Need for Speed
—solo show
—La Panera
—Lleida (Spain)
—2025
–text
[Installation shot at La Panera, 2025]
Text: karlos gil
Coordinador: antoni jove alba
Dirección: roser sanjuan
Fotos: jordi rullo
Realizador: jclariana
Graffitis Sile, Rulo, Saúl
Agradecimientos: Ganados Gili S.A.
IRTA Fruitcentre (Isntitut de Recerca Tecnològica Alimentaria): Joaquim Bellver
ARCA (Associació d’Iniciatives Rurals i Marítimes de Catalunya): Eduard Trepat Deltell
Museu Trepat (Roser Miarnau)
Joan Sanmartín Suñer
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Lleida is a landscape in constant transformation, where the agricultural memory and industry of the past are intertwined with an uncertain future. “Need for Speed” is installed on this threshold, at the intersection between production and abandonment, between acceleration and ruin. In the 13th-century columned hall of the La Panera Art Centre, formerly a grain warehouse, a spectral landscape rises where the history of the land, the speed of progress, and the transformation of Lleida’s agricultural landscape merge into an archaeology of what was and what is to come.
The centerpiece of the exhibition is the new audiovisual production Fade, in which a drone flies over abandoned fields and factories in the province of Lleida, recording a science-fiction nocturnal journey through abandoned flour mills and decaying structures. Its journey anticipates the obsolescence of a productive system in which the land bears witness to its own transformation. Images of storage sheds, empty spaces, and abandoned agricultural implements evoke a post-apocalyptic setting similar to a clandestine military operation, and are interspersed with images of illegal car racing filmed in areas near these fields. The places visited seem to have a life and force of their own, and the anticipation of what might have happened or will happen constantly builds, through the conflict between the stillness of the abandoned spaces and the speed of the night shots.
The piece "Final Fantasy" consists of a site-specific intervention by artists from three different generations in Lleida. Here, the "graffiti" walls transform the space into a palimpsest of forgotten messages and signs of insurrection, a vast ruin where industrial memory resists in superimposed layers of color and decay.
Graffiti, a marginal and urgent form of writing, intervenes in the ruin with codes from a new urban archaeology. Truncated phrases, coded symbols, and overflowing strokes rewrite the history of the space and impose a presence that defies oblivion. The superimposition of layers, the wear of calligraphy, and half-erased inscriptions function as echoes of other eras, like a residual heartbeat that survives the decay of the environment. Between the immediacy of aerosol and the degradation of materials, graffiti here is not only an act of appropriation of space, but also a resistance against disappearance. At the center of the installation is Timefall (krypton), an accelerated aging aquarium that becomes a laboratory where seeds proliferate and wither in impossible growth cycles. It is a miniature landscape where time folds in on itself, an essay on the fragility of organic matter and the speed of its disappearance.
The main idea of the Timefall series is to create sensorial encounters with the nature of time at the very border of art, as the ultimate purpose of the object is its own destruction through the transmutation of matter. Each tank is programmed with unique atmospheric conditions to create a distinct temporal rhythm. Within these elements, there are objects that degrade throughout the exhibition, at varying speeds, depending on their material programming. Surrounding it is the piece Phantom Limbs, in which the archaeological remains of tractors used to spray fertilizer in the past emerge as vestiges of an era of agricultural mechanization. From within, a dense mist expands throughout the space, transforming it into a stage set suspended between the fog of memory and the anticipation of an uncertain future.
Highlighting this type of conceptual layering underlying the exhibition, these sculptures, constructed from obsolete pieces of agricultural machinery and attached to enormous tanks, emit a constant cloud of water vapor that hovers above them. Alluding to productivity in the absence of human company, the water tanks now emit the almost inaudible reverberations of the evaporating liquid.
The exhibition is an attempt to formulate a new understanding of our environment as a network-based platform. The scenario proposed by Karlos Gil, on the other hand, suggests a posthuman condition in which corporations, with their scientific products, have taken control.
In "Need for Speed," speed is no longer synonymous with progress, but with exhaustion and conflict. The acceleration of growth, intensive production, and technological advancement have left a landscape of specters and obsolete structures. Here, ruin becomes fertile ground for imagining new forms of existence, where what remains is not only the residue of the past, but also the possibility of a future yet to emerge.