Etern
5-channel video installation with fabric, desks, cotton material, and spools and documents found on the Cal Rosal Textile Factory in Cal Rosal, Catalonia.
Presented as part of Creença, group exhibit and residency curated by Axel Void and Void Projects at Konvent in Catalonia, Spain
The quotidian rhythm of the Cal Rosal textile factory workers, their children’s education and the development of their system of beliefs was dependent on the social, economic and architectural infrastructure of the factory, which was mostly dedicated to the production of fabric sheets and tablecloths. This same industrial infrastructure is surrounded by a vast natural landscape due to its dependency to the river along the colony, which energized the factory and the convent hydraulically.
Nowadays, the space of this factory is dominated by its emptiness, by the light that illuminates this emptiness, by the silence and echo that fills the space and by the remnants of different time periods: artifacts, machinery, documents, layers of decaying paint and fabric, that are trapped in a parallel state of time. The films in this installation allude to the poetic and potential divinity of the present state of this factory. These images are interlaced with the voice of Roser, a former student of the convent and loom worker of the Cal Rosal Factory, who narrates her memories of her time at the colony.
The films are projected over materials that have been rescued from the factory: fabric, curtains, plastic and wood. These structures divide the space attempting to recreate the past dimensions of the classroom and dining room of the students and workers of the factory, who were destined to work in the textile factory once they finished their studies at the Konvent. Etern depicts a portrait of the present space of the Cal Rosal factory as a potential and continuous archive of time. Simultaneously, it seeks to create a visual and aural dialogue between the current of the river and the flow of texture of the fabric as two sources of energy of this colony.
