A look at the margins of history through the work of Nicolás Combarro

The exhibition Mirar a otro lado (Looking Away), which opens today at the MUN, is presented as a compilation of forgotten architecture and places, brought together by Galician artist Nicolás Combarro in his last six projects. Nicolás Combarro travels around Spain, where he finds forgotten elements that he photographs in order to intervene in them and thus shed light on a silenced and forgotten past and reality.

The exhibition, which features more than 200 works by the artist, is presented as an opportunity to analyze Combarro's working methodology, as well as a dialogue between his different creations, where he reflects on oversights or exclusions through architecture at different historical moments and in diverse socioeconomic contexts.

Looking Away has its origins in the process that Combarro carried out during his artistic residency Tender Puentes the MUN: while working in the museum's archives, the artist came across the photograph: France 1939. Bram concentration camp. Dormitory, 1939-39, taken by Agustí Centelles during his period of captivity in this concentration camp. The image shows the interior of the place where Centelles, along with the other men, lived during the initial period of his exile. Although this photograph was found in the archives of the MUN collection, these camps and what happened in them are not as well known as those built in Nazi Germany, for example. This fact prompted the artist to continue his research into the concentration and repression camps that existed both in our country and in France.

In Spain, there were more than 300 camps, in which between 700,000 and one million people were crammed together. This reality remained hidden for years and has only been explored in depth since 2018, when the military archives from that period were declassified. It is these camps and these realities that Combarro recovers, so as not to forget, in his latest creation: Materia del silencio (Matter of Silence). Nicolás Combarro returns at night to the places where these buildings were erected, or their foundations and small vestiges in many cases, to confront what remains of them. There, he bathes them in light, making the invisible visible, and captures them with his camera in disturbing images, where the remains of these places of repression and concentration are presented in bare landscapes. "I photographed them at night, so that the contexts are more separated from the present. I only illuminate the architectural element I am going to talk about, which gives it great symbolism, a kind of monument to the memory of those places," says the artist.

Among the works in this series, we can find the remains of the newly built camp in Miranda de Ebro (Burgos), which served as a model for the design of similar centers throughout the peninsula; the image of the foundations of the place of repression located in San Cristóbal (Navarra); and the Carabanchel prison (Madrid), which was built entirely by the prisoners themselves.

But Combarro's work process does not end with documenting and intervening in these places; rather, it serves as a starting point for a much broader process of analysis, documentation, and study of these contexts. That is why, alongside the works, we find part of an entire documentary archive that the artist has been compiling: from plans and postcards to official protocols and photographs from that period. In the case of Spain, these materials are also scarce. It is precisely this scarcity, this absence of images of these realities, that leads him to complete the series with pieces such as Arqueologías (Archeologies), in which the artist collects "minor" remains found around these architectures, which are represented through small translucent sculptures and photographs, as well as a projection in which the synthesis of the architecture of the new fields can be explored.

In the exhibition Mirar a otro lado (Looking Away), the series Materia del silencio (Matter of Silence) is presented in dialogue with a selection of projects from his career, in which the artist also works on types of architecture that resist the passage of time and the realities in which they develop. The exhibition is completed with the series Sotterranei, in which Nicolás Combarro delves into the underground of Rome and Naples, highlighting a hidden reality unknown to the eye. Alongside it, Desvelar, desplazar (Uncover, Displace) offers a glimpse of what remains of the old Tobacco Factory in Madrid, now converted into a cultural space. Both series are examples of interventions in which he uses light projection as a strategy to dialogue with architecture. The series Arquitectura espontánea (Spontaneous Architecture) encompasses examples of self-construction or types of unregulated architecture in a compilation of images and formal exercises on them. These types of interventions, plays of color, scale, and sculptural exercises with elements found in the spaces themselves, are what the artist carries out in situ in the series Arquitectura oculta (Hidden Architecture), in which he works on examples of "black works": those abandoned buildings that remain unfinished in the landscape, and in the Serie negra (Black Series), focused on the study and intervention of mining and industrial heritage. "In all of them," says Combarro, "there is an attempt to use artistic language to talk about very complex contexts that are outside the usual communication circuit. I believe that as artists, and being aware of our historical, political, and social context, we can activate it with the tools we have. In my case, I have worked on memory; the distance from the event allows me to have a perspective that makes these interventions," he says, "bring those forgotten things back to life in the architecture."

All these interventions converge in the atrium, where they enter into a dialogue that clearly presents the artist's working methodology. Nicolás Combarro's exhibition at the MUN is presented as a catalog of actions and documentation that allow him to investigate the ideologies hidden behind different types of architecture, but also the relationships between reality and fiction, memory and forgetting, or between the individual and the collective. As curator Martas Ramos-Yzquierdo points out, "Nicolás is ultimately working on architectures that are not normally found in the grand narratives but are hidden from view; hence the title: looking the other way, so that we can question the contexts in which they are generated and the ideologies that underpin them."

This exhibition is supported by Casa de Velázquez as part of its production grant program.