The Soledad Lorenzo Gallery exhibits "Ruinas del Habla" (Ruins of Speech), a project created by the artist Adrià Julià which after having been displayed in the Tamayo DF Mexico Museum and the 7th Biennial at Mercosur in Porto Alegre, is opening this December in Madrid.

The exhibition opens with a new performance entitled "El Capitán, la Niña y la Política Aplicada al Apetito" (The Captain, the Child, and Politics Applied to Appetite), which revises the actual structure and context of the work which was originally first created in 2009 with the title "Ruinas da Fala". The action proposes to compose a time between that prior to and that subsequent to the project by means of reconstructing and readapting the script, as well as using texts following research carried out beforehand.

In this sense "Ruinas del Habla" is the continuation of other works by Adrià Julià such as "La Reunión" or "Marcus Spring Cottage" centred in the consequences and features that developed from 19th century colonization projects, organised by groups of supporters of Charles Fourier's Utopian Socialism and his phalansteries.

"Ruinas del Habla" contains two films. The first focuses on four narrative themes connected together by the short-lived attempt to construct a phalanstery in a small town in the south of Brasil. They are as follows: a university theatre group which had carried out a play about the experience of the French; a local historian who had focused on the Fourierist dissident Michel Derrion -the first organizer of cooperatives in France; a historian who had dedicated herself to writing her own dictionary in order to read old letters and manuscripts from the colonists: and finally, a direct descendent from the only family of the colonists who had remained in the area and who had decided to write a book of his memoirs.

The second film which forms part of "Ruinas del Habla" is based on a group of photographs of the fauna close to the setting of the Fourierist colony, resulting from a study carried out by a biologist of the University of Joinville Region. The photographs are the result of a camera activated by a motion detector. Although the intention of the university project was to photograph animals in the area, the result was the accumulation of landscape photos which only managed to capture animals at times. Each series of photographs and each episode, together with the context, reveal an asymmetric repetition of nature and its singularities and structured rhythms adapted by the film.

"Ruinas del Habla" proposes an evasive reconcilement towards a specific, brief story determined by texts, experiences and singular places, that are presented through various screenings related together in a tangential manner. These are filmed and converted into registers, documents of gestures and words reduced to images that are separated from their sounds and which end up converted into subtitles. As Archibald recited at the end of J.Genet's play The Black (Les Négres. 1958):
"The time has not yet come for presenting dramas about noble matters. But perhaps they suspect what lies behind this architecture of emptiness and words. We are what they want us to be. We shall therefore be it to the very end, absurdly."

Adrià Julià was born in Barcelona, and lives and works in Los Angeles. His art works include installations, films, video, photography and printed material. Julià's projects examine the means of representation and reception of personal and collective, real and fictitious events. His projects function as documents of physical and psychological experiences that are articulated from altered spaces that provoke or in any case insinuate a certain amount of uncertainty. He has recently held solo exhibitions in the Tamayo Museum, Mexico DF (2010); Insa Art Space, Seoul (2009); Sketch, London (2009); Centro de Arte Montehermoso Kulturunea, Vitoria (2008); Associates, Londres (2008); LA> Trust - Media City an exhibition hosted in the Seoul Art Museum and Antes que Todo in the CA2M. In 2007 he participated in the exhibition Exile of the Imaginary. Politics / Aesthetics / Love held in the Generali Foundation, Vienna and in the IX Biennial of Lyon as well as the XIII Biennial of Yakarta. Julià has received grants and awards from Art Matters, American Center Foundation, Centro de Arte Montehermoso Kulturunea, Ciutat d’Olot, Fundación Arte y Derecho and the Altadis Prize.

*Gleison Vieira interpretes Michel Derrion in "Ruinas del Habla"