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What happens to the ashes of the Fallas of Valencia once they have been celebrated and burned, when they are outside of all public ritual? What volume do they accumulate? What is done with them? Where do they end up? Can the pile of garbage to which they are eventually reduced hold a hint of random beauty, of capricious or even harmonious movement? This is the space that artist Anna Malagrida (Barcelona, 1970) explores in the exhibition that can be seen at the Institut Valencià d'Art Modern (IVAM) until February 24, 2019. Symptomatically titled El pes de les cendres –The Weight of Ashes–, the exhibition is displayed in gallery 6, which is a difficult space, made of significant constraints. It has an intricate shape, with a staircase in the middle of the room connecting the two floors. It is precisely thinking about this space that Malagrida has conceived the exhibition, made of videos with a static camera that create two absolutely differentiated atmospheres on the first and second floors.
The artist goes where no one else focuses. After the lavishness of the Fallas, the flames die down and the workers begin the task of taking the material ashes to the landfill. She goes with her camera and records fixed shots of enormous allegorical force –everything had to be recorded, of course, in a single night–. This desire to suggest other meanings and other possibilities beyond the event itself that she records, permeates the entire exhibition, which oscillates on a calculated ambiguity, a somewhat enigmatic point.
After all, the line of 200 trucks that, once the last wisp of fire has been extinguished, head for the landfill, loaded with waste and ashes, is also part of the Fallas.On the first floor, the still virulent flames of the Fallas, with small detonations caused by the glowing embers, transport us to the prototypical image of street riots, who knows if the riots of the banlieuesfrom Paris, a city that Malagrida knows well because it is where she develops a part of her professional life. Due to the fixed shot, the videos hanging on the walls act as moving photographs, as if the artist wanted to make clear her dual facet: she usually works with photographs and videos. The live flames or the smoke from the remains of the dolls turned into ash, a disconcerting gaseous state that would not be associated with Fallas for anything in the world, give an air of tension and desolation, of a pulsating conflict that can erupt again or be completely extinguished at any moment.
Especially interested in the elements that generate a city's identity, the artist has wanted here to stir the ashes, accompany them to the landfill, shed light on an area in the shadow of the magical ritual, but which inevitably also forms part of it. After all, the line of 200 trucks that, once the last wisp of fire has been extinguished, head for the landfill, loaded with waste and ashes, also forms part of the Fallas.
The journey to the landfill takes us to the second floor. We leave behind the conflagration and darkness that open the exhibition and enter a kind of white, aseptic, almost celestial room, which transmits a peace that is curious, especially if we look at the images we started from. There is some kind of harmony, with sympathetic winks, that Malagrida has managed to find in the pile of ash and remains of Fallas that no longer look like them, piled up in the landfill. A video shows how a worker sweeps the trash in front of a mountain of ash until another truck unloads its load and a cloud of dust leaves him half-buried, although he continues to sweep. This is a magical moment. Or also noteworthy are a couple more videos that, using the angle formed by the wall, show the process of transforming rubble into sand and how this ends up forming new sinuous piles, in a kind of eurythmic dance.
The idea of the process of matter transformation links Malagrida's entire proposal, which takes the visitor through, so to speak, different phases of matter. There is a play with the element of dust, which refers to Man Ray's famous work Elevage de la poussière. In 1920, Man Ray visited Marcel Duchamp's studio and photographed a glass plate on which dust had been allowed to accumulate for months. Man Ray's photograph, taken at very high exposure, captures unusual forms on the glass. The Barcelona artist pursues the same intention when she focuses very closely on a machine cutting the polystyrene that will allow the future Fallas figures to be built. These videos take on a contemplative bias and accompany the almost shocking harmony that emerges from a workshop or a landfill. From this photograph, Duchamp extracts the concept of "inframince" – "the infrathin" – which questions how to express the art of the imperceptible, of the invisible. Malagrida stretches and plays with the infrathin, through a singular point of view, which seeks to illuminate tiny details, scenes that go unnoticed because they are not part of the public ceremonial, but which allow many pulsations and paradoxes of the city itself to be explained.
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