Starting anew, the opening motivation for an active dialogue. A continuous domestic itinerary. I search, we search. A liturgy of discovery. Different missions for each one of us. Itineraries barely a few metres away from each other. An identical space and the same time.

Infinite rooms, impossible bends, eternal corridors, terraces with weeds growing between the paving stones. Stacked beds. Orthopaedic gadgets. The still perceptible presence of nuns. A calendar of the Sacred Heart in the kitchen. The mother superior’s telephone; the torn curtain; the washbasin of so many ablutions. The remains of a Bible.

Hospital de San Martín. A cornerstone for nN2 and a place for the convergence of everything experienced in the territory of Gran Canaria. One of those places we have dreamt about more than once. For better or for worse. Nightmare. Ebullience. Effervescence, hallucination, suffering.

One world inside another. Intangible and at once so alive. Creative abstraction. Micro-universe that is not possible to cover in all its physical as well as conceptual dimension, yet it is there inside, in our minds, expanding itself between its own limits. A necessarily fragmented image of an autonomous space that does not require intellectual artifices to convey the intensity it feeds on.

A gigantic sanatorium fallen into disuse, a succession of devastated or disquieting ambiences. An unprecedented pasture ground for entelechy, mirage or fiction. Presences of age-old pain translated with the passing of the years in terms of primitive beauty. Just as if another war had happened, or the plague, or who knows what had befallen unannounced and everyone had had to evacuate the place in a hurry, taking mattresses, blankets and utensils with them to survive in extreme difficulties in another equally harsh place. Leaving us with the bare minimum to graphically build, in this pages, a past or a future or a meanwhile.

Suspended souls. Linear eviction. A sharp intact of breath. Volumetric shuddering. Sudden passion. With the corresponding personal joy, the outcome of a specific working method that wants to reflect, above all else, the void and absences. An obvious analogy with the art world that, unfortunately, we are forced to live in.

Niroza-SanMartín

HD video / medium: DVD / 7′:45” / music: Felipe Hernández

Hours before arriving at our creative appointment with the Hospital de San Martín, we bumped into a character in the street who, with the passing of time, would prove to be pivotal. Now almost eighty years of age and with serious sight problems, we found this owner of a once successful chain of furniture stores stopping the traffic in the middle of a square and begging people to go to his shops and take away all the goods they wanted. All of a sudden, an excited mass of people formed. Passers-by, cars, vans and trucks arrived out of nowhere to carry away the gifts. We asked him for permission to take pictures while he was at the forefront of this revolution, to which he agreed with pleasure.

Well into the night, with the emotions of the visit to the hospital still in our souls, we discovered in the viewfinder of our camera that Señor Azorín’s irruption that morning was not as coincidental as we had initially thought, and that, properly organised and combined, it could give rise to a promising audiovisual piece.

Two contrasting, extremely intense issues, highly transcendent for this working process, had converged on that very same day. On one hand, we had just discovered H.S.M., that huge half-empty space which, after its refurbishment, was to become an effective prolongation of the Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno, CAAM (joy at the prospect of a second life in the making.) On the other, a network of spaces full of goods for fifty years that, after a period of reflection of their owner, were to be definitively closed for want of energy. (Conclusion, decline and subsequent abandonment.)