The artist Christian Boltanski said that we actually die twice, the first time at the moment of death and then, when someone no longer recognises us in photographs. How important it is to take care of memory, personal and historical, recent memory and living memory, to reconcile with it, accept it and learn. Unlike events further away in time, which we can recover after intense archival and newspaper research work, recovering the most recent artistic and cultural memory has the advantage that there are many testimonies that are still accessible, with which we can talk, which remember, nuance and analyse from a temporal and personal distance. An essential and very rewarding job that it is not clear which museum or institution would correspond to. Would it be the MACBA that would have the duty to encourage the task of investigating the most recent past of the city in which it is located? It is surely not the responsibility of a single museum, but it should be a very present issue.
The museum that is already doing this is the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya (MNAC), through exhibitions/research of specific moments of the counterculture (such as the exhibition dedicated to El Víbora) and giving access to its archives and collections to artists so that they can make reinterpretations (La caja entropica by Francesc Torres or Neumotórax. Una perforación en l’archivo-pulmón del Museu Nacional by Jordi Ferreiro). La Virreina. Centre de la Imatge has also been doing this work for some time. The most recent case is the exhibition Sala Aixalà (1959-1975), a shop in Barcelona that carried out an intense activity of presenting experimental proposals of photography, film, music and comics. In the exhibition, curated by Laura Terré, the meticulous reconstruction of specific moments of the Sala Aixalà programme is key and, naturally, that some of its creators can explain its history.
Recovering memory, from a more personal perspective, is what Aimar Pérez Galí does in relation to the impact of AIDS on the dance scene in the 1980s in countries on the periphery (of history and power). Every time Aimar Pérez Galí travels to do a dance performance, teach a workshop or give a lecture, he tries to get in touch with someone from the dance scene at that time who can learn first-hand about the object of his study, which he then transforms into letters that he writes to those dancers and choreographers who have disappeared. All these letters make up the book Lo Tocante and The Touching Community, a dance show with five dancers of different ages and conditions. Sounds, words and movements become true words of love for all those who are no longer here but who can never again be forgotten.
Aimar Pérez Galí. The Thouching Community. Mercat de les Flors (Barcelona), 2016. foto: Siddharth Gautam Singh
[Article published in Bonart, 2020]
