LLEIDA POETRY FESTIVAL 2026. Digital Atrium
In 2000, the artist Àngel Jové (Lleida, 1940 – Girona, 2023) locked himself away, all alone, in the Lleida Water Deposit. Hidden in this basement, as if art were returning to the catacombs, and with the idea of holding an exhibition there (which, in fact, was never held), he scattered his works on the floor, on the walls or between columns and documented them photographically. It is an exercise in desecration that confronts space with the emptiness that space hides.
The tank is an abandoned cathedral from which the water refuses to leave completely. The objects that the artist places there (twisted water bottles, a dead otter, a burning chair, clothes, herrings, monochrome paintings…) do nothing but underline these voids. In the photographs that Jové frantically develops every day, more than a thousand in total, the same thing always emerges: nothing.
The camera stubbornly documents this nothingness. The snapshots manifest shadows of shadows, images that fade with an unexpected reflection from time to time. In fact, the gaze, if it is real, is inevitably cloudy, diffuse and a little erased. Or, as Àngel Jové writes on one of the walls of the warehouse: “forever, dark eyes”
In 2000, the artist Àngel Jové (Lleida, 1940 – Girona, 2023) locked himself away, all alone, in the Lleida Water Deposit. Hidden in this basement, as if art were returning to the catacombs, and with the idea of holding an exhibition there (which, in fact, was never held), he scattered his works on the floor, on the walls or between columns and documented them photographically. It is an exercise in desecration that confronts space with the emptiness that space hides.
The tank is an abandoned cathedral from which the water refuses to leave completely. The objects that the artist places there (twisted water bottles, a dead otter, a burning chair, clothes, herrings, monochrome paintings…) do nothing but underline these voids. In the photographs that Jové frantically develops every day, more than a thousand in total, the same thing always emerges: nothing.
The camera stubbornly documents this nothingness. The snapshots manifest shadows of shadows, images that fade with an unexpected reflection from time to time. In fact, the gaze, if it is real, is inevitably cloudy, diffuse and a little erased. Or, as Àngel Jové writes on one of the walls of the warehouse: “forever, dark eyes”
Information point, digital atrium, shop, tanneries and toilets.
