'Topographies of memories' and the silenced stories

The Espai Isern Dalmau of the Fundació Lluís Coromina hosts the exhibition 'Topografías de las memorias', at the same time inaugurating the program of the Panoràmic 2024 festival in Barcelona, after inaugurating several exhibitions in Granollers a few weeks ago.

This exhibition, open until January 4, brings together the creative visions of Roc Parés and Sandra Rengifo , and offers a dialogue between their works under the curatorship of Roberta Bosco and Fernando Cuevas Ulitzsch.

United by a shared sensibility about memory and territory, the two artists contribute a very suitable reflection with the "Extremes" theme that inspires this year's edition of the Panoràmic festival, building a visual and sound dialogue that speaks of memory, loss, identity and the complexities of survival in a reality marked by historical tensions. These are two interconnected works: 'Mayoral de acero: destajo' by Sandra Rengifo and 'Maqueta entrenada' by Roc Parés, and they represent the extremes present in contemporary societies.

Rengifo's work with the participation of Kostas Tsanakas, proposes an exploration of the territory from an introspective look, with references to silence, the emotional burden and the invisible scars of the workers. The project is a story about the shadows of those who struggle to survive in extreme conditions, their lives, as heavy as the machines they manipulate, immersed in a system that often ignores them. Rengifo brings the audience closer to forgotten realities: the faces of children who create music in the dark, the harshness of exhausting working days, the nostalgia of railway workers and the story of those who, literally, become earth. Through his work, he recovers and exposes the memory of the invisible, putting them at the center of the narrative.

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At the same time, 'Maqueta entrenada' by Roc Parés places the public in an immersive experience within a Caribbean landscape where memory moves between iconographies and stereotypes. The installation, an old model railway full of Caribbean symbolism, becomes a field of interactive exploration as images from a small camera on board the locomotive are projected in real time. This model reflects the duality and complexity of a society that struggles to reconcile with its colonial past and, at the same time, with the tensions that this generates. From bohios to exhausted slaves or peasants with machetes, the figures of the Caribbean come to life in this microcosm.

The role of memory and historical representation are questioned in this exhibition, and it reminds us that history is constructed from multiple perspectives and it is necessary to give voice to all those accounts that are often silenced. At the same time, it underlines how the lives of those who have traditionally been ignored or oppressed - the workforce, the uprooted, migrants and other marginalized figures - have a lot to say about our way of understanding the territory and the reality that we face surround

'Maqueta entrenada', Roc Parés i l'obra de Sandra Rengifo al fons.