Eugenio Ampudia
Eugenio Ampudia at Museo Barjola, Gijón, Asturias.
Eugenio Ampudia presents in the chapel of the Barjola Museum the exhibition "Kilos of Oxygen in the Exchange Zone", a show that pulsates with the intention of making us think and meditate on the importance of not abandoning the knowledge of our environment and history, of not looking away when it comes to committing ourselves to a future of more open and sensible paths, especially in terms of territorial transversality.
Eugenio Ampudia (Melgar/Valladolid, 1958), one of the most internationally recognized Spanish multidisciplinary artists, presents the exhibition “Kilos of Oxygen in the Exchange Zone” in the chapel of the Barjola Museum. His work explores, with a critical attitude, artistic processes, the artist as a manager of ideas, the political role of creators, the meaning of artwork, the strategies that allow it to stand, its production, promotion, and consumption mechanisms, the effectiveness of spaces assigned to art, as well as the analysis and experience of those who contemplate and interpret it. In recent years, he has focused his research on interspecies relationships and an anti-anthropocentric worldview, proposing a new perspective on our relationship with other species.
Ampudia presents us with an exhibition at the Barjola Museum that pulsates with the intention of making us think and meditate on the importance of not abandoning the knowledge of our environment and history, of not turning a blind eye when committing ourselves to a future of more open and sensible paths, especially regarding territorial transversality. It is important to maintain individual and collective awareness of the need not to lower our guard regarding the systematic neglect of the essential local enclave of global relational phases, thus avoiding the violent loss of identity and cultural impoverishment.
For this exhibition, we will have three pieces: On the chapel’s headwall, the video “Ode to Joy,” a concert starring everyday objects – various kitchen utensils – which, when receiving drops of rain on the accumulated water, deliver to our ears a laconic interpretation of “Ode to Joy.” Climate changes are determining an unequal distribution map which, in its reading, leaves us with a sad irregular score not devoid of triumphant moments, even if they accompany the shipwreck of a previously determined as unsinkable, “Titanic.” At the foot, “Valid Interlocutors,” a mountain of flour with a device that projects footprints so that they appear to come out of the pile, leaving their marks in the surrounding space, suggesting the common passage of complicit memory as a prelude to a solvent future. And under the dome, the kinetic installation “We Are What We Cease to Be,” conceived as a sacred nexus (transition between the feet and the headwall of the chapel), between before-now, past-future, tradition-updating, going-returning, remembering-forgetting, choice-decision, dream-reality, nature-culture, human-non-human…
These works that have been decided to occupy the chapel – constituting among them a transcendent discourse, as a panegyric of a responsibly sustainable context – integrate and mimic with the historical roots of the new occupied terrain. Eugenio Ampudia’s multidisciplinary work has received the AECA Award for the best living Spanish artist represented in ARC018 – which he already obtained in 2008 – and the ARCO-BEEP Award, Electronic Art Collection. Also in 2008, the Delfina Foundation scholarship (London). His works have been exhibited internationally in places such as ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany; Jordan National Gallery of Fine Arts, Amman, Jordan; Carrillo Gil Museum, Mexico; Bastan Center for the Arts, Bastan (MA), United States; Aya la Museum, Manila, Philippines; the Whitechapel in London; The Royal Academy of Spain in Rome; in Biennials such as Singapore, Havana, and the End of the World Biennial. And he is part of collections such as MNCARS, MUSAC, ARTIUM, IVAM, La Caixa, among others.
Images: Courtesy of the Barjola Museum | Tomás Miñanbres
More information here.
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Cortesía del Museo Barjola. Fotos: Tomás Miñanbres