Villa of the Mysteries
LOCATION: Citadellet, at the boiler house. MAP. Included in festival ticket
Throughout the history of Western civilisation, wine has been a source of nourishment, of work, of inebriation and of life.Through the domestication of vines and the transformation, wine connects us with the sacred in communion with nature. Wine has been transmuted into a god and there have been gods who have been transformed into wine. It springs from the earth, but it requires effort. It gives life, but also takes it away. During its making, it gurgles and bubbles as if it emanating from open arteries. Wine is the blood of the earth.
Greta Alfaro explores these relationships in an exhibition in which grapes are confused with the figure of Christ, winegrowers become the major artistic landmarks of our civilization, and Dionysius gets drunk on the body of the Saviour.
Wine can connect various worlds and give coherence to human experience. The perfect metaphor of blood, it is able to sublimate moods and provide the body with nutrients. Its subsistence depends on a latent tension between human desires and the designs of nature, equally generous and destructive.This idea, a constant in the work of Greta Alfaro, reminds us that our existence is precarious. In the midst of the forces of nature, subjugated to them, trying to appease them and to muster them in our favour, are the men and women who nurture the vines.
The process of winemaking has been transformed over the last three or four generations. No longer a family-run business associated with subsistence economy, it is now subject to legislation, supply and demand, and to health and safety regulations. Although machinery and steel have replaced flesh and skin, behind the rhythmic movement of robotized mechanism, the association with blood remains intact.
This flow of blood, a symptom that the body still remains alive, is rendered in the video “Las labradoras” (Women Farm Labourers). The women are subjected to the rigours of physical work in the fields and to the labour of giving birth at home. They have been assimilated with the earth they work and, like the earth, it is expected that they bear fruit with their own blood.
Menstruation, transfusion, crop growing, industry and civilization are some of the subject matters addressed in Villa of the Mysteries. This exhibition leads us from the roots of the vine to the sacred through wine and the many men and women who dedicate their lives to making this elixir that connects our bodies with the earth.
Isabell Mellén
Fornacalia
LOCATION: Citadellet, at the North Tower MAP. Included in festival ticket
Bread everywhere… as food and as metaphor, as image and as idea. In Greta Alfaro’s Fornacalia, comprised of a number of works in various media, the oven—the place of transformation of matter—is the turning point between dough and baked bread, between the formless and the resignified object, whether through displacement, declination or insistence.
The title refers to the festival celebrated in mid-February in honour of Fornax, the goddess of ovens and grain-drying kilns, to pray for a bountiful harvest and to worship the fertility of the Earth. Fornacalia is concerned with offering, fertility, transubstantiation. The artist examines the tradition of kneading bread and equates it with the fertility rites aimed at the land and at women, and the cultural legacy in the very process of making bread, a job originally associated with women.
Without ignoring the religious dimension of bread as spiritual nourishment that underlies her work, we can also examine the material and industrial production of bread. To this end, we can look at the Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers (1751-1765). The entry for Boulanger (bakery) states: “When the ancients learned to knead bread, they prepared it like other foods: at home and at the time of eating. It was one of the main tasks of mothers of families…(and) the highest women did not disdain to put their hands in the dough.” However, in the illustration for Boulanger in the Encyclopédie, all the bakers are men: the one who kneads the dough, the one who weighs it, the two who shape it and the one who places it in the oven.
Alfaro reminds us how the mechanization of kneading and cooking the original mix of flour and water, to which salt and yeast could be later added, led to the gradual disappearance of the hands of women from the process. The wall of bread the artist constructs is built as a space of resistance, demarcating the metaphorical space conceived by Alfaro: oven, cave, uterus, chapel, temple, palace.
In Alfaro’s work, bread occupies the place of representation of God or his manifestations. Biblical quotes, pagan cults and popular beliefs are mixed together, as are the ambivalence between oven and Eucharist. The result is a series in which the ungraspable and formless quality of divinity is altered by production and manipulation, by the religion of industrialization and progress, which transforms the formless mass of bread into a roll, a baguette or a loaf.
Rocío Robles Tardío
© Greta Alfaro
Music of the Spheres, 2024
LOCATION: Citadellet, at the prison MAP. Included in festival ticket
Home is where we know and where we are known, where we love and are beloved. Home is mastery, voice, relationship, and sanctuary: part freedom, part flourishing… part refuge, part prospect.
– Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 2019
Home is not only the place we inhabit. Home incorporates emotional dimensions, a place where we exist in unity with our surroundings. Yet there are numerous places in which we reside that do not feel like home, such as hospitals, hospices, orphanages, prisons, and immigration detention centres. Although almost no one makes the decision to dwell there, these places remain occupied. Inspired by the history of Landskrona Citadel, Greta Alfaro’s Music of the Spheres reflects on the nature of these spaces in relation to the society we live in.
This new site-specific commission occupies the spherical eastern tower of Landskrona Citadel, in which inhabitants were kept continuously under watch. The fortress became a major penitentiary for inmates serving life sentences. In 1902, it became a forced labour facility for vagrant women, including prostitutes and less able-bodied individuals who did not fit the norms of the time. In the 1940s, the establishment stopped functioning as a prison in order to receive refugees coming from Nazi extermination camps.
The inscriptions on the walls of the cells bear witness to those who inhabited them. Why were there spaces where people who had not committed a crime were confined? Why are historical buildings preserved as museums to remind societies of the brutalities performed by past governments, while new ones are being built for that same purpose, with the only difference being the prosecuted social groups?
Music of the Spheres reflects on one of the biggest topics our times: the violence of covert surveillance. Peepholes allow the audience to look into the cells as if they were guards checking on the prisoners. Inside some of the cells, a ghostly image of an orb-weaver spider and its distinctive spiral wheel-shaped web occupies the darkened space. The giant arachnids appear suspended in the centre of the units, oblivious to the spectacle they have become.
Despite being harmless, these hard-working creatures are the origin of one of the most common phobias amongst humans, causing disgust and fear. Spider webs are at once home to the custodian spiders and a trap to the distracted and unwelcome Other. In contrast, many cultures associate spiders with good luck, creativity, feminine energy, and some even with the portrayal of the mother figure due to their web-knitting skills used to weave the world into existence.
The correlation between spiders and the women and refugees who inhabited the cells of Landskrona Citadel is not fortuitous. Alfaro invites us to reconsider the ambivalence of archetypes, how these change through history, and what is our role in criminalising targeted communities.
Multilayered and complex, Alfaro’s Music of the Spheres invites us to consider the paradoxical relationships of order versus chaos, safety versus entrapment, powerful versus disempowered, us versus them. The fluctuation of our roles within the social structure, the convergence of the physical and digital worlds, and the establishment of covert surveillance, challenge our sense of the world, jeopardising the yearned-for notion of home and the privacy, intimacy and safety associated with it.
Raquel Villar-Pérez
Solitude
LOCATION: In the breakfast buffet at Hotel Öresund MAP. Included in festival ticket
In this video work, Greta Alfaro has us contemplate a tea party to which we are not invited. The still life for the entire piece is a simple table set with a cup, a jug of milk and biscuits. The main focus falls on a slug that meticulously slides around the cup, drinks the tea and finally leaves the frame. The sound track includes a rainstorm combined with one of the most recognized compositions of British baroque musician Henry Purcell, O Solitude, based on texts by the English Renaissance poet Katherine Philips.
The appearance of the slug, despite being a slow and harmless animal, is a prelude to putrefaction, reminding us that death lurks even in domestic and everyday situations. The passage of time, the ephemerality of life and a rethinking of our attitude towards the environment and respect for all the species that inhabit it, pervade the symbolic meaning of the work.
Greta Alfaro is a visual artist. Her work is multidisciplinary, and it relates a critique of power in contemporary society to Western and Mediterranean visual tradition. She works in the United Kingdom and Spain, and exhibits in museums, galleries and film festivals internationally
This project is supported in part by a grant from Acción Cultural Española (AC/E), a state agency.
