GONZALO BORONDO

GONZALO BORONDO

Gonzalo Borondo is a spanish artist who focuses his art in a collective dimension, exploring the complex relationship between Art and “Public”. Palzom collaborated with him by curating the documentary on the “Matiere Noire” exhibition held in Marseille, and curating the documentary and the audiovisual social communication on the “Settimo Giorno” exhibition held in Bologna.

In “Settimo Giorno” culminates a long creative process that Gonzalo Borondo has been able to intertwine with the peculiar internal structure of the Former Church of San Mattia, without neglecting its spots of meditation, stillness, and silence. For the first time in this exhibition, the Spanish artist uses video as the mainexpressive medium: more than sixty videos. In Borondo’s project, walls are not simply a support for images or videos: according to his way of conceiving creation, the space ceases to be a place to exhibit only and is completely transformed into a habitat -with its atmospheres, textures and environments, with its lights and shadows – that captures anyone who decides to enter San Mattia. This is recreated through moving images, in harmony with words, sound and the act of thinking and challenging the conventions that exist between the artwork and the spectator.

Video installations follow one another in the chapels, in which looped images, different languages, stories and sounds shape the fabric of a multisensory experience. An experience that fully introduces us to a primordial and unique universe in which we discover the enigmas of the six days of creation, without any order established by the artist.
“In the beginning, Elohim created the heavens and the earth. The earth was formless and empty”. This is the beginning of the book of Genesis in the Old Testament: God does not work with his hands but creates the world around him through the word.

Divided in 3 acts – projection, perception, and creation – the show deals with the dark matter – everything we cannot directly see but allows the universe to exist – as a metaphor of the invisible in our perception. A reflection upon different cultural and social realities and the media through which they are filtered, from earlier forms of representations to contemporary digital technologies. In the 4,000-square-meter exhibition, Borondo will present its universe for the first time through more than 30 in-situ artworks – animations, holograms, installations, paintings, videos – in collaboration with 8 international multidisciplinary artists: BRBR Films, Carmen Main, Diego López Bueno, Edoardo Tresoldi, Isaac Cordal, Roberto Atzori, Sbagliato and A.L. Crego, author of the show’s dynamic visual content, such as gifs and videos.

The overall result is a living organism in close connection with the place and its history, one of the last reserves of collective memories expressed through the objects found on site. They become the raw material used for most of the works, as opposed to the digital archive of our times. Borondo makes use of collective symbols and myths, and touches archetypes and latent unconscious, bringing the audience to a kaleidoscope of infinite universes to explore and capture. They are drafts of an invisible past without which our existence would not be possible, as the dark matter of our present.