TRANSITIONS
02.23 - 03.23.2022

Including work by Fiona Fell, Maarten Renes, Julia Aurora Guzmán, Candela Sol, Lydia Lake, Sandra Velzi, Virginia Rondeel, Paloma G. Diaz & Imanol Ossa, and had an opening sonic performance by Tappeti Volanti.

Transitions is our first and opening exhibition. It is a collaborative and interdisciplinary effort. At the same time it aims to interact with, and recover local history in using site-specific materials. The curatorial team has worked on a found-object basis in order to engage artists with the CasCaDas site, asking them to make an artistic statement using materials that were saved from the fire that destroyed the previous haberdashery on site in 2019. Casa Oliveras has gone but is not forgotten, and lives forth in the pieces exhibited and the stories they emulate and create.

The following is a photo series from the space before its renovation and becoming CasCaDas ArtSpace, showing marks from the fire and remnants left behind.

TRANSITIONS

​In November 2019, as the community may well remember,  a domestic accident triggered off a fire at the popular haberdashery Casa Oliveras, lodged in space 3 of 16 Bisbe Laguarda street. It left the premises covered with a thick coat of soot and some of its woodwork charred. While up until then it had been a frequent meeting place for the Raval neighbourhood, it stood empty for two years, awaiting a new owner and future, and for the opportunity to arise as the proverbial phoenix from its ashes. It was eventually in April 2021 that it was bought up, revived, re-loved and recovered as a potential space of exchange with and for the local and larger community. So shifting from craft to art, we are proud to reopen the former Casa Oliveras as CasCaDas ArtSpace on this 23rd February 2022, renewing its relationship with the neighbours.

Bordering on the former banks of an old stream in the Raval neighbourhood, now covered, paved and named Riera Alta, the Cascadas art space is conceptualized on the flow of water and or as life. It is the apparent chaos of liquid particles in steady movement fighting the solid, discrete laws of matter and energy that seek its proper medium, channel and space to acquire new female form. Our clay becomes our flesh as with gravity and heat we pull form out of slip, and so slip into matter. Cascadas is projected as a multifunctional space that combines living, working and studying in one. It builds on the power of continual change and non-conformism that is the essence of the Raval: a place on the unprotected margins  of the city—the medieval rabad of Moorish times—where meaning is afloat and art reinvents itself as identity. Cascadas aims to use this eccentric, marginal yet cosmopolitan interface to foster collaboration, cultural exchange, and innovative approaches to the art experience at large. It does so in the openness of the undefined and unfixed, offering residencies, individual and shared projects, seminars, and so on. To this effect, Cascadas has established a strategic alliance with the neighbouring sister space Curtidas, which is an art-in-residency project that has been running successfully for half a decade now and shares similar values to ours, resisting a male archetype in contemporary art. All in all, CasCaDas is a curatorial initiative set up to work with national and international emerging and mid-career artists on site responsive exhibitions and projects.

The three-week exhibition we have set up for the occasion of the opening +is the sort of collaborative and interdisciplinary effort that we have in mind. At the same time it aims to interact with, and recover local history in using site-specific materials. The curatorial team has worked on a found-object basis in order to engage artists with the CasCaDas site, asking them to use material that was saved from the fire to make an artistic statement. Casa Oliveras has gone but is not forgotten, and lives forth in the pieces exhibited and the stories they emulate and create.

Exhibition Tour
Upon entry,  the right display, “Unusual 1”, has been filled with the work of Imanol Ossa, a kind of urban totem that appeals to the common shape of bar chairs such as the Tonet model. It shows Imanol’s capacity to turn objects to alternative uses that remain aesthetic or improve their aesthetics. Ossa’s constructive approach interacts with a video by Candela, one of Curtidas’s curators, and is accompanied by a found object arrangement by Fiona Fell.

The left display “Unusual 2”, contains a series of found objects—scales, funnels, yarn—often retrieved from  the burnt premises and arranged by Julia Guzman and Fiona Fell. Their lay-out plays on subverting use, colour, position and shape to shake up our sense of the normal.

“Emily Forlorn” builds on the design and seamstress skills of Virginia Rondeel, a Dutch fashion designer who lives and works in Barcelona and has been active in reuse and recycling, in what she calls post-industrial fashion. She was given a large quantity of zippers retrieved from the site and asked to turn them into a piece of art, the result of which is displayed on the body of the mannequin Emily, who may look more forlorn than she is, actually.

Virginia’s creation is accompanied by a small installation using focal light and tailoring squares or “cuadras”, clamps and spotlight. It is entitled “Todo Cuadra”, Spanish for “All Makes Sense”. This piece is the result of the interplay between Fiona Fell, Julia Aurora Guzmán and Martin Renes.

“Sartorial City” is a collection of miniature scenes giving different purposes to tailoring material such as buttons, needles, pins, thread etc.. It is  an approximation to the private world of art historian Paloma G Díaz, who reflects on the recovery of the human and human vulnerability through the resizing of nature and people.

 “Falls” is a concerted effort by Fiona Fell and Julia Aurora Guzmán to recycle a series of rolls of suit lining into a metaphor of Fell’s homestead in Australia, which hides a waterfall in its backwoods. There she used to go every day and spend her freetime as a child and teenager. It became a place of peace and contemplation, an alternative home, and a focal point of her later, highly personal engagement with the world of sculpture and performance.

 The Bone of Contention is an engagement with the passage of time and death that boasts a charred and burnt step remaining from the fire, a bone found, and a clay body that together re-spin and re-weave the burning of the haberdashery’s. In essence, it is the combination of a series of found objects.

-Maarten Renes