Diáspora in Oviedo
5 - 30 November 1999 out- and indoor spaces in Oviedo, Spain

Diáspora, which runs from 5 - 30 November, is an interdisciplinary cultural project bringing together more than forty national, international and Asturian artists. Diáspora has been organized by Oviedo's city council (Oviedo is the capital of Asturias in northern Spain) who invited a forum of Spanish and foreign critics and art world experts to curate the show.

The selected group of artists has provided a host of temporary interventions in the city and their central theme is the issue and phenomenology of migrations, exiles, displacements and hybridities. These are the movements, crossings and fusions of peoples and cultures that we have come to call a diaspora. The aim is to inform the community of the intense contemporary relevance that diáspora has with its multi-layered meanings and this is the tenor of the work by this range of artists who themselves come from or work in an international context.

The countries that the artists come from are diverse: France, Sweden, Germany, Russia, Canada, Switzerland, Estonia, Chile, Japan, Norway, Cameroon, Uruguay, Mexico, USA, Mali, Malta and Spain. Diáspora is showing in a number of spaces, both exterior and interior, and the interventions range from installation, sculpture and light installation, to performance, theater and music interventions, as well as round table discussions and seminars.

Sweden has a strong presence, including artists of Latin American origin working there, and it is the work of the young Swedish artists Christina Eriksson Fredriksson and Christofer Fredriksson that is of particular interest. Eriksson and Fredriksson's installation in the Galería Dasto (c/Cervantes, 31), entitled "Off", uses the three elements of time, sound and space. A structure made from black aluminum is set up within the gallery defining the boundaries of the viewing space. A spherical loudspeaker is suspended in the middle and a row of powerful 1000-watt spotlights is ranged higher up along one side of the structure. The viewer stands within this structure and the lights are turned on and off every x minutes creating a sense of marked time. A voice from the loudspeaker, at once almost surprised and yet demanding attention asks "Are you there?".

This creation of an environment that is both aesthetic but characterized by emotional tension is compounded by the combination of light, the sound of the voice asking for help, and then the darkness and the silence. A tension is invoked between the instinctual and the conscious, the listening body and an uncontrollable interior voice; it is the tension of those different layers of the same identity. This is a place inhabited by both hope and its opposite, by someone who cannot move and yet wants to get out.

Perhaps because of the choice of site, this opposition of light and dark was not as effective as it could have been, and the experience seemed to lose its sought-after intensity. If the viewer closes his/her eyes it is possible to imagine a more closed, hostile and alien place in which the emptiness is more complete. A voice which is also hostile asks you in a language not your own: "Are you there?" Why? Why do you want me to be here? These are the questions the viewer is called upon to ask of this anonymous, aggressive voice. Is it to control my presence? Are you just proving that I haven't managed to escape to a world which has no physical or temporal limits, which has no threats? Then perhaps the next question you need to ask yourself would be if this world really exists apart from in our deepest desires.

The installation by the Swedish artists with its pared down components is attempting to create a tension in which no effort is spared to engender a deep sensation of fear and repression. This is the fear that is linked to the central theme of Diáspora, in which flight, whether chosen or forced upon you, is never from a situation that had worked in your favour. Oviedo has been witness to all this cutting edge art, and although most of the work and the artists have gone, it is the spore, the seed that we hope will remain and which we hope those who have visited will take away with them.

Review by Ignacio Somovilla, theGalleryChannel.