Jordi Colomer: Façana Foto Festa Futur Fideus

After an early period in which he focused on the material nature of fiction by producing sculpture-objects, Jordi Colomer took what he had learned out onto the streets to multiply the connections between imagination and reality. This shift raised numerous questions that recurred in his later work: mobility and nomadism, provisionality and peripherality, the popular imaginary and humour, community and utopia.

Façana Foto Festa Futur Fideus presents an extensive survey of Colomer’s work in numerous genres – sculpture, collage, photography, video, installations and live actions – from the late 1980s to the present day. This large selection of works is not intended to explain the artist’s evolution over the course of his career so much as to delve into those aspects that enable us to view it as a unitary whole.

To achieve this, we will be examining the performing dimension of his body of work, in which the illusory and the real converge in a continuous and complex back-and-forth. Most of the works in the exhibition are site-specific productions in a number of cities around the world, among them Barcelona, Bucharest, Sanaa, Mexico City, Istanbul, Tétouan, Modena, Palermo and Buenos Aires. In these locations, Colomer mounted a set of actions on diverse scales. In some instances, the event featured single actor, as in Anarchitekton (2002-04), No? Future!(2006) and Medina Parkour(2014). On other occasions, he called on particular communities, exemplified by Abecedario argentino(2023), and he frequently summoned citizens as a group, as can be seen in Crier sur les toits(2011), New Palermo Felicissima(2018) and Modena Parade/Corteo Modenese(2022). In all these cases, they were events – sometimes on a small scale, at other times more spectacular, such as parades, festivals and movements – in which the collective discovered new tools to address crucial questions. How and where are communities built? Who are their actors? What are their timeframes? How are their imaginaries constructed? Façana Foto Festa Futur Fideus. If, for now, just one letter is capable of all this, what might a whole alphabet bring us?