La Casa y la Fabrica - Mijail Mitrovic

To inquire into the origins. Trace them in the family album. To figure them. In La casa y la fábrica we see two series of paintings that, although different, work under a common search. One series traces the journey that goes from migration to the house of one's own, to private property in the city. A property that also migrates from the paternal side to the maternal side of the family. Then, the domestic interior as a space that supports one's own existence, where one finds the conditions that allow one to be who one is. The album appears as the source of a history that is not entirely one's own and not entirely alien, and the detail is the way to appropriate it in order to seek a generalization in which other gazes can recognize themselves. Another series records the displacements in the social space from the factory to the cellar and from the cellar to the bedroom. Now the album is read as a historical document, as a source available to capture the hopes and impasses of a class, rooted in the photos of the paternal grandmother and in the views of the father and mother as a couple. Here the family photograph does not break down into detail, but wants to become a glimpse of history.

The private uses of photography -the album unreadable without the memory that deciphers it- are not at odds here with its public uses -its insertion in the historical narrative-. It is a matter of both uses intertwining and affecting each other, and also of setting reciprocal conditions: to speak of the self under the desire to understand the collective experience, and not to block that desire; to approach history to understand the place that the self inhabits together with those others that allowed it to form itself, to say itself, to know itself as someone. It is about preserving that representational content (such a person, such an object, such a time and place) but under a new form that brings it closer to the experience of those of us who look at the paintings.

Both Fernando and Benjamín face the question of their origins not so much to clarify who they are, but to approach the narration of their family history as a genuinely collective matter. They do so in a different way from the role that autobiography seems to play in the visual arts since the end of the last century. The self is not the center of the gaze, but rather it is displaced to give way to figurations of the web of material conditions and affections that precede and embrace it. Here painting is presented as a way of reaching the historical experience, which is not the dissolution of what has been lived in the impersonal narrative, but an approach to the experience of reaching this world, to glimpse the illusions of an era in order to find a way of locating oneself in them.