JUAN CARLOS BRACHO. AYYO
AYYO, the acronym of Arquitectura y “Yo” [Architecture and “I”], is the title of the work that Juan Carlos Bracho has donated to the Museo CA2M community as consideration for his 2020 show, curated by Armando Montesinos, at Sala Alcalá 31 of the Autonomous Community of Madrid.
AYYO is a chaotic hotchpotch with its own internal order. It condenses, reformulates and transforms into new works and records the remnants of the experiences that occurred in relation to the 2020 exhibition: those of the artist himself, those shared with his collaborators, those of the participants in the educational programme, and even those of visitors.
AYYO is constructed out of many elements that are usually excluded from the spotlight of an exhibition, such as the waste and fragments that emerge during the work processes. These items make up what Juan Carlos Bracho humorously calls the “garbagism”, understood as the physical and symbolic trace of all the development stages of a project. This diverse, compartmentalised body of materials displayed on the tables is joined by the documentary dimension and the drawings the artist made for the exhibition installation.
Since the show closed, he has reviewed, classified and experimented with all of these objects in his workshop in order to consider the following questions: What happens before, during and after an exhibition? How are those processes articulated and who are their agents? What roles and responsibilities do they each assume? How are the results exhibited, quantified, sorted, classified and disseminated? Is it a closed process? What remains of all that: the works, the experiences, the knowledge, the materials or perhaps the leftovers?
The result is AYYO: a compendium that summarises six years of reflections in his studio, —and, over the past year, in collaboration with the La Palma School of Arts and Esmeralda Martín Trigos— arranged inside and beneath the tables, initially designed as display elements for the artist’s exercise books that were shown for the first time in public. Exhibited alongside them once again is Bracho’s hand-written room signage, now transformed into an artist’s book. And also on display are the canvases that will be placed over AYYO I and II when the show closes, a gesture that will transform the entire exhibit into two sculptures in the fashion of large-scale architectural scale models.
AYYO embodies and gives material form to the artist’s most personal and intimate record, the one contained in his exercise books: private mental processes, an aesthetic and heterogeneous imagination that finds affinity with the notion of anti-form, understood not as a mere negation of form but as an openness to the provisional and procedural: a territory where intuitions, desires, ideas and thoughts acquire an organised presence without sacrificing their fragmentary, scattered nature.
AYYO is, in short, an open-ended question—one that moves from the individual to the collective—about the value of work and what it means to think about, produce, exhibit, disseminate, preserve, collect, enjoy, and reflect on artistic projects, as well as the conditions that make them possible.
Juan Carlos Bracho (La Línea, 1970)
Bracho has pursued a trajectory in which plastic creation, teaching and cultural management are organically and necessarily intertwined in a self-sustaining constant dialogue. With a degree in Fine Arts (Cuenca), he has been an artist-in-residence at Hangar (Barcelona), Axeneo7 (Canada), CUAC (United States) and Caravane Tighmert [CM1] (Morocco). The recipient of received various awards and grants, including Generaciones, the Iniciarte artistic prize, the BBVA Foundation video art grant and the Ciutat de Palma prize, his work can be found in major public and private collections such as those of the BBVA Foundation, Santander, La Caixa, Montemadrid, Injuve and Arco/Ifema, as well as museums like the CA2M, CGAC and CAAC. Selected curatorial and educational projects include Arriba con Ella, Un Viejo y Nuevo San Juan and Una idea de paisaje, La Línea 2022/24/26; The Horizontal Newspaper, Perjovski/Luca, Garryson Library, Gibraltar, 2024; and his collaborations with the Orquesta y Coro Nacionales de España (OCNE) 21/22 season and the Rizoma film festival 2027/19. His exhibitions include Jóvenes Ocultos, Galería Ángeles Baños, 2026; Si, lo Quiero Todo, C.C.C Estrecho de Gibraltar, 2025; Imitación a la vida, Fundación Díaz Caneja, 2024; El més posible de menys, Casal Solleric, 2023; Florencia / Venecia, Museo Barjola, 2022; Arquitectura y “Yo” Sala Alcalá 31, 2020; Drawing Elevated, CUAC, 2015; Un mensaje para Anabel, Museo ABC, 2010; and Un hecho real, CGAC, 2007.
Since 2019 he has co-directed the Madera 11 art studio in Madrid and since 2022 the Rama cultural association. He is a member of the Mixtura project and of Shawati, a network of exchange and cooperation for cultural agents of Morocco, Ceuta and the Campo de Gibraltar region.