Manifesta 15: Casa Gomis
Notes is a series of short-form photo-essays on art and thoughts in orbit.
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Notes is a series of short-form photo-essays on art and thoughts in orbit. 〰️
26 October 2024
The fifteenth edition of Manifesta was hosted by Barcelona with an emphasis on spreading the exhibition around the periphery of the city and in satellite towns using a wide variety of venues such as a decommissioned power station, a ninth century monastery, and a panopticon prison. In many cases the venues were more than containers of the art but contributed to the exhibition as works themselves.
One stand out example was Casa Gomis, a modernist home built between 1949-1963 amongst a deltaic environment and pine forest near Barcelona airport and Prat Beach. Designed by architect Antoni Bonet Castellana, Casa Gomis’ defining feature is a parabolic roof line, mimicking a rolling swell, with each wave-like arch containing a separate living space.
Castellana’s spacious design served the needs of his clients Ricardo Gomis and Inés Bertrand who were known for entertaining artists. The large lounge, patios, pool and surrounding garden would have provided ample room for guests. Individual rooms also appear to be multifunctional with builtin bed/seat platforms and sliding partitions allowing for rooms to be reconfigured for multiple guests or for transforming use between sleeping, lounging and desk work.
Casa Gomis has also been attributed as a type of sanctuary for avant-garde artists during the Franco dictatorship. Walking through the rooms and corridors I couldn’t help but imagining the building and grounds being a refuge for not just the artists but a refuge for their creative ideas and political discussions. Sadly Castellana himself could not have benefited from the safe haven he created as he was in exile in Argentina while the house was under construction.
Given this history, Casa Gomis is an emotionally impactful site for an Manifesta and in particular for artworks by Larry Achiampong, Felipe Romero Beltrán and Enrique Ramírez. Achiampong’s work Detention consists of a series of blackboards nestled in the woodland surrounding Casa Gomis. For this work, Achiampong reportedly invited people with influence over others to write out lines such as “The colonial plan never died, it just evolved”. Installed upon the green tiled wall of an internal courtyard, a neon text work by Ramírez also uses the impact of potent statements by quoting the French gardener and landscape architect Gilles Clément. The quote reads: “Para construir un jardín necesitamos de un trozo de tierra y la eternidad” [To build a garden we need a piece of land and eternity]. Beltrán contributes a photo from his series Dialect where he collaborated with young Moroccan immigrants held in state care for three years while being processed for residency status by Spanish authorities. Separated from Beltrán’s larger body of work and being hung in the intimate space of a bedroom, I found that this added an ambiguous duality to the photograph being at once a representation of both care and control.
