It could be the intriguing title of a novel if it were not because maternal ravage crosses all culture and religion to perpetuity, those judges of the unlimited female enjoyment. Lacanian psychoanalysis exisarables the mother-daughter relationship in a voracious pantanal, where maternal desire is the open jaws of a crocodile that can be closed untimely over the girl, producing the ravage (ravage), that relationship without limits already impossible that oscillates between affective intensity and hostility. Constantly pushed to question himself as feminine, eager to find that substance that the mother cannot give her at all – because she herself has not received it as a daughter – the woman/artist can nevertheless transport that “impossible” to an individual creation that will finally release it of its ascendant and thus will be able to close the circle.
There are few authors whose works are described as a more or less tired experience with the mother: feminist art can be seen as a long sequence on the pathological matter. , Mary Kelly, Kiki Smith, Louise Bourgeois, Chantal Akerman or Tracey Emin invoked the inner freedom to stop being harassed by her own maternal superstars, by dissociating their bodies and all kinds of humble, soft materials, in a symbology of worship to the mother.
(Valencia, 1949) runs all the risks to achieve a significant victory after ravage. Your series Letters to the mother, Started in 1992 and inspired by those who wrote Kafka to his father, they are typed, painted, warp or assembled messages with small objects and ordered in numbered individual papers series. They claim the mother while still addressing the frustrations of motherhood and their sliding domestic domains.
Other recent works offer as a fundamental postulate a nothing individualistic idea of art. They are rather social energies stimulated by specific events and situations that the artist develops in collective actions with cheap materials, a way of justifying life for life, life for art, the here now. The exhibition Transmit the burning It now presents them disseminated in three spaces in Barcelona under the commission of Mateo Feijóo. They are framed in the second edition of the annual project ExtramuralMuseu Tàpies initiative that started in 2024 with an intervention by the Ghanaian artist Serge Attukwey Clottey on the facade of his modernist building.
It is there where Elena del Rivero has installed neon letters with the phrase Letters to the Mother, A message of hope, according to the artist, for trans groups. Inside the building, the artist has chosen to hang her assemblies in transit places and the shelves of the library, instead of occupying the most central spaces of the museum. They are presented as visual newspapers made with remains of destroyed paintings, costumes, feathers, glass accounts and their usual pearls, which evoke the words of María Zambrano: “There is only one to think when the pearl itself occurs.”
The core of the entire project occupies one of the rooms of La Capella, a few meters from, and are duel documents and rebirth of the action that the artist undertook last year at Casa do Pozo, in the Orensana village of San Pedro Fiz de Vilar. To understand this intervention you have to go back to the events of September 11, 2001 in New York. After the great collapse, the study of Elena del Rivero, next to the southern tower of the World Trade Center, It was destroyed. In a matter of minutes, dozens of works, furniture and work material vanished to calcined deaths. Years later, the phoenix was reborn in the form of Dust filea part of which could be seen in the Matadero ships of Madrid in 2019.
Last summer, the artist revived that unnoticed ravage in Burninga long process of grieving and rebirth that shared with the inhabitants of the aforementioned Galician people. After distributing half a hundred works of their years of training (1970-1988) Entity natural spaces and buildings of the village, proceeded to its cremation. The artist who was inspired by the trilogy of Into Their Labours, which describes the end of the peasantry in Europe and that now she relates to the end of the artist community, the monetization of art and the excess of decorative and useless elements in the world.
The installation is born from that action A mosaic of the common, which occupies all the old sacristy of the capella. The evocative power of the analog photographs, meticulousness and poetry recreated convincingly in black and white images of anonymous characters, “” graffiti and sound and sound records that were taken in that Galician parish of just 200 inhabitants. The art students of the Eina school collaborated in the assembly, as in the piece Song for a funeral monumentinstalled in the basilica of, a disused cage for the breeding of golden rabbits that keeps glass jars with the ashes of the burning.
Traffic culminates in the Jardines del Teatre Grec, with the coral work Tendal of kitchen rags, that has an antecedent in the piece that the artist hung in 2023 at the entrance of the City Council of New York, large kitchen cloths as flags that defines as “antimony” acts of elements of the female private space occupying the public space. In 2026, Elena del Rivero will culminate this burning in the Museum of Anthropology of Madrid. It will be when New York definitively leaves, where he has lived since 1991, to settle in Spain and thus be closer to his daughter. The ravages.
‘Transmit the burning’. Elena del Rivero. Museu Tàpies. Santa Maria del Pi Basilica, La Capella and Jardines del Teatre Grec. Barcelona. Until November 23.
