04 MAY – 06 JUN 2025.
«Specio» solo exhibition of Arturo Moya Villén
Curator: Mario Gutiérrez Cru.
Supported by PROYECTOR.
A street, a lamppost, a bank, a pharmacy, a car, another. One pedestrian, another. Nobody looks, nobody knows.
A camera observes life. It records it. It forgets it. A monitor shows a continuous present with the possibility of the past. But how can we go back? What would we do differently if we could? If we knew?
Life is presented to us like this: straight ahead, without distractions, sometimes with a semicolon, sometimes simply with a comma, and rarely with a full stop.
There we are, in front of a time machine, minimal, apparently harmless, that allows us to revisit the instant, the one that is already gone, the one of someone who passed a few seconds ago… or a lifetime ago.
Arturo Moya invites us with SPECIO, an interactive installation with a playful appearance and a reflective body, to contemplate what we did. He gives us back our gaze. He gives us back our gaze.
A camera collects our movements, as do urban surveillance cameras, or mobile phones that store our data, routes, conversations, gestures and tastes. A computer ‘uses’ them, and in this process a remote but persistent possibility arises: the “rewind”, that almost extinct button that evoked our childhood, control, repetition, the desire and possibility of ‘returning’. To what? To when?
But how to activate our presence, how to activate our past?
In a street where we are invited to stroll, to move – fast – and to consume – without pause -, to stop becomes an act of resistance. As occurred in the work of Alberto C. Bernal (Resistencia Pasiva, 2013-17) where standing still in front of a surveillance camera in the now defunct Medialab Prado offered you a work created for you. Here the opposite happens: only by moving does the hidden appear. The archive reveals itself, but not for those who wait, but for those who inhabit the flow.
For Arturo ‘SPECIO’ has this double dimension, that of speculating on one’s own image and on one’s own life, and that of looking in the mirror. ‘The mirror is the first other, it reconstructs our infantile gaze from a Lacanian vision’. Moreover, ‘one of the things that one looks for when looking in the mirror is to defeat death, isn’t it, one looks in the mirror to trace how death is acting’. These reflections by Arturo remind me of the poetic film El lado oscuro del corazón (Eliseo Subiela, 1992), where death whispers: ‘As long as you keep composing I won’t be able to take you away’. To look at it head on is to postpone its arrival. One could also refer to that indelible scene of Marina Abramović at MoMA in 2010, when her ex-partner Ulay sits in front of her after 22 years of separation: to look at the past is to look at the other, it is to look at(se) anew.
All this speculation, never better said, also has to do with the piece, which presents us with a present and a past as a mirror of itself, almost an evocation of the lynchean doppelgänger, that double that lurks in the shadows of the self.
In addition, the piece adds, not as something banal, a triple clock, the digital one with the current time and the ‘rewind’ time and another analogue clock, with 2 hands (hours and minutes) and a strange and unique bone second hand. As if the artist wanted to tell us that our time is marked, but the seconds we manage to stay alive are the ones we are beating death. This altered clock reminds me of the film Dans la ville blanche (Alain Tanner, 1983), where a man loses track of time and of himself in a strange city where there is a clock that runs backwards: ‘No, he’s doing fine, it’s the world that’s going backwards’ said the waitress.
It’s a pity we can’t always fly west, go back in time to be able to return to yesterday, to be able to return to you.
OBLIQUO
Calle Valencia 17, Madrid.
Monday to Sunday from 9am to 9pm.
Specio
Specio is an interactive installation that reflects on time, the body and the gaze.
Specio means ‘I look’ in Latin, a root from which two different words were formed: speculum and specula. Speculum meant instrument of gaze, mirror, while specula became watchtower, observatory. From the latter derived the verb speculari, to look from above, from an elevated position, from which our present-day specular derives.
The word specio thus contains two gazes: the reflective, horizontal gaze of the mirror and the inquisitive, vertical gaze of the lookout or giant. On this double gaze, the work unfolds time as an element that is manipulated by the participant’s relationship with his own image, with his specular reflection.
Specio is conceived as a game in which the movement of the participants in front of the camera delays the time of their image. Two clocks accompany the image, one marks the real time and the other moves backwards according to the movement, placing the participants between two temporalities, the real one and the one processed by the software. The more movement occurs, the more the participant’s image and that of the second clock move backwards in time. The coexistence of the two clocks in the projection makes the temporal splitting visible and allows us to quantify the time lag.
The installation has been presented in an outdoor and indoor version. Originally conceived for the public square, the image of the participants and the double clock are projected on a tower – the place where a community clock is usually housed – or on a bell tower – a sound architecture that also structures the time of the community. Specio’s double clock replaces the unitary, global and measured time of the community with an unfolded, individual time, manipulated by the bodies of those present.
Initially presented as an innocent and fun game, like a small time machine in which we manipulate the time of our image, and with which we can try to take a counter from 100 to 0, or recover and manipulate the image of a previous participant, the work proposes in parallel another layer of reading. Specio suggests a subject placed in brackets, in quotation marks and suspended between an abstract and isochronous time, and another concrete and mobile one, a subject split between a global and an individual temporality. Specio invites us to use movement – metaphorical and real – as a way of opposing the passage of time in my image, and therefore death, and further suggests the idea of a subject trapped in a temporal non-place between the instantaneity of the Media and real time.
Arturo Moya Villén
Arturo Moya Villén is a sound artist, electronic artist, performer, composer and curator. He was introduced to music, dance and visual experimentation by his father, Arturo Moya, pianist and composer, and Esther Guillemat, dancer and choreographer. Both were collaborators of José Val del Omar and transmitted to him as a child the experiences and vision of the pioneer, a key figure in Spanish electronic art.
After an initial stage as a classical pianist, he turned to the field of electroacoustic composition, and trained at the Phonos laboratory in Barcelona with Gabriel Brncic and at I.R.I.S., Rome with Giuseppe di Giugno, thanks to grants from the SGAE and CITE/COMETT. Since then he has developed his career mainly between Spain and Italy.
In those early years he began creating interactive devices that sought to question the concepts of performer and music assumed in electroacoustics, paying special attention to the unstable relationships between body, music and technology. At the same time, he became interested in site-specific sound interventions, including the early ‘Espacio vibrado’ (1998) at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona, a sound intervention for loudspeakers distributed throughout the entire space of the museum, and ‘Musica da Luogo’ (1999) at the Cathedral Basilica of Atri, for an arched orchestra and choir, with sound displacements in the central nave.
In those years he presided over the Spanish Electroacoustic Music Association, combining his creative activity with his commitment to the context. Thanks to his impetus, the work of very important figures of sound art was introduced in Spain, which allowed the circle of academic electroacoustics to widen. A special case deserves Alvin Lucier, whose most emblematic performances and installations were presented for the first time in Spain.
The orthodoxy of the electroacoustic medium and his need to find new forms of expression led him towards sound art and electronic art. In them he has found a wider field for sound and visual experimentation, in which he has been able to shape his research on the voice and speech as recipients of deviant violence, on interaction as a disruptive agent of aesthetic experience, on electronic devices for the negotiation of identity, or on listening as a cut and wound, to mention some of the most relevant lines of his production. His work, which includes a significant presence of interactive formats, has been developed in the fields of sound sculpture, sound installation, site-specific projects, performance, video, acoustic and electro-acoustic composition and robotics.
His interest in the global advancement of the medium led him to found and preside from 2012 until the year of the pandemic, the association EX, association of electronic and experimental art, a non-profit organisation whose aim was to promote and disseminate electronic and experimental art. The initiative managed to develop a differentiated position in its field, with projects and curatorships inside and outside Spain, training, mediation and research activities, and international calls that awarded artists from Spain, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Bulgaria, USA, China, Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, Chile and Israel.
Specio invites us to use movement – metaphorical and real – as a way of opposing the passage of time in my image, and therefore death, and further suggests the idea of a subject trapped in a temporal non-place between the instantaneity of the Media and real time. Centre del Carme Cultura Contemporània (Valencia), Museo Barjola (Gijón), Círculo de Bellas Artes (Madrid), Lazzaretto (Cagliari), etc.
He has recently presented, together with Llorenç Barber, ‘Músicas desconfinadas (finalmente)’ (2020) a site-specific interactive sound installation for IVAM, or ‘Sambori’, (2022) an interactive sound sculpture for Centrocentro (Madrid, 2022) and Centro del Carme de Cultura Contemporània (Valencia, 2023).
In 2023 he presented ‘Monster Game’, an interactive sound installation and ‘Hablar no es ver’, a reactive sound sculpture at the Max Estrella gallery, as part of the exhibition curated by Gregorio Cámara ‘El día que el Universo cambió’. In the same year he also presented, together with Enrique Radigales, ‘Sensowifi’, an interactive sound installation for Etopía (Zaragoza). At the end of 2023 he presented ‘Il suolo è lava’ a site-specific sound installation commissioned by the Creature/Open House Festival in Rome.
In 2024, together with Ruth Abellán, he presented the sound piece ‘Por boca de otro’, at the events to commemorate the 30th anniversary of Cruce, as part of the In-Sonora platform.
Also in 2024, in collaboration with Eva Lootz, he presented the works ‘Si aun quieres ver algo…’, an interactive audiovisual sculpture and ‘Columnas parlantes’, a sound installation, at the Sala Alcalá 31 in Madrid.