Lucidity and madness are not the same but the work Tomorrow will be another day of Pol Clusella (Granollers, 1994) would enter the two categories. At first glance, Clusella stands out for being a nervous guy. Their hands move erratic, and it seems to me that they are trying to follow their head. This is the first time that A -EL has been one of the 16 projects selected in the call Barcelona That we can see this season.
The room where the Clusella exhibition is Pompeii after the fire and ash. When we enter, we climb the ramp that gives its name to the space, we come across a few petrified bodies. They are made of film and adhesive tape. When the lava arrived, those people stayed like this: extended arms, underground torsos and legs up. What lava? The one of the Croscat volcano that erupts every ten or fifteen thousand years, and now it has been more than ten thousand years ago. Therefore, the following eruption could be in five thousand, five hundred, five years … or tomorrow.
Clusella has looked at her environment and detected two trends: technooptimism (the thought that technology will save us from the disasters of climate change) and environmentalist catastrophism (the alarmist lament of the world for lost). That is why he has devised an exhibition where we find, on the one hand, this catastrophic installation of the world that is already completed because it has already been burned, which would be the representation of the worst case; And on the other hand, a projection of videos where, for example, a youtuber tells us that the magma of the volcanoes of La Garrotxa has been reused to make a series of infrastructure, as if it were concrete, and that it has solved the end of the world, and already passing, the lack of housing, the dependence on the car and the depopulation of the rural world, which would be the representation of the best case.
Between the tragedy and the salvation, Clusella has put on the table the two possibilities, and proceeded to mock both. And it is true: its installation makes us laugh, but at the same time it makes us think. This is probably because he is an architect, and therefore his ideas have a basis that may seem completely realistic. Clusella studied architecture and was working for some time in urban planning offices, but now he is a musician – the little Iberian -, he makes sound design and other creative projects. If the architecture plays, it does more in the form of exhibition design or theatrical scenarios, for example. In this case, it is mocked of tragedy and salvation, but it does not want the piece to be understood as a mem: “The artistic medium seems interesting to me as a tool to widen the fiction and introduce fiction into a field of farragous knowledge, such as architecture, and specifically urbanism or the study of the territory.”
For me, the theme of the exhibition is not climate change, but a reflection on the place where we think about the things and the permits we give to imagine without barriers. Who deserves their ideas to be heard? Do they have no imaginative capacity, people who are neither catastrophists nor optimistic? “We have the idea that the world is spoiled and in addition is our fault, and therefore the best we can do is disappear,” says Pol Clusella. The idea that is best for us to have no children because, in total, the world we will leave is shit. “Exactly. This only happens to us because we assume the catastrophic frame, but instead, who lives alien to this framework thinks huge urban macroprojectes, as in Saudi Arabia. ” But climate change exists, it is not a matter of frames. “Yes, it exists, but it does not have to deprive us of the ability to imagine a future: whatever happens, as the title of the exhibition says, tomorrow will be another day.”
The exhibition reflects on two trends: techno -optimism on the power of technology and environmental catastrophism
In this exercise, then, of simply imagining, Clusella is invented that we can reuse the lava of the Croscat, “but not extracting it, but waiting for the volcano to do whatever he has to do when he considers it.” For him, this is “a beautiful crossroads between techno -optimism and catastrophism”, because, on the one hand, you do not intervene in the natural life of the volcano, and on the other, when the time comes, you play the natural catastrophe in your favor. “I propose the city that would be made in La Garrotxa thanks to the volcano,” he says, “nature would decide, but if we thought before, it would serve to replace the lack of housing. I imagine we attack urgent problems, but with this mentality respectful of resources. “
Clusella presents crazy ideas, and yet it seems to me to take the middle path. It is fiction, but there is a certain sanity. “Really? Well, I wanted to present it as something very past thread, “he says; “I wanted to look very far away and go around, so that precisely what the architects of the middle path are proposed does not look so out of place.” He concludes: “Urbanism, there are improvements that can be done and that we do not, I do not know if because we do not believe it capable, or because we believe that we do not deserve it.”
