‘Out of place’. The latest adventure, without limits, of the Néxodos collective

What better title for an exhibition than ‘Out of place’ for a text that deals with spaces that are not familiar with art and in which it blends in with the environment as if it were a second skin. In the case at hand, the event takes place in an old deconsecrated church in the heart of Valladolid, the baroque Las Francesas, the prelude, since we are talking about strange mutations, to a shopping center with the same name. An exhibition, moreover, that questions the notions of center and periphery, curated by the contemporary creation collective Néxodos. Related News report Yes ART Atypical spaces for fine art Javier Díaz-Guardiola standard Yes ART Camera Obscura or photography in troubled times Carlos Delgado Mayordomo And if there is a group of creators (fourteen in total) who have sought to blur the boundaries between the rural and the urban for the purposes of contemporary creation, these are the members of this group, a non-profit association since 2018, whose work is carried out mainly in rural towns in Castilla y León and Asturias. Thus, in its five years of existence, Néxodos has held three editions of the so-called Meeting of Contemporary Creation and Rural Environment in the Asturian town of San Román de Cándamo; manages, with a stable program and as an artistic and cultural space, an old slaughterhouse in Monzón de Campos, in Palencia, while recovering the pottery tradition, on a biennial basis, at the meeting for contemporary creators and clay craftsmen in Portillo (Valladolid) ‘Re -do’. Everything is relative Now, in the capital of this same province, ‘Fuera de lugar’ confirms that everything is relative and that, more than the color of the glass with which one looks, everything will depend on the place where that lens is placed: « The periphery –explains Javier Ayarza, one of the artists in the show and coordinator of the project– undoubtedly constitutes a taking of a position that places us out of place with respect to a certain reference. It is a relative location, since the same situation can be eccentric and central at the same time depending on its axis of gravity, which always allows us to observe and intuit dialectical fields of a complex nature». In this way, the summoned creators analyze this conceptual pairing beyond the obvious ‘geographical’ character to project it to other perspectives, and to do so in an old deconsecrated church, therefore, a setting that was a ‘center’ for art in its moment, and to which it returns when space lives a second life. TAKE THE SPACES. Above, lamp by Bettina Geisselmann. Along these lines, projects by Javier Ayarza and Beatriz Castela ABC Thus we begin a possible journey through those authors who cling to a more canonical notion of the two terms, such as Alejandro Pérez Parra, who takes the church as the ‘center’ and records four walks to the outskirts of the city following, as straight as possible, the four cardinal points. These videos are now projected on the walls of the temple, which he transforms into a kind of compass. But the ‘peripheral’ can be understood ‘historically’ (today and yesterday in Tania Blanco); in a social and exclusive key (Salim Malla or Bettina Geisselmann’s Jimson Weed ‘chandelier’, a flower associated with witches); as a legitimizer in art (what is, and remains inside, and what is not, and remains outside (Javier R. Casado ); metaphorical line of life and death (Ayarza ), or more physical, between countryside and city (José Ignacio Gil )… Collective ‘Out of Place’ Exhibition. Las Francesas Church. Valladolid. C/ Santiago, 22. Organized by: Néxodos. Until February 12 In summary, there are many ways of ‘being’. There is only than ‘focus’.