Cale, cale, cale! Caale!!! / Adrià Julià: Hot Iron Marginalia

Tabakalera unveils two simultaneous exhibits for this autumn. Both open their doors on October 27 and will run to February 4, 2018.

Cale, cale, cale! Caale!!!, curated by Juan Canela, is the result of the call for curatorial projects launched by Tabakalera and taken forward throughout 2016, and comprises work from eight artists—much of them new productions—which questions the role of magic and ritual in relation to nature. Hot Iron. Marginalia, is a solo show from artist Adrià Julià. Using a photographic archive of Romanesque churches as its starting point, the work reflects on the transfer and dissemination of cultural heritage and, consequently, of its meanings and implications.

Cale, cale, cale! Caale!!!

Curator: Juan Canela

Artists: Elena Aitzkoa, Valentina Desideri & Corazón del Sol, Tamar Guimarães & Kasper Akhøj, Oier Iruretagoiena, Equipo Jeleton, Rometti & Costales, Beatriz Santiago and Osías Yanov

Magic and nature. Placing a eguzkilore—a carlina or wild thistle—in the door of your house to ward off witches and evil spirits is still normal in the Basque Country nowadays. Cale, cale, cale! Caale!!! (Fall, fall, fall! Faaaallll!!!), shouted a countryman in Lucania, south Italy, until relatively recently, as he recited a magic spell against storms. The choice between magic and reason is one of the fundamental building blocks of modern civilisation, which leans insistently towards the second and tries to forget the first. Even so, protection by way of flowers, words or gestures remains part of our lives.

Cale, cale, cale! Caale!!! questions the role of magic or ritual in relation to the natural world whose geology has revealed the history of the Anthropocene, an epoch we could also name the Capitalocene or, better yet, the Chthulucene, as Donna Haraway proposed. The project is a collective essay, a spatial and temporal choreography where ideas and bodies are intertwined with desires and contexts to project a common force and launch a series of questions into the air: What pathways open up if we break from the old dichotomy between magic and reason? What new social and political horizons become clear if the culture-nature coupling is blurred? What new spaces of resistance or communities can be brought about based on these hypotheses?

Adrià Julià: Hot Iron Marginalia

Adrià Julià’s exhibition (Barcelona, 1974) departs from a family collection of photographs of Romanesque churches in Catalonia as a means of addressing the dissemination and traffic of cultural heritage and the spectacularization of conflict and landscape. The exhibit invites to decipher the marginal notes that facilitate the analysis of the overlaps and frictions between historical narratives and their mediatization, resulting from their transfer from one medium to another, the translation from one language to another, or relocation from one country into another.

The artist establishes a methodology for rereading history against the grain through observing and identifying a series of details in events that seem to be unconnected: the buying and selling Romanesque artistic and architectural works by American museums and collections; the reverse attempt to establish American football in Catalonia in the 90s; the recurrence of the number 69; or the ascent and descent of staircases... such elements provide the view with certain clues to understand the political implications that emerge from artistic exchanges and cultural shifts, as well as their effects on the social landscape.

For information on parallel activities organised around the two exhibits, visit www.tabakalera.eu.