Things tell us that we are no longer there. That we have gone. We are told by the armchair that has always been by the fireplace, and even by the ivy in the garden, the tap that has always dripped and the little rusty stain the drops make on the white sink after all those years of dripping. We are no longer there. We left home some time ago and it's a departure with no return. We can never return to the home of our memory because time has changed us and, more dramatically, it has even changed our memory and our experience of our memory. And it is things that let us this in a maddening, surreal chorus. All together and one at a time each in its own way and even the walls have been erased to enlarge or reduce the spaces containing them. Because in the end the essence is no longer the room which ends up as an entelechy extendable to fit our memory and our desires and which like a conjuring trick, is always big enough to put what we want in it. In other words, we can make things smaller or bigger just so that they fit into a larger or smaller space. A pint of milk ends up fitting into a thimble. That's the trouble with magic, weights and measures, exactness, don't exist. Like science. Like memory. Like life.
Our first home, the one we never really get to know but which we hace recreated a thousand times, changing the perspective, in that home we learnt almost everything we know today. Above all, we learnt to consider rooms as magical places in which, futhermore, we live. Eugènia Balcells knows a lot about this, she knows a lot about houses and rooms, she knows a lot about what it is that rooms contain and how to manage to live with all that, with things, always magic, with the light that changes them, with the shadows that arise from our imagination, that change forms and turn things into something different. That room, that light, memory, in short everything that changes in that alchemical process we carry out with more or less clarity or confusion, is something Eugènia Balcells often talks about something that appears and reappears in her work constantly, subtly and inevitably, with that way of weaving the patern of everything unexplainable out of the simplest things.
We always reconstruct fragments of that home that we return to, fragments that make up the memory of things and the mystery of life and that make us understand part of the other mysteries and, above all, make us search for more light, to delve into the reason of the unknown, to try to unveil the part that sitill remains in darkness. But the home seems an unmistakable female term: the woman's or mother’s place. Almost all the words I use in these lines in association wilh the home are feminine in Spanish: things, memory, light, shadow. For Balcells the home is a female concept, a form marked chiefly by the influence of the moon, of cosmic and at once primeval femaleness. The moon rules over the home, and with her that darkness that lights and wraps our dreams, associated with our origins.
And in those origins the place in which our ideas first took shape around language, around physical experience, around intangible fears, around ihe formal understanding of space, is the home.
The inner space is what defines the home, the characteristics of each one of these spaces and the relationship between them. Things and the names of things, the forms of those same things that reigned in each point in our memory, our home, the home of our memory. The same one we are constantly rebuilding and patching up. Because that was where we learnt lo live, lo live together, where we learnt the meaning of food, the importance of one thing's transformation into another, of an egg into an omelette; of how a bed was an infinite space, that each crease in the sheets could be hills and valleys in which we hid imaginary people in a game that foreshadowed our future, wilhout realising that those people were us, our families. Those loved and hated ones who initiated us in the discovery of
joy and pain.
This work by Eugènia Balcells has a lot of heart. And not just the heart of things. There's a piece of her own heart in it and also, inevitably, of my own. And larger or smaller fragments of the hearts of evervone who has collaborated in this adventure in time and memory. A memory that goes much farther Ihan our childhood. Let's be honest, this installalion is a time tunnel that drags us sweetly towards the origin of the world and life. And there are also, l'm sure, little bits of heart of visitors to the exhibition, of the spectators, of those who, one day, sitting comfortably at home, read these lines again. These words that only want to catch forms, ideas, feelings, give names to things.
And the home is the family. And all families are the same and at the same time different. Like all homes. Father, mother, big brother, grandfather, the bathroom, the kitchen, the bedroom, the armchair, the dining-room table, the best crockery, the sideboard1, the radio on which grandfather listened to the war reports, the books our mother used to read. Everything so similar and yet so different. Perhaps it's the rhythm that’s repeated, perhaps the cadence makes us recognize the harmony. There’s always
a kitchen, and a bathroom, and a dining-room, and some where to rest. But each of these places has a far deeper and more varied function than we see at first sight. It goes beyond the intentions of a home-and-garden magazine, decorating or even architecture. Only now, with the loss of ideas and ways of life that marked a characteristic culture can we accept that a home, that is a place to live, can have just one room. A single room in which to watch television, eat, read and sleep. That the kitchen should have been reduced to a kind of cupboard which our grandmothers and mothers would have considered too small to keep even the most useless pots and pans in. This is today’s home, a small double altar with only two idols: the television set and the bed; in which the only really important ritual takes place in the bathroom, for the sake of the modern religion of a supposedly advanced civilization: hygiene.
But this isn't the home in which we find our memory. That was a home, is a home in which there were a lot of things, some apparently useless because we didn’t know them yet, but which were going to be crucial in shaping our skills and tastes. In the same way that those words we don’t know how to spell as children become indispensable and define culture and knowledge, setting them apart for ever from vulgarity and boredom. There was always a place for being, a kind of living-room, somewhere to read, talk, meet and communicate for better or for worse; another room was for cooking and storing food, with all those contraptions, tools and commodities that we marvelled at, not knowing what ingenious mind, what mad inventor had produced them. Yet they served to make cakes, heat water, boil milk, bake biscuits, set custard creams... each article for something different, meat stock isn’t the same as fish stock, and water isn’t the same as milk forchildren, and the coffee pot isn’t the same as the teapot. This was the kitchen, the source of life and warmth. Afterwards, everything went to the dining-room. And the bedroom, a private place, the bedroom was, by definition, the parents' room, and it was obviously just a place to sleep. And the bathroom, where light and water were a relief for other rituals more difficult to accept. A home, with places for different functions, that connected various lives at different stages of development, at different speeds.
In this installation, we walk through these places that are different and always similar, we come across things that existed there, different and the same in all our homes. But we mustn't let ourselves be taken in by appearances. They deceive, and in art even more. And in this installation in which we practically float and are split between what we were and what we are, which we see through our eyes and through the eyes of our memory, even more. Because this isn't a home, it's the home. And we are here to understand, at last, something we always sensed, something we felt abstractly, without being able to put a name to it or explain it, but which is now clearing and making sense. We are clearing the vision of our memory, understanding why our lives were like this, why we are the way we are. Everything began then, or perhaps long before, perhaps it was always happening and we arrived when the machinery was already in motion, as no more than another cog in the moving machine. The machine of life, of creation and of the transformation of matter.
Perhaps we have already realised that in this exhibition, in this home, objects float in the air, suspended in space, that the only thing resting on the ground is a chair. It is, of course, the guest chair, hardly a part of the home, because it’s not the guest who sets the pace in the home, the pace
here is different, and he sits and looks while things, memories, the magic goes on and everything is palpitating and breathing, like a huge monster that shelters us and creates us. In this home stable objects, recognizable by their forms and functions, live alongside the images that live and breathe on them, abstract projections arising in the solidest part of our existences. The meeting and overlapping of these two ever opposed factors -stable versus unstable, fixed and permanent versus mobile and
ephemeral, figurative versus abstract - lays the foundation for a dialectical structure which is the basic working method used by Balcells in this work. In this way we are given a physical, tangible reference to hold on to on a journey which will take us much farther than one might think.
Once again it is things, simple things, that are the key to what is magical, diverse, multiple, but that –is something we shall have to see as we go along.
In this home, in this box of recognizable surprises in which so many things pass before our eyes, real images and others imagined by us in the warmth of an object, of a suggestion, there are five real sections. Five symbolic reconstructions of what a home means. They are the emblematic rooms transformed as metaphors and at the same time as alchemical laboratories, in which substances are constantly being transformed, sometimes brought about exactly by the artist, sometimes as a result of our wranglings with our unconscious. In each of these rooms, the sum of the different functions they serve on different occasions and for different individuals are represented symbolically. These meanings and uses are not single but multiple, in the same way that our home was never just ours, we shared it with our parents, brothers and sisters, other relatives and, above all, with things. And that is the true nature of any home: it’s a place in which we all commune, where we meet and where we pool experiences, where everything is piled up dreams overlapping with suffering, hopes with pain. These five rooms are the living-room, the kitchen the dining-roorn the bedroom and the bathroom. Of course, we could each add that favourite place that not all of us had to the same extent in each of the homes of our memories: for some the magical place was the garden, for others the loft, or the basement, perhaps some strange place like a windowsill was the setting for definitive experiences, a doorway, the window... but these are personal stories. The home Balcells offers us is one we’ve all lived in because those five rooms are definitely common to everybody in practically any circumstances with greater or less purchasing power.
For Eugènia Balcells, each of these five rooms represents elements from nature and all the same time presents clear alchemical facets that define and characterize its use and function. The living-room is the air. This is where communication takes place. All the objects forming part of memory seem to come spiralling up floating up into the air towards some infinite place -the armchairs, tables, chairs, books, television, lamps (like the lamp Bachelard says awaits us in the window, whose light made us feel that there was someone else waiting for us that perhaps the whole house was waiting)-, all the things to do with communication, knowledge, speech, the social act of relating.
This is where that wonderful moment of rest took place, where we were told stories, where father read the newspaper, where later, gradually, it seemed that the television was going to take the place of conversation. It is in this room that Balcells most clearly structures the precise relationship between objects and personal memory. The images projected on to these objects (all of them painted silver to deflect details to erase unipersonal features are fragments of portraits from her family album: her with her toy horse, her mother, her grandparents, her brothers and sisters, figures rescued from photographs that floal in the air, incomplete now, having lost the frames that delimited them, projected, barely sketched out, blurred by the passage of time, overlapping in the same way that memories and experiences overlap, fragmented by our memory, seemingly selected at random. And so we remember mummy’s jewels, a glove, some silk stockings which are the reference to those moments before the dressing-table before going out, because you can't fix a smell, a gesture remains unalterable in our hair even if the hand that initiated the caress can never touch us again.
The kitchen is fire. The ideal setting for alchemy. This is where food is transtorrned, where things are turned into energy and taste. The very action of cooking is the maximum transtormation, pure alchemy. We feed and grow, we‘ve, off the flesh of animals, off plants... This is the most primitive and most sophisticated room in the house, where fire and ice, every taste and all knowledge are subjected to
the iron. Fire is the transforming element, but the hand is what chops, cleans, peels, mixes, washes, ihe water, the colour and the variety. All the energy resides in this furnace of lite which is, which was perhaps, the kitchen. This is no kitchen with microwave and electric toaster, this is a place where the fire is stoked up or turned down, where there is flesh and blood and that host of impossible implements that accompanied us on our apprenticeship in the transtormation of elernents. This is a woman’s place, somewhere we once spent so much time, a room truly conceived for us, and the ever-beating, constantly simmering heart of the home. Here Balcells brings colour in and has created that kind of screen formed by all the bols, saucepans, spoons, skimmers, tongs, hooks, slices, ladies, scissors, openers, moulds... a smokescreen, a magic dance, a place of witches and sorceresses who play with fire and use smoke as just another tool, who master heat and know at what level it fries, at what level it roasts, when it cooks and when, only browns; and when you boil milk, rernember it has to rise three times before you can drink. Rituals and tables, legacies of recipes (a pinch of salt, and the smell tells you when the soup's ready, though some food has to simmer all night on a low flame) and potions, and not just for eating but for curing, for building you up, for the cold and for troubled times. A place full of life.
The dining-room is a place of destiny. A point for more sophisticated sociability. This is where the food transtormed in the kitchen is eaten. There’s no fire here and the tools we use are more elegant; everything used in the transubstantiation of the food disappears behind the screen.
Like in a theatre, the remains of the costumes, the innards of the stage machinery are all left in the kitchen. The dining-room is the stage on which public rules are officiated.
There we gather round a table, a large lable, at which we eat in company, at which special events are celebrated (always over a meal, always round a table, the tamily). The dining-room is earth amongst Ihe alchemical elements.
The large inclined table and the chairs, all painted silver, present a large empty stage, but on to the table are projected pictures of hands that grow and shrink, lots of hands, a single hand, humanity, people, in that rite of communion.
A meeting place and point of coexistence in which food serves to unite us and eternalize the alliance. Here Balcells’ brillant and simple trick with pIates and glasses, forming curtains whose shadows and highlights project thernselves, replacing whatsoever projected image, as they themselves are their own projections, is an effeclive one, a result so simple it could be overbearing.
The bedroom is the most intimate, most private place in the home. And for Balcells is also the maximum point of alchemy. Here we're no longer talking about memories but of dreams, fantasies, desires. The bedroom of course is represented by a bed floating in the air and somehow surrounded by planes of cloth forming a cube which meet at four corners. These cloths are covered with projections that stress the idea of alchemy and transformation. And here transformation is not just a concept, but a reality.
This transformation begins in the treatment of the images, all of them rescued from history and time and
transformed by the latest computer techniques. They are images of old engravings, of indian antiques, of implements characteristic of alchemical dealings. Once transformed by the computer treatment, we can often barely recognize characteristic forms; referential and symbolic traits are reduced to a mesh-work of lines which, superimposed on the cloths, appear to us as threads making up an embroidered pattern which speaks to us like primitive pictures of the origin of life, of the union of female and male, of the magic that gives substance to the breath of life. These blurred lines, these patterns gleaned from the handkerchiefs of Arabian princesses, are not projected on to flat surfaces but on to translucent fabrics, and the result of adding the colours of the cloths to those of the images themselves after their computer treatment comes close to gold, the colour of alchemy by definition. They are magical images, like something taken from the 1,001 nights, which speak to us of the transformation of wishes into reality, of the power of love, but not just as sexual power, but as the origin of life, of the cosmos, as the union of man and earth, of the coexistence of the principies that generate and maintain life, There are four projections in the bedroom1 and while the original images are oid illuminations (a chud rescued from the waters, a man and woman embracing, an alchemical element, a star seen through one of NASA’s telescopes) suitably transformed so that they become abstractions suggesting more than they say, what they are speaking to us about is the beginning of life and its final stage, of birth and death, of love, not literally of sex, but of the total communion between the sexes that goes beyond the flesh; of the real conception of life, and here the concept is more sexual, in a general sense; of the dream of harmony on earth, symbolized in the gathering of the morning dew and its transformation as gold. It is in the bedroom, in bed, that we are born and that we die, that we go through the pain of iliness, of childbirth, the joy of pleasure, the knowledge of our own body and of others'. The whole of life hinges on this cinema of white sheets, where we’ ve all the feasts, the rites, basically the blood rite to which we inevitably return in an interminable, ever-repeated cycle.
The fifth room is the bathroom, and its element is water. This is a place for clarity, for cleanness, for hygiene. Water brings to mind baptism, consecration, constant renewal, purity. The image and sound are of running water, an endless source before our eyes and in our ears. Once again it is the senses that work, making us form the bodies of things even in their most total absence. Simplicity and austerity of elements, but the essential importance of reality is present in this last room.
We have all buiIt this home together. It is undoubtedly this home that represents refuge, built with our nostalgia, with the melancholy need for a place to return to, inhabited by memory. But there is a point at which things force us to live in an undoubtedly inevitable present, a present which wilI shape other memories, even ours, which will live in the future and will overlap (like the images Balcells projects on
to objects, on the table, around the bed, in this instailation) the earlier memory that speaks to us of the home of our memories. Symbols become symbols because we perform all the rites they make eternal. And in that way we build our homes, in the search for our own. Another different one, in which we can really live and not like that one which only exists in our memory and which we know, as we have seen
trom the very start, that we can never return to. When we left one day and discovered that that was where our childhood ended, that innocence was Ieft behind, stuck in some corner of some room, put away in the cupboard with our toys and our first books, we felt lost, floating in the same way these objects dressed in silver now float, in the air that supports and isolates us. After the confusion came the
knowledge that we would have to find somewhere new, somewhere that was really our home, built by us in the present and never agian the one from the past, the one in our memory, the one which 5 now as smali as a dolls house for us, as big as though we now suddeniy returned to the size we were so many years ago and which makes us see every thing from another dimension. And that home, in which we
now live, is also made up of things, and its rooms have the same functions that the same rooms have always had in every home in history. Of course we have changed, and our memories and experiences have transtormed the use we make of things, their choice, and l'm not talking about aesthetics. The armchair is no longer the one in which our father read the papers, now it's our turn to sit in it to read
or listen to music. This 5 our home and this 5 our arm chair. And the bedroom, where we finaly know what we aways guessed at (that it wasn't just a place to sleep) is no longer our parents', but ours.
At last we've found or built a place we can calI our home. That's where our things are. And that home, that compendium of forms, defines us, like a kind of self-portrait of us. We are what we eat and we inevitably Iook ike our things, and we ourselves are our home, which is our truest refection. And it’s to our home that we return, because now we know that we always return somewhere, even it it's just to leave again. And when we return, even it only for a moment, we cast an eye over the things we left behind
when we left the last time. My books. My armchair, my bed. That corner from which, by just raising my eyes from the pages of the book, I can see a familiar piece of sky, trees that change their dress and their hairstyle, the shadow of a cloud. I used to think my home was where I was. Now I know that my home has been buiIt by the things that make up a state of mind, that things are the bricks and the foundations of a place in which no-one is waiting for me, only I live there, away from people, from famiiy, from love, from friends, temporary neighbours who settle in above, on either side, below, more or less nearby. But I live in the heart of things. I feed on their warmth and am lit by the light the sun reflects in them. That is my home.