“Informal informal” exhibition
Kindness is one of those concepts that everyone seems to be very clear but that no one is able to accurately define. We lack vocabulary and only examples are gone. We tend to define kindness with some of the forms of courtesy: smile to someone, hold the door, please, thank you, do not deserve. The forms of courtesy, (good education), are needed standards of coexistence, sometimes customary, that reflect social structures. In this sense, they change over time, they respond to the ways how the social is structured and they are not universal at all, nor are they equal or two -way.
But the kindness, in the sense of being left and let it be, goes beyond standardized formality in our relationship with others. We think that kindness is servile and complacent, even naïve, but it has a huge ability to disable power, and therefore a huge political power. For the philosopher Byung-Chul Han, power is centralizing, it has a tendency towards itself, and what is left out or on the sidelines is something that must be deleted. The kindness disables this tendency and gives space to the multiple. In order for it to be multiplicity, the quality of the kind should not only guide the behavior, but also to foster physical, mental and symbolic spaces that make it possible.
The works present in this exhibition did not have, a priori, when they were created, the kindness as the main intention, but to all covers and supper them. The artists reflect on kindness as a critical praxis, as a way to do and showas a starting point or even as an inevitable consequence. They provide meaning and adjectives, which extends their semantic field and, therefore, our imaginary about the kind. They give us clues to rethink and update the modals through which it takes shape. They land in the present, and thus their proposals become symbolic places of relationship with others, almost like small antidotes against pessimism and dystopia.
Artists: Bárbara Sánchez Barroso, Blanca Gracia, Enrique Radigales, Fito Conesa, Irene PE, Julia Puyo, Luz Broto, Marc Herrero, Radia Cava-Trel (Samu Céspedes, Patricia del Razo, Violeta Ossina Duez and Yazel Parra Nahmens), Tau Luna Aposta and Marc Salvà Villanueva.
This article on the cultural agenda has been updated on January 31, 2025. In anticipation of possible subsequent modifications, we recommend contrasting the information with which it appears published on the web:
