“The moon has come to the forge (…) the child looks at it”, we read in the first verses of Moon Romancepoem from the book gypsy ballad by Federico Garcia Lorca. The Man from Granada describes in the text how a boy experiences “duende”, a mysterious force that has the ability to move and transform the viewer. The notion of this supernatural power which brings about individual and collective change is the axis of the exhibition. In the air moved organized by the Reina Sofía Museum and the Center de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB), open from this Wednesday until March 17, 2025. The title borrows another part of the Romance of the moon.
“An image can transform your life but you don’t know it. Emotions have a connection with the unconscious and poetic images can be a way to understand it: what is in my memory, what is my desire?, explains the curator of the exhibition and French philosopher Georges Didi-Huberman. In reality, the exhibition is an essay by this theoretician of visual semiotics, “an exhibition by a Frenchman on emancipatory Spain”. To disseminate his idea of art as an activator of personal and social revolution, he exhibited nearly 300 works, including paintings, sculptures, installations, photographs or films by 140 artists, varied and without apparent connection, like Goya, Dalí, Picasso. , Goethe, Victor Hugo, Miró, Passolini or Rodin.
Side by side, a photographic montage by Bertolt Brecht and a cinematographic sequence by Béla Tarr can share on the same wall, the choreographies of the dancer Israel Galván like an engraving by Goya. The common thread here is the emotion that an image can arouse and its subsequent shock, understood as a chain of sensations which affect a whole, an environment and its relationships. “The question I ask is not whether emotions are good or bad, but the use we make of them. A propaganda image is an image that produces an emotion that it captures but this one, for example [señala una de las fotografías de la serie Una vez y no más de Corinne Mercadier]is more ambiguous, it asks a hypothetical, poetic question, it opens our gaze and, when it opens, an emancipatory thought too,” says Didi-Huberman.
To develop his thesis, the French art historian divided the exhibition into seven chapters: childhood, thoughts, faces, gestures, places, policies and childhoods. The leitmotif is the work of García Lorca who runs through all the rooms with his handwritten drawings or photographs. Both the first and last parts are devoted to the first phase of human life: childhood. Thus, the exhibition opens with a young Ana Torrent in a sequence of The hive by Víctor Erice, the children sitting on Peironcely Street in a bombed Vallecas captured by Robert Capa or the astonished, curious and suspicious look of a child watching a play, depicted in the short film ten more minutes by Herz Frank.
“The question in a museum or any cultural institution is what we look like. García Lorca has an answer and it is magnificent: we must look with the eyes of a child and ask for the moon,” says Didi-Huberman. The second chapter, “Thoughts,” reflects how human beings have wanted to explain and understand emotions and how they are evoked. It is displayed from a copy of The expression of emotions in humans by Charles Darwin, to a study of eye expressions carried out by José García Hidalgo. In this part, through documents and philosophical essays, the theories of Descartes and those of Kant enter into dialogue.
Faces brings together attempts to transform into plastic the range of expressions that a face can produce. There we find the head studies of Alberto Giacometti, the sculpture Screaming Montserrat Mask by Julio González or two pieces, in wax, rough and ill-defined, that Medardo Rosso cast from the head of his son. But emotions do not only use the face as a vehicle, they are also expressed in body language (hands, dancing bodies), the basis of the “Gestures” chapter. We find there the histrionic movements of the German dancer, pioneer of performance, Valeska Gert, played by Suse Byk. Involuntary gestures, associated with madness or experimentation with psychotropic substances, are also present in the works of Antonin Artaud or Dalí.
The most abstract and inconcrete side of In the air moved is the chapter dedicated to “Sites”. Not only to accommodate works by Miró or Lucio, but for Didi-Hubermann’s conception of space: “Places altered by the tragic element of human emotion, imbued with emotions and desires”. From the unreal we move to the tangential and punctual through the ‘Politics’ section. The emotion of an image can become a generator of social movement, of massive rejection, as proven by Goya’s war engravings, Julio Ubiña’s vigil photographs or the documentary Anger by Pier Paolo Passolini. “In this film we have two common themes: the mourning of the wives of the miners killed by a gas explosion and the explosion of the atomic bomb.”
Passolini’s film joins the last room, which returns to childhood, but in a more raw and visceral way. The drawings of the surviving children of Hiroshima sit alongside those of other Syrian refugee minors. One of the latter draws a series of bombs falling on a family, the face of one of them shows small tears. It is the look of a child transformed by an image, just like one who sees the moon in the sky. Moon Romance by Garcia Lorca.
