Anna Adell on On the Border (De paseo por los limbos, 2022)
Boundary markers of road and border after the Greco-Roman era would be stripped of all apotropaic function. But we suppose that in the medieval period those buffer-zones between Arabs and Carolingians, such as the «Hispanic March», its mountain range dotted with enormous battlemented castles surrounded by dark moats, or with abbeys camouflaged among dense forests, must have preserved something of the ancient sacredness granted to intermediate zones. In any case, the patina of time can endow them with a certain thaumaturgy.
The landmarks of geopolitical boundaries are witnesses of escapes and murders, of persecutions and exile, conflicts that have been leaving scars on their stone dermis. Thus, for example, the Spanish-French border, with its necklace of boundary markers erected as a result of the Treaty of the Pyrenees (1659), although nowadays they are like the decayed teeth of an old mouth, never cease to secrete a particular force.
The tourism industry takes advantage of the attraction exerted by the mugas (Occitan term for the boundary markers) by organising historical-memory routes about the Republican exile through La Jonquera (the 1939 migratory flow towards France, after the victory of the Francoist side).
Other kinds of experiences, less interested in documenting and more in the undocumentable, reach us from the artistic sphere. The long walk that Marco Noris made in the summer of 2017 from Andorra to Portbou, equipped with mountaineering gear and a painter’s tools, was almost an initiatory rite. He took a month to walk three hundred kilometres on foot, crossing border passes, stopping before each muga to make a quick sketch in oil or ink.
He painted the muga or some element of the surroundings that caught his attention. The sum of the resulting sketches would acquire the appearance of an emotional inventory, if the oxymoron be allowed, for they were not a cold record of the mugas but imprints of his own state of mind before each of those geopolitical landmarks. The accumulated tiredness, the inclement weather, the awareness of treading a land that has caused so much coming and going… leave their mark on the gesture, on the stroke upon the paper or the canvas.
Noris flirted here with anachronistic models of the arts (plein-airism) and the sciences (naturalist exploration) in order to involve his body with an almost religious sense (in the manner of a via crucis with its station-boundary markers) in the experience of being-border, wishing to connect ancient and recent feelings of uprooting.
On the Border (2017) marks a turning point in his way of understanding creation and life. Walking will annul the distance between the two, discovering in transhumance hints of pagan sacredness. It is curious that the title of his latest show, In the slight overlapping of sky and earth (2020), suggests to us the knotting of Gaia and Uranus that we spoke of in relation to the ancient Mediterranean rites concretised in the boundary markers of the borders. His own feet treading those territorial limits were in some way a tool of ritual ploughing, and we could almost describe his sheets of paper full of annotations as sibylline scrolls (oracles of the Sibyls) for personal use.
Sentence by sentence, historical narrations are spun in order to give them coherence, but the lives that are lost in making them advance lack any coherence whatsoever. Historical events are only the crests of waves moved by underlying currents. Ritual actions reinvented as artistic proposals channel ever-renewed synergies with those subterranean whirlpools, however distant they may be in time.
Adell, A. (2022). De paseo por los limbos (pp. 117-120). Wunderkammer. De paseo por los limbos – Anna Adell - Wunderkammer