On the Verge of Being Nothing

23 May, 2021 - 21 November, 2021

May 23 – November 21, 2021

Opening + guided tour:

Sunday, May 23: 11 am & 1pm

Opening hours:

Tuesday-Sunday, from 12 to 2 pm & from 4 to 7 pm

Free entrance

On the Verge of Being Nothing is conceived as a kind of phantom library. It preserves landscapes on the brink of disappearing. It presents, in a sampling that is not only vertical but in all directions, remnants of matter, energy and forms. These have all been located and created in a series of fieldwork sessions in the company of Irene Grau, Juan López and Jorge Yeregui over the last three years. The research links not just times and fields but also all kinds of substances. It includes records and lives, present in the day to day of this place in which we find ourselves and with counterparts in countless other places on the planet. It is developed among karst, mines, mountains, high-impact infrastructure projects and agrarian images; complex hybrids of history, sometimes linked by far from obvious tunnels and galleries – aesthetic, poetic and political. It anticipates the need to open out our imaginaries to furnish us with narratives with a different kind of resonance, capable of reinvesting us with empathy and incidence on and responsibility for global presents and futures viewed from a mountain region in the rural environment of León.

Many of the FCAYC’s programmes and seasons engage the landscape as a means rather than an end. They perceive the ground and its transformations as a space of reference to make life possible, where processes of all kinds – biological, social, geological and cultural – intimately linked through non-linear time to the different ways of populating the planet, establish this perception.

On the Verge of Being Nothing is a research project that brings together elements of the work carried out over the last ten years at FCAYC and around that starting point – the landscape before and under our eyes – with an exhibition that touches the ground with the courage to intuit what will come next: what purposes and futures we need to imagine in order to give continuity to life in sight of its own ghosts.

Thanks to: Alfonso Esquivel, Andrés Díez-Herrero, Arsenio Terrón, Aula Paleobotánica de Fabero (Ernesto López & Joaquín Ramón), Bruno Marcos, David Rubio, El Naán, Esperanza Fernández, Hacendera Abierta (Javier Llanos, Miguel Ángel Llamas ND Mónica Castro), Javier Rubén Castrosín, José María Cerrato, José María Parreño, José María Pulgar, José Vicente Casado, Juan José Valderrey, Juan Manuel Villanueva, Menhir, Rubén Alonso, Rubén Reinaldo Alonso, Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, Susana Cámara, Tecoi, Venus.

With the support of: Archivo Histórico Nacional, CIUDEN, Fundación Joaquín Díaz, Grupo Mirabaud, Museo de la Academia de Artillería (Ejército de Tierra-Ministerio de Defensa), Museo de León, Solopiedra.