DOLOR (A.D MCMXCIV)
– UNDER CONSTRUCTION –
A circular arena becomes the private ring of a boy who has not known how to grow up. The many faces of suffering are personified in an audiovisual journey that embodies the unbearable pain of being oneself. With a three-act structure, we witness the successive appearance of allegorical characters who peel away from an audience that hides its hunger for misery behind the stands. One by one, they stage their own struggle against the ballast that keeps them from moving forward: the inheritance of family trauma, the need to capture others’ attention, the inability to accept the responsibilities of adult life.
Josep Piñol designs a scenography rooted in the poetics of flaying: internal organs that deflate and collapse onto the stage; the pelvic bone suspended like an impassive, watchful deity; humans condemned to be beasts of burden seeking only to be rid of their load. Pain is explored as a universal and universalizing experience; in an attempt to find himself again and to reconnect with the world, the artist presents a narrative in which the misfortune of existing progressively distances us from a macabre, alienated society.
DOLOR is a work born of a spasm, a drive that invites us to look further inward. We witness a journey that begins in the lungs, the organ of sadness, housed in the chest, descends toward the intestines, which embody anxiety, and continues down to the pelvis: hard bone, center of gravity, unfathomable fear. A katabasis that goes beyond the search of the subconscious to enter the somatic unconscious. Automaquia, or the art of gazing at one’s pelvis.
This project in progress continues the path opened with La Muda: the visual language (baroque, symbolic, and operatic) reaches a new density. The piece transcends the cinematic format and proposes a spillover of content into the exhibition space. Its viewing is not limited to the screen; it expands into the room, creating an immersive environment where the spectator enters, viscerally, into the work’s emotional apparatus. With a total duration of about 25 minutes, it is not projected as a piece to be watched from beginning to end, but split and fragmented across an exhibition display.
The project involves professionals from different fields who, under Piñol’s direction, orchestrate a macabre bullfight. The characters’ choreographies heighten the tension between flesh and machine, between bodily resistance and symbolic obedience.
Sound also operates as a visceral channel of the experience. Composed by Lluís Martínez, the soundtrack reinterprets fragments of Purcell’s opera King Arthur, combining its baroque solemnity with echoes of Nyman’s funeral march and a sound design that incorporates bodily sounds processed like industrial machinery: bone creaks, inhalations, exhalations. This auditory universe reinforces the liturgical character of the piece.
In DOLOR we witness a violent catharsis that rises from the depths of the body itself, from the bones and the marrow, and which, in the artist’s words, is “an attempt to become aware of my burdens and pass through my own suffering. An attempt to put myself back together, personalize myself, free myself, unbind myself, feel myself, and defragment myself.”
