The exhibition Ground and Underground held at La Virreina Centre de la Imatge (Barcelona) from June 11 to Setember 29, brings together four projects by Patricia Dauder. The centrepiece in the show is the new film Insulana (2021). Its centrality stems from its ability to link conceptually the three other works presented, as it serves to structure the exhibition display. Except for Insulana, all the other works, Sections (2021), Groundworks-Documents (2015-2021) and Weather Sticks (2018) are split in two different parts, each part presented in a different room, at the beginning and at the end of the show. 

As the show curator Carles Guerra says: "The structure of the show has been thought of as an itinerary that invites the viewer to go through the same project twice. What we see in each room is half of the work, to have the feeling that when we are in front of the work we never fully understand it. It is necessary to imply time, displacement and a double vision that forces the viewer to complete from his/her own experience two fragments, two visions, two encounters with the work. This is in itself a cinematographic approach, as we want to suggest an image with the juxtaposition of two images."

All photos of exhibitions views: Pep Guerrero.

INSULANA, 2021

A series of eruptions that would transform the Azores archipelago had begun on 27 September 1957. They had started underwater and lasted for thirteen months. Eight days after the first eruption, the island of Faial was completely covered in ash. The consequences were devastating.

Sixty years later, Patricia Dauder walked over the solid ash. She travelled to the island of Faial during an artist's residency at the Arquipélago Centro de Artes Contemporâneas on the island of São Miguel in the Azores. She found herself walking over the roof tiles of the buildings that had once formed a small town and, by 2017, had been exposed by the erosion caused by atmospheric agents. The catastrophe wiped out crops and pastures, although it caused no casualties. The natural forces unleashed by the birth of a new island left the waters contaminated with ashes. The sea became a graveyard for shoals of fish, plunging the island's fishermen into poverty. On the day when Dauder walked over the site, she remembers stumbling across fragments of window glass and wooden beams everywhere. 

When Patricia Dauder made her second visit to the islands of São Miguel and Faial between 4 and 20 December 2020, she found a complex geography, not because of the appearance of the landscape, but because of the density of the accumulated layers. She placed the making of the film Insulana (2021) in the middle of this constellation. The film is the centrepiece of the exhibition Patricia Dauder. Ground and Underground presented at La Virreina Centre de la Imatge.

Sections, 2021

The following images show the mural work Sections. All the visual motifs arranged on the walls were treated using lithographic techniques. Duplication, overlay, and palimpsests generate images that have an effect closely resembling that of a film projected onto another image.  Considering the methods Dauder uses in most of her work, this practice lays the groundwork for the production of the film, Insulana (2021), shot in the Azores and the artist’s studio. 

During the preparation of Insulana, Dauder accumulated a number of images. Many were archival images that referred to the history, geography or traditions of the Azores Islands. At the same time, the artist was making drawings, which had to do with the idea of ​​fracture, movement, superposition, layers. All this material from different sources, was filling the walls of Dauder's studio until she decided to interconnect all this material to create a visual map where it did not matter if a particular image was a drawing or a photographic found image. The lithographic technique allowed to get a goof definition in the photographic material and at the same time it had a handcrafted element that allowed the artist to control and manipulate the final print. In Sections there are images taken from anthropology books, tattoos from the islands of the South Pacific, books on whale fishing and drawings. All of them are images of marks or patterns that have been recorded on the skin of people, animals or on the surface of a geography. The complete wall installation is made with several layers of paper, superimposed, in a structure similar to what we see in Insulana.