La Promenade

The promenade that surrounds the circular wall of the medieval town of Münster is the starting point for my installation in the exhibition hall Am Hawerkamp.

Two aspects of the image and the life of the city are those that have the greatest weight as they are recurrent themes that have appeared in my work:

Defined through the course of creation of the medieval fortifications, the promenade also contains a great historical, urban and geographical load. Historical burden in the sense of having formed through history, change and the course of time, at the same time as of that physical reality that we feel so present.

As a peculiar moving element (the coming and going of the men in the city) seems to me the idea of the route, the fusion of the journey spatially and temporarily, of the cyclic return as a synthesis of spatial and temporal significance, and the connotation of the idea of the circle: circulation, life cycle, return, etc.

The installation consists of six video projections, of six elements found in the promenade of Münster and trapped by the eye-of the chamber-which have been torn out of their "real" context, urbanistic (without being denied as referential points).

Elements that, as images of an artistic installation, become part of a new relationship that transcends and is alien to the original context.

These six moving images become metaphors of various aspects of the aforementioned life cycle theme, the path traveled, the transformation, etc. Its interrelation-as reflected in the spatial distribution of the showroom-is defined by the ordering of the pieces in three pairs. Its conceptual and content relationship can be described schematically as follows:

The tunnel and the forest: both speak of movement, progress, transit, goal to fulfill, uncertainty, etc. Experience of the present and the future.

The monument and the rest of the felled trunk: temporary suspension, carving, death, the past.

Each couple is confronted in its corresponding context to two different positions or realities: the literal representation of a given reality, "natural" (forest, remainder of the logged trunk) on the one hand, and on the other the reality constructed, "of the Hand of the Men" (Monument, tunnel). The natural experience and its possible cultural and rational transformation. This constellation is also repeated in the last pair of images, which is shown in two different spaces separated from the central room:

The window and the island: while the first four images are referred to the experience of time and space, the vital stages and the movement of a subject, the subject itself is understood as a spatial and temporal entity: the body as a vehicle to make our journey through life, as a definition of place and identity. Prison, isolation, communication. Outside world and inner world, intimacy and public life.

Chema Alvargonzalez and Virginia Marx