Artists: Sam Cottington, Caspar Heinemann, Phung Tien Phan, Deborah-Joyce Holman, David Moser, Alex Dolores Salerno, Francis Whorral, Campell, Quay Quinn Wolf, Leto Ybarra
Exhibition title: SNECKDOWN
Curated by: YABY (Beatriz Ortega Botas, Alberto Vallejo)
Venue: EACC, Espai d’Art Contemporani de Castelló, Castelló, Spain
Date: May 20 – September 03, 2023
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of Deneb Martos, Carlos Pascual and EACC
The term sneckdown describes an accumulation of snow that covers part of the roadway, obscuring road markings and extending the initial limits of pedestrian space. During the momentary erasure of the visual indications that normally order traffic, new routes are traced on the snow, exposing different desires, needs and relationships with the public space. The result is an eloquent image that speaks of normative and non-normative uses of the environment, of visibility, invisibility and circulation. sneckdown brings together the work of 9 young international artists who address various points of contact between identity and space. The selected works formally elaborate approaches derived from contemporary critical discourses around visibility, the codification of situated expressions and the political geometries of intersection, confrontation and solidarity. These issues are confronted from spatial considerations that elude direct representation, such as access, exclusion, staging, belonging, domination or infiltration.
There is always friction between the desire to document and documentation itself, a form of capture that forces objectification and intelligibility on the lives of certain social groups. This friction has generated a longstanding debate that traverses the field of urban sociology. It is a clash comparable to the one that takes place in the sphere of contemporary art between the demand for representation and its rejection by those of whom representation is demanded. Nevertheless, a significant fraction of historical knowledge about lives considered “deviant” or non-normative -those that took place in bars, concert halls, certain neighborhoods, porn cinemas, public bathrooms- comes from the research of sociologists, social workers and anthropologists (Underdogs, Social Deviance and Queer Theory. Heather Love, 2021). The artists participating in sneckdown draw on their personal experience and familiarity with particular contexts to renegotiate the problematics that derive from some of these sociological, anthropological and political approaches to the relations between space and social groups. Parody, codification, opacity and various exercises in abstraction are used to propose alternative perspectives on architecture and urbanism as social mechanisms.
If racial and sexual oppressions are spatial projects that establish a correspondence between the habitable, the imaginable and the recognisable (“The Wild Man in the Green Swamp and Other Stories about Race in America”, C. Riley Snorton, 2021), the analysis of their spatialisation surely implies the exploration of concepts that are very close to visual and performative arts, as well as theoretical tools that come from the investigation of visuality and relation. The exhibition brings together artistic works that inspect architectural, social, legal and conceptual barriers that affect literal and figurative circulation, as well as the interdependence that defines any social interaction. Modes of interrelation that are characterized by pleasure and care have a particular importance here, occupying a space whose conception did not contemplate the possibility of certain bodies, or their pleasure, or their own capacities for imagination and recognition.
**The documentation process responds to an invitation to Deneb Martos who, based on the reading of Francis Whorral-Campbell’s Trap pieces, produces a development based on chopping Magnolia leaves and the relationship between insects and flowers. Also starting from Sam Cottington’s position of subjective documentation, Deneb has created a type of documentation that is not very precise and that moves away from the archetypal images used in the processes of transmission of contemporary art, a gesture to be related to the concepts of opacity or sneckdown developed in the exhibition.
