VALENCIA.- Within the framework of World Design Capital Valencia 2022, Bombas Gens Centre d’Art – under the artistic direction of Sandra Guimarães— has invited El Ultimo Grito to create an exhibition proposal based on the Per Amor a l’Art Collection. In this exhibition, design operates as a conceptual and material narrative and curatorial device, sketching a sort of language of the interlude, engaging in a dialogue that opens a speculative approach into the nature of this collection and its individual works.

For El Ultimo Grito, design is an inbetweener. Design is an action, a verb, and not a noun or object. Although these are commonly mistaken as design, they are just by-products of these processes. Design lives in those in-between spaces that exist between humans and their surrounding worlds, both real or fictional, conceptually and materially connecting two distinct points in time and space.

“Earth: A Retrospective” showcases the Per Amor a l’Art Collection as a “creative geography” –an editing concept developed by Lev Kuleshov, designed to collide shots from different locations to generate a seamless new landscape where the narrative elapses. With this project, El Ultimo Grito is looking back at Earth from an undetermined point in a future space-time. A point in which our memory of Earth is broken and our only link back to it is a collection of images where signified and signifier become blurred; where our gaze romanticises them into narratives seeking to find meaning beyond their historicity.

Generated in the present by trying to reimagine a past from an unknown future, “Earth: A Retrospective”, including artists such as Nobuyoshi Araki, EUG-Arno Mathies, Bleda y Rosa, Iñaki Bonillas, Pedro Cabrita Reis, Joan Cardells, Tacita Dean, Koji Enokura, Elger Esser, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Noritoshi Hirakawa, Inma Femenía, Paul Graham, Jonas Mekas, Mathieu Mercier, Matt Mullican, Thomas Ruff, Armando Salas Portugal and Aaron Siskind, among others.

El Ultimo Grito is an artistic duo formed by Rosario Hurtado and Roberto Feo. Since 1997, they have produced work that responds to an ongoing investigation into the nature and representation of systems. This work is both the means to analyse and advance their ideas in the subject and the object of the investigation itself. The results they produce are presented in various contexts and take different forms that have ranged from installations, objects, films, performances and publications to curatorial, editorial and academic projects.

The work of El Ultimo Grito is present in the Per Amor a l’Art Collection. Recently, they have participated in the exhibition “Hiperespacios” (2021) at Bombas Gens Centre d’Art with an intervention entitled “(Mise-en-scène)”, that transformed the gallery hall into a landscape wrapped in smoke and flames.

In 2012 they were awarded the prestigious London Gold Design Medal acknowledging their contribution to design in the UK and more recently the 2019 Madrid Design Festival Award.