Courtesy of the artist and Artium Museum.
Patricia Esquivias speaks to us of collective memory. She rescues handmade architectural elements and designs from a family-owned blacksmith’s workshop or the history of a forgotten giant cactus that travelled from Mexico to Spain in 1992.
Her project Cardón Cardinal is now on display at the Artium Museum in Vitoria Gasteiz. Esquivias tells the story of a 17 metre high cactus, weighing 18 tons, that in 1992 travelled from the desert of Baja California to Spain to be placed in the gardens of the Mexican Pavilion during the Universal Expo in Seville.
The giant cactus [Pachycereus Pringlei] is still alive but somehow forgotten and no longer in a garden. Patricia rescued its history and made a video that is now screened in the exhibition together with photographs, notes and objects that document her research. Cardón Cardinal was developed throughout 2019 thanks to the Multiverso Grants and entered the Reina Sofía Museum’s collection in January.
This exhibition is the first of Artium’s Z Gallery programme. A project curated by Garbiñe Ortega «that constructs an intermediate space from which to reflect on and draw attention to works by artists making the leap into the cinematographic field as well as filmmakers exploring the exhibition format».
Have you listened to Patricia Equivias and Carlos Copertone’s audio walk?
In Walking in Chamberí, their conversation for ART data, Patricia Esquivias and Carlos Copertone, invite us to be accomplices of their passion: to sneak into buildings unveiling stories about their makers, their outside, their inside and, at times, also about their dwellers.
We want to share with you some clues below that may be useful when listening to Walking in Chamberí.
A veces Decorado | At times embellished, CA2M 2016.
- At the very beginning of their itinerary, Carlos says «This is like arriving in the Madrid of At Times Embellished. He refers to Patricia Esquivias’ exhibition curated by Soledad Gutiérrez in 2016 at the CA2M, the public museum of contemporary art of the Region of Madrid.
To know more about At Times Embellished, click here and download the catalogue published in Spanish and English [from page 151] with texts by Soledad Gutiérrez, Pablo Martínez, Fernando Ochoa, David Bestué and Robert Blackson, through which you can discover and further explore her work.
- In her stroll with Carlos, Patricia also speaks about a family-owned blacksmith’s workshop. We invite you to watch her short video Brave Wounded Blows [in English] in which she tells us more about their story.
Click on the image above.
Walking in Chamberí. Enjoy a very special thirty-minute experience along this neighbourhood of Madrid.[Spanish with English subtitles]
English subtitles availale:
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