Art understood as a virus which engenders reflection and hence dissidence. Fleeing from a submissive and accommodating simplicity. Encouraging discussion and the effort of the receiver.
Nora Ancarola posits a debate between lead and silver as metaphors for combat, the struggle of the underprivileged: immigrants, refugees, prisoners, hooded outlaws, the misfits, the poor. Always the poor. Art as a device to reflect on and offer dissent from the moments of lead, surveillance and control systems, forced migration, tragic arrivals, hospitality closed, life as a convict. At the same time, a device to ponder on the moment of silver: wounds that can be healed, lives that can be transformed, fists that open, despite all the limits imposed, to welcome survival.
In Nora Ancarola’s work, we see a burgeoning desire to share – it is only that, or nothing less than that. In a society as individualized as ours, cooperating with other artists, here Agnès Wasserman, Juan Muiño, Josep Manuel Berenguer and Marta Marín Dominé) is an effort to underscore the virus of dissidence, a necessary vision of art as something communal. Socializing the visual nature of what seeks to differentiate itself in the sea of complacent images surrounding us. Standing up to tackle the challenge wherein the voices of those bearing the suffering of the moments of lead – whole lives of lead, always invisible and unheard – may emerge in the dialogue of these artistic devices which argue with each other rather than taking on society. It seems that there is no other road.
