The Clearing of the Unseen

A solo exhibition held at the DA2 Museum of Fine Arts, Salamanca, Spain. Sasportas was invited to refer specifically to the Museum space and its character. In the past, the building had served as a church, which was then turned into an isolated prison for inmates deemed dangerous to society. During 8 years, the structure was renovated and became a museum for contemporary art. The installation dealt with the surfacing of subconscious material, portrayed across the museum space, and its structure related to both the prison cells and the public area which have been conserved.

The work GHARDY Local Voices and the Guardians of the Threshold installation from the Venice Biennale were first exhibited here. GHARDY constructed a panoramic landscape of the conscious and consisted of 6 video screens showing animated manual sketching. The work was made up of six landscape drawings proposing an archaeological cross-section from a secret underground layer of consciousness to the upper, illuminated layer on the surface. Bubbles of confined light moved from the bottom to the upper layers in all the screens.

The work GHARDY Local Voices was based, among other things, on sketches of consciousness maps of the artist's sisters and brothers. Sasportas placed the structure of the personal tribe in the prison-museum's public space. The exhibition referred to the history of the museum building and its various architectural incarnations as a metaphorical platform for a continuous movement of fragments of the subjective consciousness in the collective space.

DA2 Domus Artium, Salamanca, Spain