Often, art work consists of managing projects, negotiating, convincing and balancing budgets, and those of us who dedicate ourselves to this run the risk of forgetting the most important thing: the artists. They are the ones who give meaning to this whole framework that governs exhibitions, biennials, institutions, art schools and galleries. The art world could exist without critics, without commissioners or without galleries, but not without artists. Sometimes daily tasks make us forget that art is that space of freedom, which allows us to go beyond established limits. Making exhibitions and producing projects is, above all, working with people, with artists, collaborating with them, discussing and also defending them and supporting proposals that may seem like impossible adventures.
“El Viatge Frustrat” by the artist Enric Farrés Duran has just been presented, one of those proposals as wonderful as it is impossible that one can only support unconditionally and, occasionally, contribute experience or common sense. “El Viatge Frustrat” is a project produced by the Cal Cego collection in which the artist and collector set out to recreate the journey to France carried out by the writer Josep Pla and his friend Hermós, as recorded in the story “Un Viatge Frustrat”. While Pla’s journey never took place, Enric Farrés and the collector Josep Inglada did make it, in the middle of August, from Palafrugell to France, in a sailing boat and a small barge in which the artist was towed. Pla’s realistic fiction (with all the details of people, places and weather conditions to give credibility to the story) is contrasted with Farrés’ fictional reality, which, in video format, makes drifts, winks and connections between different places, objects and situations.
In “El Viatge Frustrat” no major events take place. Among the scenes shown we see the small boat being towed, the learning of the card game of butifarra, the visit to a fish market, the preparation of dinner in the houses of friends who welcomed them or the attempt to pick up a cushion that falls into the sea, as a high point of intensity in the film. But through this “nothing much happens” some of the themes (big themes) of today and always parade: the relationship between reality and fiction; the obsession with documenting experiences; productive time versus vacation time; waiting time; the creative potential of moments of inactivity; the demystification of the roles of artist and collector or internationalization as a path to recognition and legitimation but also as a passage from ultra-local references to the big themes of history with a capital H.
[Article published in Bonart, 2016]
