“Banditry” is the first in a series of exhibitions curated by Yaby (Beatriz Ortega Botas and Alberto Vallejo) on reading as a process entangled in power relations. Claudia Pagès underlines the complexity of this theme through the scenography of the show, where two videos are separated by a membrane of handmade paper; the light emitted by the screens, which can never be seen simultaneously, lets glimpse figures and patterns worked on the paper in the opposite room. The starting point is a research on stamped paper and watermarks as instruments of social control used to reify heritage, property and the self. From this resolutely niche premise unfolds a powerful meditation on the construction of the past, encouraging reflection on the construction of the present. In the first video, a group of young women reinterprets historical documents at the Museu Molí Paperer de Capellades, improvising on drawings found on judicial and administrative papers from the 15th to the 19th century. The second video takes place in the Abric Romaní del Capelló, an archaeological site whose stone walls bear traces from the Paleolithic era to the 21st century. The group examines these inscriptions through theoretical lenses including ‘anarchy’, ‘lesbianism’, ‘capitalism’ and ‘dualism’, words spoken with the incantatory power of conjurations. The two videos consist of images shot from three different angles, each capturing the women taking part in a kind of witch’s dance – a feminist ritual which, the work suggests, allows them to appropriate and question the history of the power, a bit like light passing through paper in the exhibition space, spiraling out of control.
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