Opening: Friday, August 8th, 6 p.m
Labdanum is a sticky, aromatic brown resin extracted from the plant commonly known as sticky rockrose, typical of certain regions in Spain. This substance lends its name to a project that was initiated by the artist’s journey across the country’s central plateau. That casual walk triggered an investigation into the political, biographical, productive, and magical memory of the territory—a space where, the more one traverses it, the more the times that compose it are revealed. Now marked by minimal population density and low agricultural productivity, these conditions allow for the survival of latent pasts: it was a site of hermitic retreat during the High Middle Ages and a strategic space of anti-fascist resistance during the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939).
These temporalities of the territory inspire an investigation that weaves together historical surveys, archaeological findings, magical conjectures, and autobiographical fiction. At the core of the project is a video that merges documentary form with archival images, sighting records, and texts. Alongside this material, a collection of objects with multiple identities—part archaeological piece, part facsimile, part artwork, and part eyewitness testimony—serves as a reverberation of the moving image. This interweaving drives a narrative that conceives history as a field made up of remains, fragments, disconnected parts, lost objects, and illegible texts, seeking in the viscous substance of labdanum a binder for the times scattered across the landscape.
Image: Mario Espliego, Ládano, brillo de micacita.