Opening ‘Leftovers’ by Grazia Amendola, 26 Nov

Leftover is the residue, the reject, the remains after a meal has been consumed or when the market is closed and its stalls are dismantled and overturned. Leftover is what is left, what carries the experience of a fragment of time. Grazia Amendola decided to encounter Barcelona through its local markets, talking to sellers, observing how fruits and vegetables are arranged to appear as desirable as possible and how the configuration of these places recalls the squared geometry of the city. The market is the place of meeting and exchange par excellence, crossed by everyday differences and habits. The market as a space for social interaction and negotiation, as well as in its economic extension, is the centre of this site-specific project for Espronceda, where the artist spent her residency period, presented as an open research. Recorded noises and voices from among the stalls enter the exhibition, introducing the vision of a large photographic installation. The technique deceives the spectator by giving the appearance of an extended x-ray of discarded fruits, while actually halting the vision at the surface, at the peel. Left#1, dropping vertically from the top, leans on the floor of the first room and, by allowing the spectator to approach, lets the body mirror itself on the opaque and reflective surface, blending into the portrayed objects. Rejects and residual elements inhabit the exhibition space — traces of the market, in a suspended time, ambiguous and similar to the moment when the sale has finished or is about to begin. In the large central room, two sculptural interventions, linked by material and vertical tension, converse from opposite edges while the centre is left empty for the visitor to step through. Left#2 is a precarious architecture of recycled wooden boxes, arranged as sellers leave them after emptying them or just before use. With its tower-like structure, it recalls the stacks of packing and transport of large-scale retail trade, referencing overproduction as one of the biggest causes of waste. Left#3 reuses a material from Espronceda’s warehouse. An overturned wooden scaffold board leaning against the wall is engraved with a verse by the poet whose name was given to the cultural centre.

For quite some time the artist has reflected on food and related economies as a form of social control, exposed to regulations and rules that are often as far from common sense as from the sense of hunger. Freedom, desire and work coexist in the selected verse, opening considerations on food control — from the seed to large-scale food distribution — and on labour as a form of contemporary slavery. Amendola‘s interventions intercept and bring back the traces of those human gestures that are constituent parts of the market: in the collection of wooden boxes, in the fruits discarded at the end of the day because they are not beautiful enough to be sold, in the hands of its workers which the artist fixes through the plaster casts of Left#4. The market is first of all a place of work, a space of micro- and macroeconomics, crossed by those who have learned to grab the last discounted fruits at the end of the day, and by those who carry and sell heavy loads. For years, Amendola’s artwork has investigated the relationship between bodies and biological forms, looking at human beings as part of an ecosystem, placing emphasis on their actions and visions — often unaware but not free from consequences. Left#5, the installation placed in the smallest room, also refers to the human gesture on the environment. A window pane connects the two spaces, allowing only a view of mounds of earth on the floor of an overheated space; the thermal variation not only provokes an estranging experience for those passing through, but also makes the glass sweat, impeding a clear view. The last room opens above the central one, from where the view is only partially permitted — the spectator is in fact forbidden to go up and access it. A coloured wallpaper covering the walls can be distinguished: in Left#6, the repeated geometries of fruits and vegetables create a decorative pattern, converting into an apparent aesthetic eccentricity that visibly recalls the local floral style. This refined ambiguity interrogates the possibility of the artist to act on crucial contexts and issues such as wastefulness and global food control. Deliberately, Amendola presents — as often — a formal vision that pauses on evidence, aiming to open a free space for thought, toward which the first step is a necessary and discriminating attention requiring an obstinate will to look beyond the market stall or the supermarket shelf display. In these works, the artist continuously arranges obstacles to vision while repeatedly showing elements found during her research, partly reporting her experience of impossibility — during the residency — of accessing the back side of the markets, in the spaces dedicated to garbage. Permits, forms and online procedures seem necessary in order to observe and understand how the waste of Barcelona’s markets is treated, without success. The organic leftover thus becomes — almost ironically — a priceless material.