Voices that walk

An image: the large nave of the Cerezales Foundation's exhibition hall, with the two enormous triangles on either side, pointing to the sky; the diagonals that divide the glass, like tensors holding the structure together; and behind it the branches of the trees, and the green of the forest, nearby. Tents erected in the night, in the forest clearing. And under its roof, the great empty space, welcoming the voices of the muleteer bodies, transhumants, pilgrims, wanderers, who arrived on foot; to rest before continuing their march.

As if it were a nomadic camp, Voices that walk stays with us for a few weeks in winter, pitching their tents in the gallery, letting us hear their voices, their sounds and their bodies moving around the different corners of the gallery. These walking voices stop their journeys for a moment. Travelling through space and time, crossing different epochs and geographies: records, traces, sound traces produced by the human body in its eternal wandering, as an elementary condition of existence.

Voices that walk is an exhibition in movement, which crosses space and travels through time: from Roman Hispania at the end of the Empire to the present; from Antarctic ice to Australian deserts, passing through Iberian moors and forests; from travel literature to video-installation and the Soundwalk, travelling through episodes of History and Myth in between. Along the way, the nomadic tribes that are the protagonists stop at some way stations, gathered under these tents stretched out inside the hall in a sort of secular via crucis.

With the help of Carme Nogueira we have designed a space in which all these voices can be accommodated and heard. “It is a very special distribution, without distribution, in a space without frontiers or closure”, she says, referring to Deleuze and Guattari, in reference to the space of the nomadic encampment, which has served us here to determine the formalisation of the exhibition. This is how, with the collaboration of this artist, the return journey to the Atlantic Coast, which Egeria had embarked on at the beginning of our trip, comes to an end.