Avelino Sala
No one is an island
curated by Ángel Moya García
Villa Portelli, Kalkara
Opening 14 March 2024
Until 31 May 2024
with the support of the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation (AECID).
We live in a chaotic time, a time of preambles, of vertigo, of chasms that are continually opening up, of necessary changes that can contrast populism, nationalism and the constant rejection or fear of difference and otherness. We are direct spectators of a paradigm shift, of an incessant conflict between political and economic premises and a reality in which these are clearly failed, exhausted and overwhelmed by social, cultural, migratory and identity problems that cannot be resolved without reaching a new balance in which there are neither culprits nor accomplices.
An unprecedented migratory movement, made up of large numbers of people fleeing wars and impoverished living conditions, is crossing the Mediterranean and Eastern Europe, leading states to believe that they can solve the problem by constructing insurmountable limits, borders where human rights cease to exist or are directly cancelled, or limbos in which migrants are trapped, with no right to move forward and no possibility of turning back. If socio-political, demographic, economic and environmental factors are the main reasons that push individuals to migrate, the fastest growing nations become privileged places to arrive. The island of Malta could not be an exception, especially considering its strategic location in the middle of the Mediterranean and its heterogeneous stratification of multicultural history.
In this context, the Spanish pavilion works on the concept of identity in a multiple and plural dimension, where the encounter and exchange with other cultures is its fundamental axis and where the concept of the island is understood as a place of possibilities. Without exclusions, without limits, without fear, without rejection. Avelino Sala’s work interrogates the cultural and social reality from a romantic perspective with a critical point of view, continuously exploring the social imaginary, identifying its weak points and verifying the credibility of conceiving and implementing alternatives.
The exhibition, held inside Villa Portelli in Kalkara, is a succession of critical portraits of the current political situation in Europe in the face of the humanitarian tragedy unleashed by the recent migration crisis, the most serious since the Second World War. In the first part, “Mirror stage” is configured as a dialectical study of doubt, fears, illusion and that audacity that leads us to carry out irreversible and passionate acts. An impulse towards the unexplored that, despite the height, despite the risk, is not a suicide but a conscious, dangerous, enthusiastic and uncertain action, a voluntary and courageous act that implies moving towards that place that we desire, that we love, but that we do not yet know. The analysis takes place at the precise moment when decisions are made, at that turning point that comes immediately after the debacle, in the situation of total uncertainty. In the centre of the room, the work “Archaeological Museum of Revolt”, the theoretical and formal axis of the whole project, brings together an archive of symbols of social resistance. Madrid, Barcelona, Rome, Thessaloniki, Paris, Rennes and Valparaíso are just some of the cities represented in this work in which the artist compiles a series of stones collected in the different contexts in which the largest international protests of recent years have taken place. Stones that acted as a force of impact against immobility, a priori banal and unsustainable objects that, for a moment, became weapons of resistance, shortening the path towards a possible new future and constructing a counternarrative with respect to the consolidated system. A reflection on the present that returns in the video room with “4’33” minutes of silence of minutes of silence”, a continuous back and forth between the expectations of utopia and the flagrant clash of dystopia, a time of economic and ecological crisis, terrorism, social injustice and the disappearance of ways of thinking that differ from the globalised and globalising dogma. From this perspective, the work “Europe as a shield” represents the five countries of the UN Security Council that manage the migratory problem, while in “Runaway plan”, a tangle of flags leads us towards the flight from this paradigm that the states themselves have created.
According to this scheme, contemporary art, without being able to provide solutions or answers, attempts to highlight the problems of a worn-out and collapsed Europe, while at the same time trying to form a new mythology. The economic crisis, the social differences between North and South, technocracy, indifference towards refugees or the rapid expansion of populism show different aspects of the same problem: a Europe that is fragmented, decadent, moribund and incapable of resolving its problems. An exhibition that highlights the collapse of the welfare state and observes the fall of capitalism and the crisis of Western democracy in the so-called old continent. All the works are united by a sense of unease: Europe, supposedly the promised land, shows its intrinsic fragility, unable to respond collectively to the human tragedy taking place on its shores.
The exhibition thus becomes a global chronicle of resistance where, beyond the particularities of each protest action, it speaks to us of the need to take action in the face of the evident failure of the narratives constructed so far, in order to lay the foundations for a new, fairer and more sustainable paradigm.
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Avelino Sala (Gijón, Spain, 1972) is an artist and editor. Sala is a Spanish point of reference for art as a vehicle for political resistance; in his production there is a kind of poetics that contains a reflection on state powers and the control they exercise. His recognisable aesthetic strengthens a discourse that is as necessary as it is powerful, covering sensitive and relevant themes such as migration, contemporary dislocation, the environmental crisis and the paradoxes of capitalism. Sala works in the global context of contemporary art, exhibiting in and participating in biennials in Caracas, Tel Aviv, Istanbul, Bienal Sur, or Bienal de Cuenca (Ecuador) among others. His work has been shown internationally for the last 20 years in spaces such as Abrons Arts Center, New York; Museo de Bellas Artes de Asturias; Centro Nacional de Arte Contemporáneo, NCCA, Moscow; Matadero, Madrid; White Box Art Center, NY among many others. He holds a scholarship from the Royal Academy of Spain in Rome and his work can be found in important private and public collections.
Ángel Moya García (Córdoba, Spain, 1980. Lives and works in Florence, Italy) is a critic and curator of contemporary art. He is co-director of Visual Arts at the Tenuta Dello Scompiglio in Lucca, curator of contemporary art for the “Panorama” Project of the Quadriennale in Rome and member of ICOM Italia – International Council of Museums, IKT – International Association Of Curators Of Contemporary Art e of IAC – Institute of Contemporary Arts in Spain. He has recently curated the annual programme of the BLM – Fondazione Bevilaqua La Masa Art Residencies in Venice and in the past has held the position of Head of Programming and Cultural Events at the Mattatoio in Rome.
