Everybody talks about the weather. We don't: Alán Carrasco

In Melancholy of the Left (2019) historian Enzo Traverso points out that, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, which he deems as the end of utopia, those who took part in the revolutionary movements of the sixties and seventies assumed a sad vision of history that traced back to the defeats of the 1930s. Thus, the complete implementation of capitalism would have given rise to a kind of "political melancholy" marked by frustration and the absence of new emancipatory projects. This melancholy is present throughout the exhibition over a body of work that ranges from irony to gravity within the processes of change in recent European history.

Through a dozen pieces of heterogeneous nature –video, installation, sculpture, and painting-, the artist offers a critical look at some political processes in Europe in the last half of the 20th century. As is now customary in his work, the analysis of such processes brings Carrasco to question the strategies implemented in the creation of the stories that make up official history.

The title of the show takes its origin from the 60s when the German Socialist Federation of Students appropriated the well-known slogan of an advertising campaign to alert the population of the need to talk about issues that were of actual relevance.

Under this metaphor, the exhibition brings together a series of works articulated mainly around four blocks, with unexpected vanishing points and intersections among them: the Spanish Transition (1975 - 1982); the German socio-political violence of the 1970s (from the armed start of the RAF to the 1977 escalation known as the “German Autumn”); and the Anni di piombo (Years of Lead) in Italy between 1969 and the end of 1980. Foquismo appears transversally to all of them: a guerrilla combat strategy that, in its attempt to establish itself in Europe, would lead its creators to the defeat.

In this way, the artist sheds light on invisible connections that open possible alternative stories inviting us to rethink and question the hegemonic story. In short, with this project, Alán Carrasco shows an interconnected vision of history where coincidence and causality lead us to that path of political melancholy that runs between utopia and memory.