Es Baluard Museu d’Art Contemporani de Palma opens the second exhibition season of 2021 with “The Archive of Dust: An Ongoing Project“, an exhaustive overview of the fundamental lines that characterize Elena del Rivero’s work gravitating around the attacks of the World Trade Center on September 11th, 2001, in New York. This show presents, for the very first time, The Archive of Dust entirely, where the artist reflects on loss, collective memory and pain, as well as on the construction of the existential pillars that make up the beliefs and values of society.
This exhibition, under the artistic direction of Mateo Feijóo, opens to the public on September 11th on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the attack on the World Trade Center and will feature “Pre-dust-post”, an immersive sonic action by 60 young resident musicians on the island, some of them from vulnerable groups, led by the musician and percussionist Juanjo Guillem.
Likewise, the exhibition will take place from September 12, 2021, to January 30, 2022 occupying the interior space, the exhibition halls, and the exterior space, through interventions on the walls, roofs and terraces of the historical complex that surrounds the Museum. In addition, the exhibition is presented in conjunction with a selection of unpublished collages by Elena del Rivero, which closes The Archive of Dust, at Christie’s New York headquarters from September 9 to 12.
“Elena del Rivero. The Archive of Dust: An Ongoing Project” emphasizes citizen collaboration and the local fabric through three lines: Juanjo Guillem’s action with musicians living on the island; the collaborative work Trapos de cocina (2021); and a mural by the artist OVAS based on words that the artist recovers from the Black Lives Matter movement.
The main axis of the exhibition is A CHANT, the memorial installation produced by Elena with the over 3,000 pieces of paper collected from the floors of her destroyed studio home, and related works that she has been completing during these 20 years, especially the collages built with the salvaged pieces of paintings from her destroyed works during the attack. These collages will be seen for the first time in Palma.
At Es Baluard Museu will also be shown Nine Broken Letters, a work produced during nine consecutive sleepless nights while being displaced from her home at 125 Cedar Street and that were inspired by her reading Marina Tsvetáyeva’s Florentine Nights. The interests and methodologies that are part of her trajectory, such as the Letters from Home, will materialize as well in the Palma exhibition through the intervention on the roofs where Elena will build a monumental dishtowel rag with common kitchen towels provided by the local community.
“Elena del Rivero. The Archive of Dust: An Ongoing Project” organically structures and crystallizes the different phases of the project that emerged from the trauma of the attacks. In this way, it includes the drifts and reflections initiated in her first two installations [Swi:t] Home (2000–2001) at The New Museum in New York and [Swi:t] Home: A Chant (2001–2006), installed at Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington (2008), and at the New Museum in New York in 2011. On this occasion, A CHANT installed at Es Baluard Museu will mark the twentieth anniversary of 9/11.
The project takes shape thanks to a number of voices from Mateo Feijoo’s curatorial theatrical presentation, Professor Warwick Anderson concept of Dust, to Lawrence “D” Butch Morris (1947-2013) who composed Bring Light (2006), a sound piece that has accompanied the installation of Chant in each presentation. Bring Light was composed using Elena’s sound recordings of noise at ground Zero with Butch’s own compositions and is presented with permission from the Estate of Lawrence “D” Butch Morris.
In the artist’s words, “the project in Palma culminates the work around a personal archive that inevitably contains layers of memory that are part of previous processes”.
The proposal at Es Baluard Museu forcefully presents Elena del Rivero’s artistic and personal work and gives visibility to two independent and complementary lines of work: the first, which began around 9/11, points to loss, collective memory and pain, and the second, addresses personal issues that have to do with how our existential pillars are built, in the case of Elena’s work her ongoing series “Letters to the Mother” (1990-2022).
According to the Museum’s Director, Imma Prieto, “the importance of the project lies in the connection established between a specific event, 9/11, and a relationship that unites past, present and future. Thus, we propose a reading that cares for the community and thinks Es Baluard Museum geopolitically: an island between Africa, Europe and the Middle East. In this sense, thinking about the relationship between New York and Palma means assuming our socio-political co-responsibility”.
“9/11 has transformed contemporary thought, changing the course of history, but it would be absurd to believe that evil began there. The Archive of Dust brings the cracks in the system to the table. We are the result of a concatenation of interests and errors that have taken place throughout the 21st century: what is happening in Afghanistan today is a good example of all this”, she adds.
“The Archive of Dust: An Ongoing Project” ponders on the historical, the collective and the personal while addressing, at the same time, our most immediate present and the urgent and necessary reflection about the politico-social strategies that shape our contemporaneity for future generations.
The project has the collaboration of Consell de Mallorca, The Paraclete and AICO Servicios Audiovisuales. Likewise, the Ministry of Culture and Sports of the Government of Spain collaborates in “Pre-dust-post”.
BIOGRAPHY
Elena del Rivero
Valencia, Spain, 1949
Lives and works in New York, USA, since 1991. She has had solo exhibitions at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Madrid); New Museum (New York), Corcoran Gallery of Art (Washington D.C.); International Center of Photography (New York); The Drawing Center (New York); or the Museo Patio Herreriano de Valladolid (Spain).
Her work is in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York); Museum of Modern Art (New York); Yale University Art Gallery (New Haven); Fogg Art Museum (Cambridge, EUA); National Gallery of Art (Washington DC); Baltimore Art Museum (Baltimore); Colby College Museum of Art (Waterville); Pollock Gallery en Southern Methodist University (Dallas); Birmingham Museum of Art (Birmingham); Institut Valencià d’Art Modern (Valencia, Spain) and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Madrid, Spain), among others.
She has received awards such as Prix de Rome from the Spanish Academy of Fine Arts in Rome (1988), Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (1991 y 1995), Creative Capital Foundation Grant (2001), The New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship (2001, 2002), The Rockefeller Foundation Residency en The Bellagio Center, Italia (2005), The Joan Mitchell Foundation Award (2015). She has recently done a residency in the Joan Mitchell Center of New Orleans (2017), she obtained the Guggenheim Fellowship (2019) and has been awarded by the program Anonymous Was A Woman (2020).