The Trascity project by Alberto Feijóo (Alicante, 1985) proposes a physical and mental space in a museum hall. A space built from a series of rooms and other configurations of pictures and objects. An assembly through which we can wander distractedly or oppositely, concentrating on its density and discovering, in each space, diverse configurations that make us think about the different ways of inhabiting a world: a replica of something that happens outside, a workplace, a meeting point, a space under construction, an archive of pictures or a storage room of works and objects
from the past.
Trascity alludes to a physical location, a commercial storage rental shop in Alicante, which is situated on the street where the artist resides. However, it is also a mental space: trash is one of the ways of calling rubbish in English, and tras- is a prefix meaning what is behind, or what comes after. So Trascity would then mean, literally, what is behind the city, and, metaphorically, it would refer to its waste, to what we leave behind. It is, in this case, the name of an intimate territory that we generically call a storage room; a cold and anonymous version of a place - formerly charged with bourgeois enchantment - such as the attic: always locked and waiting for the key that initiated the movement of the mind.
A storage room is a world of things, of objects that have lost their primary function. Things that are vibrant matter, that live a different life, one of their own and alien to human habits and projects, resistant to the normalization of the ordinary.
Multiplicity, diversity, mutability, and continuous displacement are characteristics offered to us by the artist at this exhibition, with which he establishes multiple identification processes that allow us to think about the avalanche of pictures that shape and occupy our bodies from different points of view. Alberto Feijoó is a visual artist, working mainly in the field of photography, who also considers himself an apprentice, an accumulator, especially of pictures, and a collector. Like a DJ handling soundtracks, the pictures, his own and those of others occupy the space in very diverse configurations: always based on juxtapositions, on conceptual and formal links, like a collage in movement. Photographic columns as pillars, pictures framed in overflowing passe-partouts, or photographs that make reference to the tactile and upholster chairs and sofas where to sit and rest, coexist and give shape to the five rooms that make up the exhibition.
Multiple, diverse, mutant, open to what is strange, foreign, queer pictures appear as opposed to unique, serial, or typological pictures. Photographs that go one step further, or further into, the photographic collage and that suppose a mise en abyme as a result of the inclusion of some pictures within others. Certain dualisms can be perceived in his work, but they act more in contiguity, in affinity than in opposition.
Pictures invade the walls without a defined frame: diverse materials that unite bodies and objects showing a shared matter; soft bodies on hard surfaces or altered and residual landscapes.
Alberto Feijóo's work is very attentive to matter and its accumulations. Piled-up things, mountains of waste, and debris, constitute complex universes that accumulate stories and define territories: they show ways of life, economic transactions, commercial relations, and social realities.
Text by Nuria Enguita (curator of the exhibition at IVAM Valencia, 2023)
