La mitología como vacuna

Mythology as a Vaccine / La mitología como vacuna, Barcelona 10. 10. 2020

The roup-exhibition Mythology as a Vaccine. The show features the works of three young artists: Felipe Aguila, Anastasia Malkhazova and Juan Carlos Valdiviezo. The three different mediums: Painting, Photography and Sculpture will be displaying.

Felipe Aguila is a young artist born in Lima, Peru. His domain – a documentary photography. Felipe is currently enrolled into a Masters in Art Photography program in Barcelona. His background involves studying and exhibiting in Peru as well as elsewhere in Latin America.

Anastasia Malkhazova was born in Moscow. A graduate from the Art Academy in Düsseldorf and Media Art Academy in Cologne, she works as a Painter and Filmmaker while attempting such interdisciplinary mediums like performance, video, and sculpture.

Juan Carlos Valdiviezo wasborn in Ecuador. He is a young sculptor living in Barcelona and implementing different techniques while working with stones and plaster. His projects can be seen in galleries and museums of Barcelona.

Mythology as a Vaccine sheds some light on the inner sense of the artwork that evokes a general feeling of what can be translated as a mythological comprehension. Mythological translation of our world transcended into meanings and views claims to hide sense or truth. But what if there is no truth or falsehood? What if right and wrong are only relative categories in relation to a specific subject or case? And what if these categories are not opposite to each other but, to the contrary, sit on the same side of a table?

A vaccine is something that protects us from the real disease. As a medicine that is being injected into the body, it provokes our natural immune system to beat a virus or bacteria forever always being immune against their destructive impacts. In order to beat a natural enemy we have to insert it into our body, into our system at first. What if the same applies to meanings and myths? We insert them into the reality we live in in order to compare and understand that reality, ourselves while our behavior might keep unconsciously following the mythological path. Is mythology able to serve as an ultimate vaccine for us so that we’d be immune to any impact of reality?

Jung believed that mythology lies inside the structure of the collective unconscious in that they express core ideas that are part of human species. The human beings and their minds correspond and connect to each other inside meanings, senses and values all over the world while the art seems to serve as a universal venue, be it music, cinema, visual arts, applied sciences or any other forms of art. In each of the artists’ works on display, is an inherent in visible structure opening up a dialogue with the outside world.

Mythology as a Vaccine is a joke yet having a cruel and inherent meaning where messages and their significance lie in the play on words that have seemingly no relation to one another. And yet they
are evoking a vast rebound concerning the fact that we can be vaccinated with a myth against which an immediate immunity is built. So, conversely, we would never get ‘sick’ from mythological meanings that blur our sense of how we are thinking about or imagining the world.

Mythology is the “other side” of a rational understanding of the world which is exactly what the art is. It speaks without words, evokes senses, describes them without saying anything. Art queries the truth by just showing it; it queries itself by being itself. Art has no use, but it has a sense.

Art gives sense to things that have use as its only function. A play on words is the artistic choice of expression provoking and evoking a reaction — fast and intense as a lightning rod creating the sense and meaning of art in the eye of a spectator.

After the time of lockdown (which is not over yet) we are obliged to provide a greater value to simple things while questioning many of our routines and behavior. We have been given an opportunity to change, reflect and dive inside our unconscious wisdom. That is what has been keeping us united.

Mythology as a vaccine aims to fight your antibodies and fill your organism with the necessary structure of artistic feeling. That is not rational, nor it is practical but yet vivid and thoroughly expressive defining feelings as creative part of our brains, a substance that brings ideas into life. Something that seems to be even crazier than the understandable reality: ideas that lay apart from any consume-driven spectacle, away from a fast digestive solution. Therefore, they are not suitable to be ‘spitted out’ looking for a next attraction to come.

The Work-show is not only a curatorial expression showing the three distinctively different mediums yet corresponding to each other in a deeper sense. It is also a private viewing that provides an intimate and close atmosphere filled with the artworks; and it also implements a philosophical dialogue on a current agenda in an intimate, exclusive and intellectual ambiente.