Digital’ and ‘smell’ seem like two mutually exclusive words, but in this little exhibition their conjunction makes perfect sense. Tracking Shot of Smells brings together a selection of videos from the colección olorVISUAL at the Fundación Ernesto Ventós, all of which were chosen to be part of the colection because they awakened the olfactory memory of its founder.

For the perfumer and collector Ernesto Ventós the video was a compilation of images that transported him by way of the olfactory memory to moments he had lived. As he often exclaimed, a video was ‘A thousand images in a single work!’, which rooted him in his memories and experiences, both personal and professional.

These videos also connect with the Gaudían imaginary of Casa Vicens: nature elegantly yet insistently invading the rooms of the house; colours that we find in every corner and smells that help us imagine the life of the family that lived in it.

Technology, colours, smells, memories.

The pure necessity is based on David Claerbout’s idea of returning his original behavior to the animals of The Jungle Book. A way for the Belgian artist to deconstruct the anthropocentric dimension of Disney’s story while offering a reflection on the traditional narrative mechanisms. The work plays with the idea of cause-effect, plot and action, creating a 50-minute film that seems suspended in time, in a kind of contemplative limbo in which the expectations of the viewer are always denied or postponed. Like Claerbout’s other works, The Pure Necessity subverts the classic relationship -established by painting- between the content and the form to criticize the simplifying reduction of the jungle and its inhabitants to setting and sidekicks for its human protagonist.

The landscape is no longer presented as a functional context, full of signs whose meaning is given by human rationality but as an open world in which events overcome the simple subject/object approach, posing an existential openness -of that incapturable- that resonates throughout The bee who forgot the honey, the larger exhibition that includes this installation at Casa Vicens.

Over a period of 3 years, David Claerbout and a team of professional artists painstakingly redrew the frames of the original movie by hand, one by one, and then assembled them to create an entirely new, lifeless animation, which stands in raw contrast to the lively and rythmical original. Now devoid of narrative, the animals move amidst the jungle as if the story were of their own making.

This intervention is part of the fourth edition of Gallery Weekend Barcelona and the parallel programme Compositions.
The shot of a small piece of land is dilated with each inhalation and goes back to normal with the exhalation. This work talks about our relationship with nature and how we approach it from the essences, through something as essential as breathing. Breathing is not only each human being’s manifestation of life; it is also a recognised way to arrive to higher states of being, to elevate oneself. It is the ability of human beings to externalise the internal world each one carries inside, with the same ease with which we breathe. Cada respiro [“Each Breath”] is about the power of imagining, the power of creating and the power of giving life.