Alberto Feijóo at IVAM

Artist: Alberto Feijóo

Exhibition title: Trascity

Curated by: Nuria Enguita

Venue: IVAM, Valencia, Spain

Date: June 1, 2023 – January 7, 2024

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and IVAM, Valencia

The Trascity project by Alberto Feijóo (Alicante, 1985) proposes a physical and mental space in a museum hall. A space built from a series of rooms and other configurations of pictures and objects. An assembly through which we can wander distractedly or oppositely, concentrating on its density and discovering, in each space, diverse configurations that make us think about the different ways of inhabiting a world: a replica of something that happens outside, a workplace, a meeting point, a space under construction, an archive of pictures or a storage room of works and objects from the past.

Trascity alludes to a physical location, a commercial storage rental shop in Alicante, which is situated on the street where the artist resides. However, it is also a mental space: trash is one of the ways of calling rubbish in English, and tras- is a prefix meaning what is behind, or what comes after. So Trascity would then mean, literally, what is behind the city and, metaphorically, it would refer to its waste, to what we leave behind. It is, in this case, the name of an intimate territory that we generically call storage room; a cold and anonymous version of a place – formerly charged with bourgeois enchantment – such as the attic: always locked and waiting for the key that initiated the movement of the mind. (A key that, as an intrusive power, appears in the exhibition in the form of a sticker). A storage room is a world of things, of objects that have lost their primary function. Things that are vibrant matter, that live a different life, one of their own and alien to human habits and projects, resistant to the normalisation of the ordinary.

Multiplicity, diversity, mutability and continuous displacement are characteristics offered to us by the artist at this exhibition, with which he establishes multiple identification processes that allow us to think about the avalanche of pictures that shape and occupy our bodies from different points of view. Alberto Feijoó is a visual artist, working mainly in the field of photography, who also considers himself an apprentice, an accumulator, especially of pictures, and a collector. Like a DJ handling sound tracks, the pictures, his own and those of others, occupy the space in very diverse configurations: always based on juxtapositions, on conceptual and formal links, like a collage in movement. Photographic columns as pillars, pictures framed in overflowing passe-partouts or photographs that make reference to the tactile and upholster chairs and sofas where to sit and rest, coexist and give shape to the five rooms that make up the exhibition.

VISUAL ARTIST
Alberto Feijóo lives among pictures. They are physical bodies that invade his studio and no longer records of a lived moment. They are not representations and do not activate memories, but rather fortuitous encounters, always partial, fragmented connections. Pictures work by establishing links, proposing syntheses between heterogeneous realities, rather than reconciling opposites. In this hall, the “visual artist” Feijóo proposes a synthesis of pictures where some inside others and sometimes indiscernible from each other, offer a symbiosis that reaches the passe-partout, understood here not as a window but as an overflow. Or, as the artist says, “an open system of relationships between what is enigmatic and what is banal”.

ACCUMULATOR
Alberto Feijóo’s work is very attentive to matter and its accumulations. Piled up things, mountains of waste, debris, constitute complex universes that accumulate stories and define territories: they show ways of life, economic transactions, commercial relations and social realities. Also the certainty that the planet cannot support indiscriminate and massive consumption. Accumulations of plastic in New York, of used clothes and fabrics in Alcoy or of baked clay in Alicante are examples of an unlimited extractivism of which we do not seem to see its finitude. Columns, pedestals, and diverse remains intervened with photographs occupy this room.

APPRENTICE
For this exhibition, Feijóo has worked with Max Herrero, a blacksmith from Alcoy. In his workshop he found a box full of round plates that they decided to weld together with some square tubes as masts, as if they were small traffic signs. The city is a recurring reality in the artist’s imaginary, and the back of the traffic signs function for him as urban abstractions, as a “flip side” that contains much more information than on the front. Again, he uses pictures to elaborate a poetics of discarding, but also a recognition of shared learning. A meeting point between different realities that meet in the same space.

PHOTOGRAPHER
Feijóo’s photographs pose a discontinuity, a constant displacement, a becoming, a continuous difference. Multiple, diverse, mutant, open to what is strange, foreign, queer pictures appear as opposed to unique, serial or typological pictures. Photographs that go one step further, or further into, the photographic collage and that suppose a mise en abyme as a result of the inclusion of some pictures within others. Certain dualisms can be perceived in his work, but they act more in contiguity, in affinity, than in opposition. Pictures invade the walls without a defined frame: diverse materials that unite bodies and objects showing a shared matter; soft bodies on hard surfaces or altered and residual landscapes.

COLLECTOR
Visual artist, photographer, apprentice and accumulator converge in the role of collector, who is always a format fetishist. In turn, every collection is an archive of his own and other people’s pictures. In this room there are continuous references to music and how to approach a visual response to it, being as it is so ethereal. Feijóo builds a cabinet of records, music magazines from past eras and other references; pictures arranged in showcases, on the walls and on objects. An always dancing archive that shows ways of doing, and of facing the continuum of digital pictures, that far from taxonomies and classifications, rather push the poetic and conceptual possibilities of pictures to the limit.

Alberto Feijóo, Trascity, 2023, exhibition view, IVAM, Valencia

Alberto Feijóo, Trascity, 2023, exhibition view, IVAM, Valencia

Alberto Feijóo, Trascity, 2023, exhibition view, IVAM, Valencia

Alberto Feijóo, Trascity, 2023, exhibition view, IVAM, Valencia

Alberto Feijóo, Trascity, 2023, exhibition view, IVAM, Valencia

Alberto Feijóo, Trascity, Accumulator’s room, exhibinition view, IVAM, Valencia, 2023

Alberto Feijóo, Trascity, Accumulator’s room, exhibinition view, IVAM, Valencia, 2023

Alberto Feijóo, Trascity, Accumulator’s room, exhibinition view, IVAM, Valencia, 2023

Alberto Feijóo, Trascity, Aprentice’s room, exhibinition view, IVAM, Valencia, 2023

Alberto Feijóo, Trascity, Aprentice’s room, exhibinition view, IVAM, Valencia, 2023

Alberto Feijóo, Trascity, Photographer’s room, exhibinition view, IVAM, Valencia, 2023

Alberto Feijóo, Trascity, Photographer’s room, exhibinition view, IVAM, Valencia, 2023

Alberto Feijóo, Trascity, Photographer’s room, exhibinition view, IVAM, Valencia, 2023

Alberto Feijóo, Trascity, Photographer’s room, exhibinition view, IVAM, Valencia, 2023

Alberto Feijóo, Trascity, Photographer’s room, exhibinition view, IVAM, Valencia, 2023

Alberto Feijóo, Trascity, Collector’s room, exhibinition view, IVAM, Valencia, 2023

Alberto Feijóo, Trascity, Collector’s room, exhibinition view, IVAM, Valencia, 2023

Alberto Feijóo, Trascity, Collector’s room, exhibinition view, IVAM, Valencia, 2023