Empty Streets

It is when we see something that we fall. Down, sick, from grace, in love. The gods did it all the time. Empires crumble and fall. Buildings become dust that settles on whatever came before. Ashes to ashes from the Bible and Bowie. We are part of everything that came before us.

In the first room we start at home, in the domestic sphere, the nucleus of family. But it is not any family. In the room, with walls covered in a deep red color, is the artist himself and his family. But it is also his home and studio in Lima, where everything is made and life lived. Like millions all over the globe it was also where Miguel Andrade Valdez spent time locked up with his family as the pandemic raged. This is us, togetherness, the creative collective of an artist’s studio. This is “we”. Together we step across the threshold, through the screen separating the private and the public. On the other side lie the empty streets, deserted squares and silent walls of the city.

The gallery becomes a square that could be seen as a stage for a play, inhabited by a couple of monumental sculptures. One is a double sided character, both rising and falling, made up of what looks like elements cut from walls with layers of paper and refuse. The other one is Moby Dick, a towering monument to a civilization claiming the height of progress but built on colonialism and a brutal whaling industry. Moby Dick is the ruins of today, the endless mountains of garbage around our cities and shoals of plastic choking the oceans, so different from the magnificent Huacas of pre-Colombian culture.

Andrade Valdez has since long had a special interest in the cities, buildings and the manifestations in urbanism of a Latin American identity forged by the 1968 Mexico City Olympics. Inviting a more collaborative practice into his work following building his own Barragán inspired house from 2014 and onwards, and establishing the design studio Taller Tarapaca in 2019, a few years ago he and his studio team started to “harvest” layers of old poster from the walls of the city. Posters announcing sales, concerts and political messages – the voices of the street, but during the pandemic the walls went silent, the messages ended in a whiteout, white as the foggy sky of Lima.

Having worked in a conceptual and abstract mode, Andrade Valdez let figuration back into his work, with characters and narratives that have been present in his drawing practice. The wall objects made from posters and paper have patterns inspired by pre-Columbian design that morph into simple emoji-like faces. Suddenly Sad Face was staring at us from the wall and opened the door to the most simple and direct emotions. The face made its way into freestanding sculptures – perhaps it was always there inside, waiting to be carved out, freed? And man was born again, and emerged full of emotions. Happy, sad, happy-sad. It doesn’t have to be more complicated than that. 

Andrade Valdez’s new body of work focuses less on the conceptual and more on creating a starting point for a narrative. But it is a narrative where he leaves it up to us to imbue the works and the installation with our story, our emotions. Enter stage left, a man is falling, a man is rising up. In the square a monument looms, like all monuments full of shit. The people of the city are looking out from the houses like a Greek choir. What is going on? What shall we do? Deal with us, be part of our city, our community. Deal with our baggage of history, colonialism, politics, the forgotten histories, the plastic swirling somewhere out in the ocean. But perhaps you have a story different story to tell, another play in mind? Bob Dylan, who like Pythia, prophesied the end of the Modern era in his Subterranean Homesick Blues; “Look out kid/It's somethin' you did/God knows when/But you're doing it again”. But the kid is alright. The joker is looking on. So we fall. Down, sick, from grace, in love. And we are not heroes bound by fate, so we get up again, the dust settles and we choose another path. This one’s for the future.

Sofia Bertilsson, 2021

The exhibition Plazas Vacias, Empty Streets in English, was conceived for Proyecto N.A.S.A.L. in Guyanaquil, EC, and exhibited 25 November 2021 - 15 January 2022.