Trémula, an exhibition by artist Javi Cruz, kicks off the CA2M’s 2021 programme

January 19, 2021. - The Autonomous Community of Madrid’s CA2M Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo opens the exhibition Trémula by the artist Javi Cruz, which can be visited between January 19 and April 25, 2021.

This exhibition is the story of a poplar tree - scientifically called Populus tremula or trembling poplar - that was planted in the 1980s next to the building where it grew and lived in the San Blas neighbourhood, and which was felled last year due to disease.

Produced entirely for this occasion and after several months of work in the museum spaces and previous time spent in the workshop, Trémula is constituted as a user's manual for a second life of things, a context conducive to the emergence of both existences and stories, where things diverge from reality and fiction can become law.

The lives of the tree and those that emerge from its remains are interlaced with many individual and collective stories: graffiti as archaeology, the end of a bar, the alphabet that emerges from plant bark, the resilience of a domestic plant, a window transmuted into a flowerpot, the pressure that a single chickpea can exert on a wall, the crystallisation of a bottle or even the recovery of his previous piece for this same CA2M space, Temple, made in 2018 for the exhibition Wanting to appear night , which consisted of making a wall effervesce.

INVOLVEMENT, OWNERSHIP, COLLABORATION

The relevance of Javi Cruz's work passes through chains of involvement, appropriation or collaboration, all ways of making the work never be that of a single artist, but rather a piece that reflects the pulse of a generation.

In this case, it has the lighting design of Cristina L. Bolívar, the chemistry advice by Alejandro Gómez Pérez, mycology advice by Juan Luis H. Cardós, with guest pieces by artists Esther Gatón and Paco Graco, charcoal by Fernando Gandasegui, biochar compost by Iñaki Álvarez produced in Nyamnyam, glass work by the Real Fábrica De Cristales De La Granja, publication design by Andrea González and photographic documentation by Jorge Anguita Mirón.

In this sense, Javi Cruz is involved with some of the production methods that take place in Madrid today, and characterise its contemporary cultural scene: a certain agility in gathering political and social events and giving them symbolic power, and a certain care in preserving their complexity; an organic and easy-going disciplinary fluidity, in which to place the body and voice, but also writing; an extraordinary ability to calm the narrative anxieties that we collectively suffer from in postmodernity, always from the viewpoint of an overwhelming subjectivity that, at the same time, is capable of becoming more than the sum of its parts, reaching a place of collective memory.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Javi Cruz studies art while giving up basketball and graffiti. He now works on projects related to drawing, performance, masonry and the performative powers found in orality and other textualities. This often leads to the design of situations.

As an individual or through the collectives Elgatoconmoscas and PLAYdramaturgia, he has worked more or less institutionally as an artist in various local and international contexts.. He collaborates in scenic processes with Cris Blanco (Bad Translation), Claudia Faci (Works of Love), María Jerez (Yabba, The Stain), Aitana Cordero (The Kisses), Nyamnyam (Food, 8000 years later) and Cuqui Jerez (Ultrathings, Magic and Elasticity) with residencies and shows all over the international circuit.

Together with Fernando Gandasegui, he runs Bar Yola, a series of crossroads between stage creation and pedagogies, hosted in contexts such as the Salmon Festival in Barcelona, and which takes its name from a bar near the Pradillo Theatre, a hub where they trained as audiences and programmers.

In 2019 he starts, together with Jacobo Cayetano (Zuloark), Bosque Real, a platform that looks at the natural dimension of our cities from a contemporary perspective, safeguarding forgotten heritage and retelling them from multiple salvage perspectives. In strategies similar to those that have given rise to Trémula, its first declination took the form of a festival that explores the territory and the biography of the Casa de Campo in Madrid. En 2019 inicia, junto a Jacobo Cayetano (Zuloark), Bosque real, una plataforma para revisar desde la contemporaneidad la dimensión natural de nuestras ciudades, salvaguardar patrimonios olvidados y volver a relatarlos desde múltiples perspectivas de rescate. En estrategias similares a las que han dado lugar a Trémula, su primera declinación tuvo la forma de festival, para abordar el territorio y la biografía de la Casa de Campo de Madrid.