STRANGE COUNTRY CHAPTER 1
ABOUT MAPS AND PLANS

28.10 / 18.11.2021
CENTRO CULTURAL LA PARCERÍA
MADRID
SPAIN

PHOTOS: VALENTÍN BENOIT

From textiles, Elián Stolarsky has weaved part of his artistic work with family stories of migration and violence, in an exercise of memory that creates circular and personal bridges with the past.

From the action of sewing, historically assigned to women and relegated to the category of crafts, this artist intertwines stories linked to the territory, finding in the textile the potential to make the past resonate in its materiality, with codes that are cohesive in the present, forming a kind of memory membrane. In his encounter with the Lavapiés neighborhood, she connects his own story of migration and that of his family, with that of the inhabitants of a neighborhood who have come from far away in search of a different future, a less hostile one, and who have found in this space a great fire of collective struggles for dignity.

During this creation residency, Elián tuned her ears and hands to the stories of others, putting together pieces, snippets of shared experiences that evoke maps, architectures, common spaces and collectivities, all strange and familiar territories at the same time. The exhibition is the trace of this meeting in process, of pasts in constant movement.

If The past is a strange country (Lowenthal), the one that we don't even know how to locate on a map; this complex territory of Lavapiés that contains so many countries, and so many times, at the same time, can we perhaps place it in a certain cartography? Would all its revolutionary diversity fit on a map? Elián's cartographic version suggests that it is not possible. The map placed in the territory that it represents is no longer a map, when I see it I am already on it. Sometimes, the strange country is ourselves..

Special thanks:
Pepa Torres (Interlavapies Network) and  Resurrección Expósito
Carolina Chacón


DISPLACEMENTS

The ArtExperimenta Commission of La Parcería has launched "Displacements", a curatorial, research and residency project for creation, which seeks to reflect on a historical and contemporary phenomenon, not without conflicts, regarding the mobility of the bodies that move between the territories, but also those movements that are made from thought, memory, language or imagination, exploring the symbolic value that is given to the routes - physical, rational or emotional, as well as also to elapsed time and changes of direction.

Displacements raises three conceptual nuclei to develop:

• Place displacements. They refer to processes of migration, refuge and exile.
  
• Time offsets. They affect the construction of memories, the rewriting of history and the review of the past; making this analysis a referential framework to understand and transform the present.
  
• Direction displacements. They include the diverse and critical ways of interpreting current reality and the exercise of power, from the body, the territory and the struggles for life.
  

An approach to the contemporary artistic space and to the different forms of creation is proposed, in particular to those contextual artistic practices, which start from the critical review of social realities, and which are committed to their transformation and that of the contemporary imaginaries that sustain them.

The first stage of the artistic residences of Displacements is presented in the exhibition "País strange" by the Uruguayan artist residing in Madrid, ELIAN STOLARSKY, winner of the scholarship for creation in the local artist modality convened this year 2021.

Artexperimenta La parcería


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