The Interviews Section from Davis Museum Barcelona

The Tile Project at The Davis Museum Barcelona

What/who inspired the work?
"The Tile Project" was born from my experience in Istanbul, where I was fascinated by the intricate patterns of Turkish tiles that adorned the city's palaces and mosques. I was inspired to recreate these patterns that represented my favorite places in the city and my memories of them. The medium of tiles is intentional because it allows me to place my art in public spaces, inviting people to interact with it and make it a part of their daily lives. The subject matter is the city itself, with its streets and urban codes of conduct. My aim is to challenge our perceptions of public space and how we relate to it.

What do you hope its viewers will feel/think?
I hope that viewers of "The Tile Project" will see it as a young and fresh project, created in collaboration with ordinary people. I want it to encourage people to reconsider their surroundings and see them with new eyes. By placing these tiles in public spaces, I hope to show that we can transform the places we inhabit and make them our own. The project is a celebration of collective creation and the power of art to change the way we think and feel about our environment.

Why did you choose the medium, subject matter, style?
The project's aim is to disrupt our preconceptions and assumptions by disrupting the relationship between the artwork, the public, and the space. The artist depicts the recollections of city residents on tiles, which are then placed in public areas, highlighting what was once private and reclaiming the public space as a venue for communal expression. The choice of tiles was deliberate because they are ubiquitous household items found in bathrooms and kitchens. These personal objects are now publicly exhibited, depicting everyday scenes from our daily lives. The artworks are reminiscent of traditional Portuguese tiles but have a fresher, more youthful, and dynamic feel.

Mia Harris | How Will You Consume Me | Davis Museum Barcelona

What/who inspired the work?
This work was inspired by the look and texture of this wood pile. The pieces of wood cut into different sizes reminded me of the deconstruction and commodification of women's body parts and drew a parallel with the continued objectification, and consumption of women's bodies in much of popular culture.

What do you hope its viewers will feel/think?
To consider the careless consumption of the feminine form and the consumption of our natural resources, mother earth and her parts.

Why did you choose the medium, subject matter, style?
I really enjoyed playing with the word 'chop' and allowed this to inform the way the film came together. I have always detested the phrase "You're all dolled up" as if it is a desirable thing to be like a doll, pretty but without a heart or a mind.

Isabel Gómez & Sergio Garcia | La reine et ses célibataires | Davis Museum Barcelona

What/who inspired the work?
Isabel Gómez: As a young girl, I was fascinated by Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Journey (1726). The attraction came from various aspects:
1. The evocative power of its sceneries and fantastics situations.
2. Because it is a journey to an unknown world, implicitly giving up the security of a comfortable environment.
3. For being a transgressive vision, critical of the society of his time.

Sergio García: The works were inspired by 19th century mental patients dealing with insanity, obsessions and anxiety. I believe that I chaneled these people. I didn't plan or sketched these works. They just happened. Perhaps my experience in the past with dealing with my own personal demons and stays in my youth at several psyche wards for substance abuse.

What do you hope its viewers will feel/think?
Isabel Gómez: First of all, the inversion of the masculine-feminine parts. Discovering an implicit discrimination we have all be subjected to all along our recent history. And more specifically in this mini-piece, I hope the spectator will appreciate the point of humour in the awkward Queen, presented in an irreverent ways. An indirect critic toward power figures.

Sergio García: I believe that the viewers will get in touch with compassion and understanding of the human condition. That we all are just a hair line away from sanity to insanity.

Why did you choose the medium, subject matter, style?
Isabel Gómez: Over the years, I developed a vivid curiosity for unknown worlds, as well as a strong critical mind against the lack of feminine representation in most of the social and cultural environments. For the project Liliput of wich the work I present to the Davis Museum I re-created some of the Gulliver episodes, replacing the main character by the image of a young girl (my daughter). She became the protagonist of these stories. The contemporary, realistic-magic style allowed me to reach the desired effect: a intense and surprising narration.

Sergio García: I chose poker playing cards to show that we are gambling with our lives on a daily basis with our minds. I chose acrylic and magazine cutouts and transformed them to my liking.

Yapci Ramos | pelo, orgasmo y jersey de cuello alto | Davis Museum Barcelona

What/who inspired the work?
Sexuality, femininity, and self-determination are issues that have been always present in my work in a very personal way. This piece arises from remembering those moments of intimacy that we have with ourselves, from discovering a little bit more about what solitude means and how fragile our interactions are.

What do you hope its viewers will feel/think?
All interpretations made by the viewer are valid. I give them maximum freedom for interpreting the piece according to the personal experiences of each one. Once the piece is exhibited, it belongs to the public and it is the public that closes it.

Why did you choose the medium, subject matter, style?
Each piece needs a different medium or tool. I specify them as the project progresses. In this case, it is an installation consisting of hair and a video.

Claire Ducène | Imaginary Museum | Davis Museum Barcelona

What/who inspired the work?
When I discovered the Mini Davis Lisboa Museum I immediately thought about the mental image process. Exhibiting such a process in the smallest possible place can be interpreted as an infinite place where the viewer would be immersed in thousands of multifaceted images, a kind of infinity where the viewer cannot escape. By appealing to my memory in a random-access way, I wanted to get lost in my reminiscences. I would say it’s like a labyrinth where there is no door to get out. Like a mental representation of an unlimited place, somewhere undefined.
Gaston Bachelard defined the dream house as a suitable place and vector for dreams. The imaginary museum is also kind of oneiric since it doesn’t exist… It is rather a fantasy elaborated by multiple personalities and fiction. Somehow, memory is like a huge labyrinth where you get lost in our past. These spaces are multiplied like the analogic memory and the remembering processes. Spaces are multiple and obsessive.
The imaginary museum also evokes André Malraux’s work. The French writer made his mental catalog of artworks. Paintings, sculptures, drawings that were placed in his memory to constitute his collection of artistic souvenirs. And of course, Belgian surrealism has always been a major influence.

What do you hope its viewers will feel/think?
I hope the viewers will make the mental and physical journey through their images and try to remember their past, making their mental labyrinth. Which person or objects or setting they will choose to build an imaginary place. A long time ago, the Ancients in the Antics worked with the concept of a Palace of Memory to activate memories. The system was used to remember objects, concepts, people, words, and so on. It’s quite simple to think about a place you know very well, a place like your childhood home. When you enter this space, you can choose how objects and concepts will be displayed. Every time you will remember the path, you’ll also remember the things and words inside that place. That was one of the great mnemonic principles of the ancients.
I’d like the visitors to try and get lost by remembering places that are into his mental storage, his myriad of thoughts. The results of these mental processes give way to stories, whether real or fictitious that blur the boundaries between reality and fiction.

Why did you choose the medium, subject matter, style?
For the Davis Museum, I wanted to reproduce the model of the inside of a museum where you find small images. You can travel through sculpture and discover mental travel in the visual work. The idea is that of the museum within a museum. When you mentally go through the inside of the labyrinth, you discover images printed on Plexiglas. A Plexiglas that looks as fragile as glass. It can break. Images are so transparent they disappear.
The complementary piece of artwork is a video of the mental journey of a character wandering through the inside of a 3D reproduction of the imaginary museum. That character builds up his own mental space and observes the photographs, images that activate its memory and allows us to let his imagination free in a space that doesn’t exist, on the border between reality and fiction. It is about forgetting, dreaming, unconsciousness and stopping time.
To activate the memory and to go back in the past, I retrospect settings, fictitious places from my collection of memories. In the video, the audience discovers many media with different rhythms from slow to fast and were painted, drawn and electronic images communicate with one another. Images are blurry, hazy, and sometimes almost illegible. Time passes by and the images, people and places progressively fade out.

Gary Duehr | Unknown Suspects & Mouse | Davis Museum Barcelona

What/who inspired the work?
Unknown Suspectswas inspired by the media obsession with foreign-looking suspects whenever there is a terrorist incident - a kind of fear-mongering. Mouse was inspired by the mundanity of everyday objects.
What do you hope its viewers will feel/think?
I hope Suspects provokes a bit of critical thinking, and Mouse is a fairly deadpan joke about obsolete technology and our fetishism.
Why did you choose the medium, subject matter, style?
For Suspects I worked directly from the web and translated to stencils and spray graphite, to make the images more "real." For Mouse, cement is pretty useless in terms of technology, so it's part of the joke.