"Aimless. Imago Mundi", new reading from the Es Baluard Collection

From February 3, and until January 21, 2014, Es Baluard Museum presents a new reading of its Collection, which has as its research line the representation and projection of the world in its contemporaneity. Based on the interest in recovering the medieval legacy and putting the emphasis on being able to, just as the cartographers did, imagine the world, the curator Agustin Pérez Rubio has been proposed to carry out a reading in a contemporary key of what it means to imagine the world today through the works of Ignasi Aballí, Miguel Ángel Campano, Alfredo Jaar, Bouchra Khalili, Ángeles Marco, Manolo Millares, Joan Miró, Robert Motherwell, Gabriel Orozco, Jorge Oteiza, Claudia Peña Salinas, Gala Porras -Kim, Tomás Saraceno or Hassan Sharif, among many others.

The new reading of the Es Baluard Collection, together with loans from private collections on the island, is based on the notion of disorientation and dislocation as strategies consciously taken to dismantle the construction of the history of the humanity and the representations of the Imago Mundi – Image of the World – that have come down to us. In addition, it aims, through works as forms of representation, to stop perpetuating and eradicate from our concepts, writings and images, the colonial, imperial, racist and sexist matrix of Eurocentric thought.

The conscious interspersed narrative of the project takes a speculative form to land on facts, stories and micro-stories to understand the changes and questioning in our way of looking, narrating and representing. Thus, it confronts the actions and desires of the artists and the potential ways of approaching these works from the rejection -formal and conceptual-, to lead us to a spatiotemporal dislocation that serves as a break with the rationalist and modernist positivism of the eurocentrism

Bouchra Khalili. Mapping Journey #2, 2008

Along the route of this journey, these strategies are more concretely evidenced in the relationship between works that come together and allow several stops in the diffuse space: comparing the forms of historical and contemporary narration in their representations, with the illustration as a backdrop; in the muted stories that are now felt in their literalness, or in the rewriting from micro-stories; from questioning to value judgments about what constitutes the artistry of an object or a work of art, and its function in museums, despite being part of looting and violence; and how the postulates of modernity, in favor of a pretended humanist progress, have hidden these global social and political inequalities, which continue today to perpetuate the colonial cisheteropatriarchal regime.

Grounded strategies transferred as forms that the artists have rejected in this resistance to the colonial order in which the Museum and our ways of thinking, learning, communicating and producing are based. Forms of resistance, many times resilience because they are in the first person, to understand that losing your way, not reaching a specific direction, is part of the strategy of a new learning.