“Covid made it painfully clear that the world we live in is flawed and unfair on many levels. And it became painfully clear that collective healing starts with us. Since then I have embarked on a personal healing process.†It is the reflection neither of a leftist politician nor of a contemporary Stoic philosopher, but of Francesca Thyssen, heir to one of the main names in European industry and for two decades one of the great art producers in the world through her TBA21 foundation. “For this reason, it has been very interesting to think with the curator Daniela Zyman in this exhibition that we are inaugurating, Remedios: where a new land could grow, which deals with how to deal with trauma and repair our relationship with our past and present, with ourselves and with the world in which we liveâ€, continues the patron born in Switzerland in 1958, daughter of Baron Heinrich Thyssen and the great model of aristocratic origin Fiona Campbell-Walter.
The often shamanic show Remedios, with giant dream catchers, orisha altars, powerful videos of young Jamaicans dancing sodden on a stormy night along the road to low-frequency dancehall music evoking the swaying of car windshields, and, above all, a huge healing crocheted yurt, brings together the work of 40 artists from around the world. With names ranging from Kader Attia to Marina Abramovic, from Olafur Eliasson and Shirin Neshat to Sandra Vásquez de la Horra and Gabriel Chaile, prominent names at the last Venice Biennale. And it is the second major collaboration project of the TBA21 foundation with the C3A, the Center for Contemporary Creation of Andalusia, in Córdoba, for which its brutalist building with echoes of Islamic art motifs will host the major exhibitions for three years with the The Francesca Thyssen Foundation shows its collection. A godsend for the Andalusian center, as shown by the total dedication to patronage of the Andalusian Councilor for Tourism, Culture and Sports, Arturo Bernal, and the mayor of Córdoba, José MarÃa Bellido. And, above all, as shown by the works that make up Remedios and that in their path of healing they cover perspectives that go from the Amazon to the Pacific, from the African diaspora to Western art.
The curator of the exhibition, Daniela Zyman, explains that they wondered what the word remedies could mean today and they answered that it could deal with “how to conceive and mobilize healing and repair capacities in a time of great insecurity and change.” And, furthermore, “how to repair what we have been given rather than try to rebuild the world through great ideas: perhaps the time has come to take care of and repair what we have rather than start over every timeâ€.
And remember two thinkers. To the African American Bell Hooks, who wondered “how to heal this world into what it could becomeâ€. And to the great Cordovan philosopher Maimonides: “Tikkún olam. Repair the world. cure it. A commandment of the Hebrew tradition on which he reflected a lot. What does it mean as individuals to heal the world? For him, being constantly in a system of relationships, everything that happens at the smallest level, whatever we do as people, has an impact on the world. Micro and macrocosm are always in relationship. “And with Remedios it is possible to explore the relationships, the correspondences, the different ancestral paths with which the artists dialogue, a way –he concludes– to understand that curing today is more than something we do by ourselves, it is a tikun olam, a way of approaching the construction of the world, making it a better placeâ€.
