14th September 2022
Es Baluard Museu d’Art Contemporani de Palma presents “Daniel García Andújar. Letter of Marque”, a project with unpublished materials and works resulting from a site-specific investigation that the artist has carried out around the Mediterranean.
The project, curated by Imma Prieto, opens to the public on Thursday 15 September at 7 p.m. and can be visited at Es Baluard Museu’s Exhibition Hall B from 16 September until 22 January 2023. On the other hand, the Museum organises an exclusive visit for Members of Es Baluard with the artist and the curator on September 15th at 6 pm.
The exhibition “Letter of Marque” shows a group of pieces that reflect on the multiple layers and facets that the Mediterranean encompasses. From journeys scenario, migrations and diasporas, a place of transit linked to history from its conflicts to the cemetery of silenced lives.
Through video installations, photographs, French and Algerian newspaper clippings from the Spanish Civil War-era, maps and a sound piece, the artist rethinks the Mare Nostrum, revisits its history and gives voice to expelled and erased lives.
The research on the character of Deseado Mercadal (Maó, 1911-Maó, 2000), deserves a separate chapter. Writer, journalist and musician, Mercadal was part of the Menorcan resistance during the Spanish Civil War and edited the socialist newspaper Justicia Social. During his escape from Franco’s regime, he was interned in concentration camps in North Africa and the south of France, returned from Algeria to Spain in 1948 as an exile, until he was allowed to return to his native Menorca in 1965. For the exhibition, the most complete visual publication to date on the presence of Republican prisoners in concentration camps on the Mediterranean coast has been published.
Likewise, Greco-Roman myths are composed that adopt a visionary role, as in the video “Juguete de los hados” (2022), produced on the Balearic coasts, which shows Poseidon sailing the sea in a cage on the patera Baya Rimes, a patera like the ones that continue arriving. As the artist Daniel Garcia Andújar declares, “this weekend more than twenty have arrived on the Balearic coast. This is all about these stories that we often only see in one direction. There is a need for a retrospective view on history itself, as well as other social and political contexts. The stories that surround the Mediterranean are always back and forth, this cannot be ignored”.
Imma Prieto, director of Es Baluard Museu and curator of the exhibition, adds: “Violence has always been a consubstantial part of the relationships we have established with other peoples and communities different from our own. Reflecting on expulsion leads us to the action of expelling, but in this gesture of identity, and we appeal to the identity of the expeller, something deeper is hidden that has to do with the will to make the other disappear, not only from the territory considered to be one’s own, but from life“.
The project gives visibility to the historical heritage that accompanies us and distinguishes us, to this gratuitous violence with which we manage conflicts and, above all, denounces the nepotism with which we establish a relationship that already starts from an unequal condition. From these precepts, the lack of historical veracity and, above all, the monstrosity with which human beings relate to themselves are appealed to.
BIOGRAPHY
Daniel García Andújar (Almoradí, Alicante, Spain, 1966) is a visual artist, theorist and activist who works and lives in Barcelona. Through interventions in public space and a critical use of digital media and the communication strategies of the corporations connected to it, his theoretical and artistic work oscillates between real (the city) and virtual (the Web) territories. He has given and conducted workshops and seminars for artists and social collectives in many countries. His works have been shown in numerous exhibitions around the world, including Manifesta 4 and the 53rd Venice Biennale. The Museo Nacional Centro Arte Reina Sofía hosted a complete solo show in 2015, curated by Manuel Borja-Villel. In 2017 he participated in documenta14 in Athens and Kassel.
