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One morning of a strange May in Madrid, a week of the blackout is celebrated that left Spain without light and the black sky insists on remembering that the darkness still has a while about this city, David Catá (Viveiro, 1988) Photography part of his exhibition Perpetua In an industrial ship in Alcobendas. The curiosity has brought me here to meet a boy who sews landscapes and the face of his relatives in his hand. Upon entering the Est Art Space gallery, my eyes are looking for those pieces with dissimulation and in my head the questions are piled up: “Why do you do it? Does it hurt? Do you have wounds? Do you show me your hands? What do you do later with those threads?”
But a second before I get the questions on the mouth, Catá points to me two series of portraits and my attention is redirected. They are paintings of their friends and family in different styles that made from 2008. Below there is a collection of photographs that he took during confinement: from his window he launched lion tooth seeds and captured them on the sky. “Do not wither,” he says, “I have táperes since 2015, my friends give me entire boxes.” The music that sounds in the Salas has composed. It also exposes video, facilities and a screen throws the video clips that it made for an album that also occurred.
“All my work talks about memory, the passage of time, the ephemeral of life,” explains Catá. “How the people of our environment and the footprint that leave us mark. My work is inspired by personal experiences.” The central axis are its two grandmothers and its perpetual great -grandmother, the name of the exhibition comes out of it.
At three years, Catá’s parents, who had a trade to frame paintings, gave him a pianito. He has videos of a birthday in which he is seen in a corner, giving the keys, while the rest of the children play. At five he asked to go to the conservatory, but he had to wait until eight. He learned to touch the accordion. He was never the best in class because, he says, he “cost him a lot to memorize.” He remembers as an introverted teenager who loved to spend time with his grandmothers and his great -grandmother, listening to his stories, especially those that Lolina, paternal grandmother accumulated during his exile in France during the civil war. In his memory, his mother’s hands are also very present. “Sewing, fixing furniture … it’s like me, you can’t stop,” he says.
when the school ended, he studied Fine Arts and began to create some of the projects he exposes now. Then he trained at the extinct EFTI photography school in Madrid. Live between Viveiro and the capital. For now you cannot dedicate itself to art and give classes, work in cinema and television. He temporarily left music until in 2012 he was diagnosed with degenerative disease. “I’m staying deaf,” summarizes it, “on this side I don’t hear.” Their hopes are put in an operation with risks and, once again, in memory and in their art.
“I did this video after the diagnosis,” he explains, “I had been with the music a bit away. And as long as they detected this disease, I resumed my classes in the conservatory and started composing music. I felt the need to enjoy all those sounds that I gradually lose.” In the images Catá appears in the Cantabrian Sea playing the accordion. Little by little the tide goes up until it covers it completely and the instrument is drifting. The remains are exposed next to the sand of that beach.
When opening the doors of the last room, the smoke permeates all the senses and determines the final part of the visit. There are his hands sewn, but again, the view focuses on the recreation of his great -grandmother’s room that Catá has made on a real scale and with some of the elements he recovered after his death.
Next to the project is Leather flower “I have faces of my loved ones in the palm of my hand as an ephemeral tattoo. When I take those threads of the skin, I make small pieces that are the remains of the perforption action,” says glass enclosed works in glass to hold the remaining silhouettes. He has been recreating his mother’s memory since 2010, his grandmothers and refers to the figure of the grooves with the thread. “It is a superficial work, on the epidermis. There is a wound, in some pieces it came to bleed a little, but I also take all security measures and disinfect everything.” Once the threads are removed, that they do not come out alone, such as when the bass of a pants is frapsed, the marks remain for a while. “I do not consider them physical injuries, but I relate them to emotional pain,” he says, “in this photo, it is also seen that when days later I shower, those faces come out again.”
His work on his hands understands him as part of the writing of his autobiography. “I like to say in a metaphorical way that the work of embroidery in my hands will end when I stay without leaves to write,” he says, the same ones that he puts on my face in each self -portrait because to tell his life there are already the lines that travel the palms.
In less than an hour I realize that their hands also sewn with the Tower of Hercules, the Retiro Park and Galician beaches are not understood without photographs, videos, paintings or lion’s teeth. I have fallen into the viralization trap. Its landscapes accumulate millions of reproductions on their Instagram account and I have stayed there, trying to reference their work as a phenomenon of social networks.
I am not the only one, he explains in front of these images. In 2014 this work began to have a lot of impact. He was called media around the world. “I said no to most,” he confesses.
-Oh really? If you just told me that you self -confinement.
—The approach that was being given to the project was not what I wanted to convey. They wanted television programs to sew the hands to the presenters live. Or celebrities. My work is about my family ties. This is a very intimate action. And the context in which it is done is important. It is not a demonstration of how my hand is coso so that the audience sees it. I am not interested in that type of exposure.
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