Agenda Barcelona

“Storytelling is all we have," Ursula K. Le Guin stated through one of her characters in the novel The Telling. Far from the idea of ​​history as an immutable, definitive and unequivocal construct that would repeat itself ad infinitum, although this may sometimes be the intention, storytelling inscribes the narration of an affective-political transformation in which past, present and future that are constantly at play at the same time. What are our stories? What is the place for storytelling when it is not narrated or when it is ideologically made invisible or suppressed? In what world-system does what is narrated lock us in or, on the contrary, what worlds does it open us up to? These questions are implicit and are updated each time a story is told, while transforming the stories acquired. 

The projects by artist Paloma Polo touch on these questions and a fundamental contemporary commitment to what is meant by a Story in a constant and non-negotiable confrontation with this concept. Following extensive research processes, the artist approaches very precise historical events, looking at stories that have formed part of the hegemonic colonial-patriarchal foundations of our history, as well as others that have been discarded or silenced. 

The exhibition is structured into four constellations that coordinate works produced between 2010 and the present day. The first,   El barro de la revolución, takes us to the Philippines, to ways of life and ancestral knowledge that mobilise struggles for emancipation and social transformation. The second,  The Path of Totality, looks at colonial approaches underlying Western scientific expeditions and is presented as a matrix of questions and methodologies developed by the artist. The third constellation,   Dulcinea, takes on two stories of militancy, struggle and political commitment in the context of Franco and the so-called Transition in Spain. Finally, the fourth installation,   Se jeter au fond du lac pour conserver sa vie (1), represents a new field of research for the artist, who, intervening in feminist genealogies, examines the ways in which indigenous thought, in particular the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, would have influenced the feminist ideas that were forged around the French Revolution. 

These constellations construct a complex and delicate network in which the relationships between specific historical contexts and transversal structural frameworks of socio-political and ideological organisation become palpable. The proposals presented, however, do not aim in any way to question the dominant inherited history in a binary way, but rather to intervene in it and in the tools with which it is constructed, which entails mobilising the social and political structures that support it. This exhibition by Paloma Polo proposes a look back, while delving into the political task of narrating. 

(1) This phrase has been taken from a quote by Kandiaronk, political thinker and chief of the Native American Wendat people. The artist has taken it from the book   Dialogues, ou Entretiens entre un Sauvage et le baron de Lahontan (1704).