caminos. Contemporary images of the Camino de Santiago exhibition is inspired by the physical, anthropological, cultural, historical, spiritual and/or religious reality of the Camino de Santiago and the pilgrimage that drives it, but above all on the lived experience of all of these features as captured in a number of contemporary works of art. Some are directly linked to the pilgrimage and the landscape of the Camino itself, others illustrate the mystique, the history of religions, of art, the historical events and the current critical reality of the rural areas through which the pilgrimage route passes. Most of the works are by contemporary Spanish artists, although some are foreign; some have been selected because their works are owned by arts centres and museums located in towns along the Camino, others because they address issues directly related to it. The Way of Saint James traverses all of Europe (and as a result, the Camino starts from one’s own front door) and many cities boast streets, institutions, churches and towers with a link to Santiago. However, despite this undeniable internationality, which can be felt throughout Europe, the Muchos Caminos, Contemporary images of the Camino de Santiago exhibition focuses on work from the Spanish context, directly related to the routes that run from Saint Jean Pied de Port (France) to Roncesvalles (Spain) and continue towards Santiago and Finisterre.

The Camino as a route for communication and knowledge, has been and continues to be a driver of experiences, research and dissemination. Over the centuries and the many kilometres that it covers, in addition to the spiritual, religious and cultural experiences (to which today can be added the leisure and sporting facets), the Camino has also “witnessed” realities such as wars and invasions and cities that have flourished and decayed over centuries, the disasters of the Spanish Civil War in the

1930s and the Francoist repression that followed in the 1940s, the rural exodus towards the city from the 1970s, the demographic collapse and abandon characteristic of so many parts of rural Spain since the 1980s and the ineffective rural policies adopted in the 1990s. With this new millennium, the Camino is witnessing the progressive ageing of the population coupled with the decline of rural areas, environmental problems stemming from climate change, wildfires and droughts and the increasing popularity with tourists of a route that is often verging on saturation.

For centuries, a constant human tide has continued to flow along the Camino, washing over these historical vicissitudes and the present-day challenges (which are also addressed in the exhibition).

They have walked to the physical site known as Santiago, that mythical site of the sunset that we know as the Atlantic Finisterre and to that other “place” that does not belong to geography but to the desire of humanity to go ever further in its knowledge of the world and of itself.

The road to knowledge: go ever further The desire to go beyond what we know, and the human quest for a deeper consciousness are the reasons behind the historical reality of this pilgrimage to Santiago and Finisterre from many areas of Europe and the world. They have also generated a myriad of experiences and cultural events that help to explain, among many other artistic phenomena, the diffusion of Romanesque and Gothic art, the construction of hostels, hospitals, churches and cathedrals and the many other, less tangible cultural manifestations, such as contact between languages, literature, music, folklore and much, much more, that has occurred over the centuries and to which, today, our contemporaneity adds its layer of images and visual structures, as the Muchos caminos. Contemporary images of the Camino de Santiago exhibition tries to illustrate.

Pilgrimage, which is generally a form of exploration and quest most often performed on foot, is a feature of all cultures and religions. Universally, the pilgrimage is not only a movement from one place to another, nor a voyage abroad, nor even a profession of one’s faith; it is an anthropological experience of knowledge in search of wisdom, enlightenment and transcendency. That is why pilgrimage routes are, above all, pathways for the dissemination of knowledge.

The Camino to Santiago, or the Vía Francígena in Rome, and so many other pilgrimage routes such as those of Muslims to Mecca or Jews to Jerusalem are not simply a means by which to reach a destination, whether it be the Atlantic Finisterre or the Eternal City; rather, they are pathways with a more spiritual goal. In other words, these routes are not trails from one place to another but places of transit, designed to extend rather than shorten the journey. They are, in fact, detours rather than shortcuts, because it is in this extension of time and space, in this prolongation, that exploration and investigation become possible.

Walking as a metaphor for research and the route as a metaphor for knowledge and life form the basis of Bruce Chatwin’s work, which alludes to a sort of totemic geography that allows one to find our way in the middle of a foreign, unknown and even hostile landscape. The direction and the physical route of the pilgrims are marked in many ways (white arrows with the silhouettes of pilgrims along the Vía Francígena, the yellow arrows of the Camino de Santiago created by Elias Valiña in the 1970s and today multiplied in solidarity by a number of anonymous individuals, the red and white markings of the GR hiking trails and, above all, the movement of the sun as it sets in the west), but the route within oneself is unyielding and personal and involves the entire body.

The interior road: something else Of course, the experience of walking is haptic: one needs to touch and make contact as a form of knowledge and understanding. However, beyond the scientific, rational and logocentric forms of achieving understanding through reason, the Camino encourages us to have a direct, unmediated experience, a personal practice that engages the body and the senses, a form of learning that goes beyond logic and one that, ultimately, leads to a test where the skin and the body work together emotionally and help free the mind of all intellectual rhetoric.

In this way, it heals the dichotic split between the objective and the subjective, appearance and essence, the phenomenon and the noumenon, the thing and the thing in itself, and other countless ways of naming the separation of the body and the spirit. Modern thinking, with its blind faith in reason, has tended to ignore areas of knowledge and experience that fall outside of logos and that cannot be explained by science. In this way, for example, the terms ‘apophenia’, ‘hierphania’ and ‘pareidolia’ attempt to give scientific meaning to perceptions and phenomena that are difficult to explain rationally. Art, like other manifestations of culture, attempts to come closer to something that cannot be expressed through reason and tries to find ways to, paraphrasing the famous work by Bruce Nauman, reveal mystical truths.

The works selected for this show illustrate the dialectic between, on the one hand, the modern project that is the heir apparent to reason and, on the other, the illustration and expression of mysticism, spirituality and popular religious behaviour that propose an alternative to this project. If reason and the progress of the Enlightenment were the foundations of a western, Eurocentric and exclusive modernity, opposing references could help to lay the foundations of new parameters (going beyond a “criticism” of the construction of modernity) from which to imagine multiculturalism, heterogeneity, syncretism and the coexistence of “hydrid cultures” with which those on the “cultural and political periphery” are redrawing the baseline context for our time. With this, not only are we succeeding in showing a cultural reality but we are also exploring something that is “revealed” through the construction of images and the imaginary, or, put another way, we are exploring the role of the image in a society which moves within the global “iconosphere” where we must learn to see certain particularities that do not fit within the rule, the established truth or reason.

Muchos caminos. Contemporary images of the Camino de Santiago is therefore a project that illustrates and investigates the various ways in which images have been produced and used to organise knowledge that reason and science are unable to explain, giving form to the experience of perceptions and sensations related to pilgrimage and mysticism. The visual configurations present in this exhibition reveal some attempts to visualise certain types of knowledge through manifestations of the supernatural and descriptions and approaches to something invisible, inaudible or imperceptible that, although we struggle to grasp it, defines the experience of the Camino.

In The Songlines, the aforementioned Bruce Chatwin makes allusions to these experiences. Fascinated by ancient practices of errant wandering, the writer travels to Australia to learn about the experiences and customs of the Aborigines (which can be extrapolated to wandering travellers in general) and in this book, he sets out reflections on the endless curiosity of humanity. In turn, in his Diaries written between 1914 and 1916, Wittgenstein noted that the tendency towards mysticism emanated from the inability of science to fulfil our desires (unbefriedigkeit): “Even when all the possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life remain completely untouched.”

This thirst and dissatisfaction to which both thinkers allude coincides with the search for knowledge and experience by mystics or, in a radically different scenario, of intellectuals such as Aldous Huxley who, in his essay Moksha, reveals the potential of certain drugs and narcotics to reveal the sacred in the human being, within a context that is clearly opposed to mysticism. These substances, just like techniques, rites and ceremonies, are seeking to generate knowledge and enlightenment through experiences.

Indeed, these are practices that seek to experiment with the supernatural, divinity, freedom and emptiness, just like the Buddhist and Hindu faiths talk of “nirvana” and the Japanese have the concept of “satori” which, meaning understanding, alludes to enlightenment and spiritual experiences. This contact with and knowledge of something superhuman or divine of a gnostic nature is also what underlies María Zambrano’s concept of “voz abismatica”, the abyssal voice, which can only be a call for the capacity of poetic reason to rescue from muteness the aspects silenced by logos. For this “voice,” only one type of language is possible, becoming more complex and strained in the hands of artists until it is able to express something greater than the mere enunciation or description of the world. A “something else” or a “go further” that in fact is the base of all knowledge and experience.

Structure of the exhibition These ideas are present in Muchos caminos. Contemporary images of the Camino de Santiago, through the work of 31 artists. Some come from the collections of cultural institutions in the autonomous regions and provinces along the Camino, such as the CDAN in Aragón, the MUSAC and the ILC in León, or the CGAC of Santiago de Compostela, while others have been selected for their close links with the Camino. They make use of a variety of media, although video and photography predominate. The exhibition adopts a polysemic structure of the various aspects of the Camino, identifying four major themes: the route and the destination of the pilgrimage, the experience of walking to “go ever further”, the dialogue between oneself and the world and lastly, the events that have marked the history of the Camino. These four themes are presented sequentially in each of the exhibition rooms of the ground floor of the RAER. In addition, due to the specific installation requirements of each of the objects, some have been located in various areas of the first floor, such as the Conference Room, the Portrait Room or the Library.

In the first room, we find the presentation of the theme of the direction and the destination, the sunset and the conclusion represented by Compostela and Finisterre and by the architecture (mostly cathedrals but also roads, bridges, staircases, doorways and lighthouses) that punctuates the Camino and which were conceived to relate us spiritually with the awareness of “where we are going”. In this room, we find the works of Roland Fisher, Humberto Rivas, Peter Wüthrich, Xurxo Lobato, Roman Signer, Andrés Pinal and Vik Muniz. This topic is also illustrated by the installation by Mariona Moncunill in the library, where she enigmatically questions the directional meaning of the pilgrimage and its “impossible” destination.

The second room presents a series of works that express the “experience of walking” as a means or a technique towards knowledge, enlightenment or the experience of “going further”. The Camino is represented as an unrequited urge to move forward, the pilgrim’s staff following the rhythm of the footsteps, where some of the rites are shared with religious practices, uniting the “monks” and separating them from the “priests”, among other references, as represented in works by José Val del Omar, Esther Ferrer, Rubén Grilo, Francisco Felipe and Pedro Garhel, to which can be added the works of Gabriel Díaz, in Studio 2 and Javier Codesal, on the first floor of the RAER. These experiences are completed with the works of Zoulikha Bouabdellah, consisting of arches from different styles of architecture, different cultures and religions which, whilst sharing a similar religious experience, diverge, come together then separate once again.

The Camino amasses a series of experiences of the self at one with the surroundings, the environment and the context. These experiences, which combine micro and the macro detail, the atavistic and the actual, and where the self enters into a dialogue with the world can be seen in the works of Enrique Carbó, Peyrotau & Sediles, Nina Rhode, Natividad Bermejo, Eugenio Ampudia and Mapi Rivera, located in the third room on the ground floor, to which we can add the film Viaje de novios by Javier Codesal which is projected on the first floor, and the aural collage by Francisco Felipe, which accumulates audio recordings in various languages and the aural contexts of the Camino, and is located in the Portrait Room on the first floor.

The Camino crosses landscapes but also traverses history and its events. The fourth room presents a series of works related to the historical events that have marked the landscapes and the lives of the people of the Camino (wartime disasters and invasions, the dramas of the Civil War and the Francoist repression) and are accompanied by other more recent incidents (such as the rural exodus towards the city, demographic collapse and an ageing population and environmental problems stemming from climate change or tourism). This section displays works by Gerardo Custance, Bleda y Rosa, Javier Ayarza, Jorge Barbi, José Luis and Rosendo Cid All the selected artworks take a pluralistic approach to an equally pluralists anthropological, religious and cultural phenomenon. The multiplicity of views, often ecumenist and syncretic, illustrate the contemporary relevance of a pilgrimage that has existed and renewed itself for centuries; art reveals some of the features of the Camino, its experiences, the historical aspects traversed by it and above all, the emerging current challenges, such as the paradox of a tourist influx at certain times of the year contrasted with the constant decline in the population in vast areas of inland Spain.

MUCHOS CAMINOS IMÁGENES CONTEMPORÁNEAS DEL CAMINO DE SANTIAGO

MINISTERIO DE ASUNTOS EXTERIORES Y DE COOPERACIÓN DE ESPAÑA

Ministro de Asuntos Exteriores y de Cooperación Alfonso Dastis Secretario de Estado de Cooperación Internacional y para Iberoamérica Fernando García-Casas Director de la Agencia Española de Cooperación Internacional para el Desarrollo Luis Tejada Director de Relaciones Culturales y Científicas Roberto Varela

CURATOR

Manuel Olveira COORDINATION

M.ª Ángeles Albert de León, Helena López Camacho, Carmen Rodríguez Fernández-Salguero ORGANISERS

Consejería Cultural. Embajada de España en Roma /Real Academia de España en Roma MUSAC, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León / Consejería de Cultura y Turismo. Junta de Castilla y León SPONSOR

Embajador de España en Italia Jesús Gracia Aldaz Consejero Cultural Ion de la Riva Directora M.ª Angeles Albert de León Secretario Francisco J. Prados JUNTA DE CASTILLA Y LEÓN

Presidente de la Junta de Castilla y León Juan Vicente Herrera Campo Consejera de Cultura y Turismo M.ª Josefa García Cirac Director del MUSAC, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León Manuel Olveira

INDRA COLLABORATORS ARTWORKS BORROWED BY

CDAN, Centro de Arte y Naturaleza. Fundación Beulas CGAC, Centro Galego de Arte Contemporáneo MUSAC, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León MNCARS, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía Diputación de León – ILC, Instituto Leonés de Cultura Galería NoguerasBlanchard HAMACA, media & video art distribution from Spain ARTISTS THAT BORROWED THEIR ARTWORK

Eugenio Ampudia, Enrique Carbó, Francisco Felipe, Esther Ferrer, Mariona Moncunill, Peyrotau & Sediles, Mapi Rivera, José Luis Viñas EXHIBITION INSTALLATION

Margarita Alonso (Coordinación), Marco Colucci, Mino Dominijanni, Alberto Fernández, Emmanuele Gargano, Irene Llovet, Alessandro Manca, Fabio Polverini PRESS

Miguel Cabezas Ruiz, Cristina Redondo Sangil DESIGN

Mercedes Jaén Ruiz TRANSLATION

Elisa Tramontín, Emma Cypher-Dournes TRANSPORTATION

InteArt Esta exposición no hubiera sido posible sin el apoyo de Stefano Blasi, Pino Censi, Roberto Santos, Silvia Serra, Maria Spacchiotti, Simona Spacchiotti, Paola di Stefano, Adriano Valentino y Brenda Zúñiga, de la Academia de España en Roma, y la Consejería Cultural de la Embajada de España en Italia. Un especial agradecimiento a Sofía Tarela, por su generosa dedicación a este proyecto.

ORGANISERS

SPONSOR

ARTORKS FROM

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