AVELINO SALA’S GREATEST EMERGENCY

Avelino Sala has been described as a “politically resistant” and “socially committed” artist who “critiques state power and control.” However, contrary to other political artists, he does not believe art can radically change the world as much as help us question and understand those structures of power that condition our lives. These are our greatest emergencies, that is, those emergencies which are absent from our spiritual predicament. As we will see, international politics has always been central for Spanish artists, whose installations, sculptures, and collages rescue us into our greatest political, corporate, and state emergencies. But what are these great emergencies and why is he rescuing us “in” them? Shouldn’t we be rescued “from” emergencies instead?

 

We live in an age where the greatest emergencies are the ones we ignore, overlook, and disregard – such as climate change, global surveillance, and political impasses – and are, therefore, the most urgent. The “state of emergency” of the 20th century has been transformed into a condition of “absent emergencies” in the 21st century. This does not entail, for example, that the Coronavirus, the war in Ukraine, or the recent internet outage that caused millions of computers to crash repeatedly, causing problems for airlines, banks, hospitals, and government globally, were not fundamental emergencies that we shouldn’t have confronted at all levels.

 

The problem is that they were great or absent emergencies not long ago. While the World Health Organization, as well as scientists such as David Quammen, warned us for years that the threat of a pandemic virus was imminent; John Mearsheimer, Pepe Escobar, and many other political scientists and journalists also foresaw the invasion if NATO continued to pressure Russia; and cybersecurity experts are constantly warning us the worst internet outage is just around the corner if we don’t build a more resilient infrastructure. The more absent an emergency is from our spiritual predicament, the greater it is. But doesn’t this greatness also imply a higher level of salvation if we begin to confront them?