Do we have any future? Any hope? “History still to be written” stated the Spanish artist Avelino Sala. Books for an Unwritten History is a project that focuses on the call of attention to the time we live in. The time of the environmental alarm, a time to rethink our actions, a vital moment.The phrases were taken from Fridays for Future slogans extracted from the cardboards that are seen in the movement initiated by activist Greta Thunberg in 2018.COAL KILLS, THE END or IT IS OUR TURN NOW represent a call to action “in a collapse time of a dark era” says Avelino Sala.The phrases, often written by the artist in capital letters, are here conceptualized in monochrome laser cut sculptural books that allude to minimalism. Striking slogans that make these pieces could be part of a library that has yet to be written.In addition to the sculptures, paintings of different sizes are also part of the project.The aesthetic —that also have a strong ethical— raised by Avelino Sala throughout his career articulate a discourse certainly personal, coherent, and yet complex in the looks of people who look at his artwork. The diversity of mechanisms employed and expressive languages, which include among others the video, sculpture, photography, neon, drawing or plural world of objects, keeps his coherent idea of art but at the same time complex on the diversity of views. His images, largely appear to us like allegories or metonymies that exemplify the loneliness of the individual and his frailties. As we can see in his new project MANIOBRAS DE ESCAPISMO (Escape Maneuvers).“September arrives with the same uncertainty that we had a few months ago when the suspensions and cancellations of all cultural programming began to occur. Some projects have been left by the wayside, others have been relocated and all have made our precariousness clear. We do not know what will happen, meanwhile, we continue to act as a funambulist on the rope of our own instability.” says Avelino. A complex balance that, if the cable does not break or he does not lose its footing, will take Avelino Sala to the Contemporary Culture Space of Cádiz – ECCO Cádiz – to inaugurate on October a sleight-of-hand exercise divided into three acts that have the curatorship of Fernando Gómez de la Cuesta.
