Lúa Coderch: Cracking a nut / Rein Jelle Terpstra: Robert F. Kennedy Funeral Train—The People’s View

Continuing with the programme dedicated to (para)cinematography, Fabra i Coats: Contemporary Art Centre of Barcelona presents two exhibitions that, with different formats, share the desire to reflect on the creation, reception and circulation of images in the hands of the so-called spectator. The perspective and parade of images are prefigurations of the cinematic apparatus filming arrangements that these artists explore to question the construction of a narrative, be it historical or fictional.

Lúa Coderch: Cracking a nut
Cracking a nut is an insignificant, everyday action. Who would think of entertaining us by cracking nuts? But the fact is that in its very humility this action has in itself the ability to deploy the whole structure of a tiny scene, with its own expectations and dénouement. It doesn’t just summons us with the promise of something to eat, but also manages to focus the attention of everyone there on a single point.

Rather than the often unsuccessful pretensions of more ambitious, elaborate stories, Lúa Coderch places herself where small events like this one discreetly seem to offer us a starting point for a movement of restoration, from which to repair the seams of our common life.

In the Fabra i Coats venue, the exhibition shows a series of devices to capture the attention, including a film-curtain, sculptures that might be furniture and a programme of small-scale actions to share with others, like a set of scenes or small units of meaning that could even make up the starting point of a shared narrative.

Through videos, performances and installations, the work of Lúa Coderch (Iquitos, Peru, 1982) deals with the ways we try to make sense of our perceptions, and with how stories and images are essential to give form to our lives. Her work has been exhibited at the Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien, Bienalsur 2021, MACBA and the Fundació Joan Miró, among other museums and arts centres.

Rein Jelle Terpstra: Robert F. Kennedy Funeral Train—The People’s View
On June 8, 1968, a year shaken by division and violence across the United States, the coffin of assassinated senator and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy (RFK) was carried on a funeral train from New York to Washington, D.C. Around one million people turned out to bid farewell to RFK in a spontaneous expression of grief. On board was photographer Paul Fusco, who took pictures of the bewildered mourners as they watched the train, which for the most part remained outside the camera’s lens, pass slowly by. Fascinated by what these people saw, between 2014 and 2017, Rein Jelle Terpstra (Leeuwarden, The Netherlands, 1960) carried out a thorough investigation in search of these people, gathering the photographs and home videos they took that day.

RFK Funeral Train—The People’s View is based on a reversal of Fusco’s photographic perspective. Here, the mourners not only play a key role in the images taken by another person, Fusco, but become photographers and filmmakers themselves, recording and documenting this historic moment with their own cameras. This project is made up of recollections, memories, snapshots, home movies and sound, recorded by some of the many people who lined the train tracks that day, providing a meticulously elaborated vision of a parallel history, the one constructed by all sorts of people, in an alternative universe where the spectator is a witness of history from the other side.