Patricia Gómez & María Jesús González: Cabanyal Archive. In Memory of the Place

Curated by Joana Hurtado Matheu.

Trained in engraving and printmaking, Patricia Gómez and María Jesús González explore the physical possibilities of these traditional artistic practices while broadening their meanings by linking architecture, urbanism, sociology, philosophy, anthropology and archaeology. Their distinct methodology of archiving is based on investigating the context, analysing the spaces and forming a photographic and audiovisual record, as well as on direct interventions on large walls that are transferred to canvas, using what they call “printing by detachment”, which stems from combining the principle of transfer, characteristic of printmaking and strappo in fresco restoration. By detaching facades, walls and floors, they have extracted the material and historical memory from disused prisons, closed detention centres for illegal migrants and abandoned homes, as in the case of Cabanyal Archive. In Memory of the Place, a project carried out between 2007 and 2008 in the Cabanyal neighbourhood of València (Spain). 

The Cabanyal is a group of fishermen’s houses declared a Cultural Asset of Interest in 1993 in recognition of its architectural, urban, social and historical value. Nevertheless, in 1998 the City Council, governed by the conservative party, announced an urban redevelopment plan which involved the demolition of more than 1600 houses. Gómez and González decided to recover as many houses as possible and create an archive at a 1:1 scale. They printed 26 pieces from 10 different houses creating a total of 340 metres of canvas, which they sewed together and rolled into a single piece weighing 314 kilos. They also recorded two videos about the context and the process, as well as all the printed fragments passing through the rolling machine. 

In these contemporary ruins, there is no romanticism or nostalgia. They are not monuments, because they do not enthrone the past but interact with it and question it, highlighting its gaps. Elements and materials until now barely heard in the narration of history, are rescued and exhibited to denounce the corruption that affects the space and memory of the present. 

At a time of utmost dematerialisation and excess of information, materialising the disappearance of traces means giving value to the process and matter behind what is simply lived and shared. Returning to physical prints without added discourse is a way of recognising the agency of matter and at the same time, gives tangibility to what is most unremarkable, uncertain and useless, serving as a means to vindicate something that is neither productive nor consumable but which structures our lives, inside and outside the home. What the artists save are the signs of wear and tear, the indefinite but insistent marks of routine that we don’t want to see, but also everything that is neither seen nor spoken, the derisory and ordinary that appears between the objects, in that intra- as Karen Barad says, to make us aware of the micro and macro relationship between the individual and the world. Between the object and the image, the artists give physical presence to gestures, customs and ties (intra-actions) that constitute the relational space, to show us the extent to which social constructions materialise in the physical world and people’s lives.

The exhibition is a part of the conceptual line introduced by the former director Joana Hurtado Matheu in 2023 on the political connection between the material and affective memories of the environments we inhabit. After seeing, with David Bestué, how Barcelona can cyclically become a City of Sand and after excavating the first Neolithic city or immersing ourselves in the oblivion of the Mediterranean with Rossella Biscotti in Cable City Dance Cable City Sea, now, with the Cabanyal Archive, we discover the history of a neighbourhood affected by urban speculation.