THE ATTIC OF MY DAYDREAMS IS MY GRANDMOTHER.

Diego Delas

From September 23

A solo exhibition by Diego Delas.
Pelaires Cabinet, Nit de l'art
Curated by Cristina Anglada

"I was talking about time. It's so hard for me to believe in it. Some things go. Pass on. Some things just stay. I used to think it was my rememory. You know. Some things you forget. Other things you never do. But it's not. Places, places are still there. If a house burns down, it's gone, but the place—the picture of it—stays, and not just in my rememory, but out there, in the world. What I remember is a picture floating around out there outside my head. I mean, even if I don't think it, even if I die, the picture of what I did, or knew, or saw is still out there. Right in the place where it happened."

Beloved, Toni Morrison

Diego Delas was born in Aranda de Duero forty years ago. He spent his childhood in a Castilian village of less than twenty inhabitants, and his memories include hiding in the attic of his house surrounded by dusty objects as time slipped away quickly; the many moments he spent in the shadow of his grandmother learning and admiring the agility and determination with which she did her domestic labors; the nightly walks through the still damp guts of houses under construction. He later studied Architecture and Fine Art in Madrid before moving to London, where he completed a Painting MA at the Royal College of Art. He also obtained a PhD at Ruskin College of Art, Oxford University. Diego Delas currently lives in Malaga.

Based on his personal experiences, memories and great restlessness and curiosity, he develops projects in which research, writing and the construction of objects and installations unfold multiple layers where knowledge and fiction lead to brilliant connections.

The research that Delas has been conducting for years focuses on how certain vernacular architectures sustain/guard subjective memory. This type of buildings could be defined as architecture without architects, common in peri-urban, rural and pre-modern environments, now in the process of extinction and defined by an always transitory and mutant character, at the mercy of the changes that their inhabitants implement according to their needs of shelter and animist protection. Structures and nooks and crannies housing work and ornaments of an apotropaic nature, which hide multiple stories fuelled by the experiences of their dwellers.

I recently had the opportunity to read Diego's newly completed thesis*Atlas of the Hole / House of Dementia,*whichbrings together many of the elements that have shaped his research, now available to see at the Cabinet. The cleverness of the thesis lies in the artist's approach to these topics and their complexity, not only with rigour, but also using seductive narrative techniques, with their particular catalogue of structures and tricks. According to Diego, the house functions as a personal and familial body; as a repository of stories in which ornamental arrangements rush along with experiences lived. The house as a body full of marks and tattoos, the rooms of which are the setting for multiple plots, rescued in the form of memories combined with magical thinking.

The works now on show in theCabinet Spaceof Pelaires Gallery are remnants of the big solo exhibition that he inaugurated earlier this year at CAB in Burgos, where he and his family are from. In it, the ideas we have been mentioning so far confront each other on a large scale. In this case, the house functions as a structure that has the ability to reconstruct messages and memories, and in which states such as dementia play a major role. Dementia, as well as daydreaming, distraction or play, are unusual ways of retrieving memories in which our mind meanders aimlessly and is carried away distortedly, and where time and space form an indistinct mass. Delas develops his installations as a form of recollection and updating of this peculiar state of things.

The Cabinet Space brings together four pieces by the artist. Three of them are textiles, and act almost like murals that show a room within another room. They invite us to walk through them slowly, suggesting a reading, both of the whole and of every single element, as if it were a tarot card, a map or a plan. Next to them we findMilk Teeth (Dientes de leche), a piece featuring items in decay, with a floral motif protected by some kind of armour. Shuttering wood, structural wood, plaster, resin, concrete, oil and steel make up a kind of cut of archaeological strata that capture the author's personal experiences.

Endless, Forever Strength (Sin Fin, Fuerza Siempre)andDream, I do not know(Sueño, no lo sé)are two fabric pieces crafted manually using other textile materials from other periods. One of them was made with remnants of sackcloth that "restitch" past activities, and to which the artist has attached a canvas and old woollen mattress fabric. The other piece is the formal result of changing the scale of anex libristhat he made to turn it into a patterned fabric motif that he has now superimposed on that of a woollen mattress.

Here, the author recalls how members of his family of all ages would gather every winter to unstitch, beat and re-stitch the mattresses of the house all day long. These pieces seek to highlight the importance of folklore and household tasks, the repetitive rhythm of the seasons, and that of memory, which is constructed and deconstructed at the speed of speech, as Delas reminds us. What do we forget and what do we remember? The attic of a house is that room where we store objects that are waiting for a second chance, or to be fully covered by dust or even discarded forever. Like a mind full of memories waiting to be finally activated or forgotten for good. With this type of work, Delas wishes to trigger the collective memory that gets lost with dying villages.

After all, we tell stories in order to survive, in our endless quest to align the personal and the particular with the collective. Magic begins with words and words give life to things, they open the door to the realm of the art of memory.