Distorted Scenarios No. 1

Distorted Scenarios No. 1 is the title of Joan Horrach’s exhibition, part of Co-Presence is a Passing Gesture, an exhibition season that considers public art as a relational condition in which the intermittent presence of passersby becomes an active element of the work.

 

The installation examines the psychological and social conditions of waiting, drawing on the notion of non-places theorized by Marc Augé – waiting rooms, stations, airports, hospitals, offices, and supermarkets – spaces where the body lingers without belonging, exposed to unresolved social and individual tensions. It is precisely in one of these sites, Lancetti station, that Horrach recreates a waiting room: a symbolic setting through which to question contemporary systems of power and control. The environment both contains and shapes bodies, imposing a logic of efficiency that has turned waiting into something to be eliminated rather than inhabited. The work suggests how the pressure toward productivity increasingly undermines the possibility of lingering in empty time, transforming stillness into something that must be filled.

 

Within this scenario unfolds Performance for Voices, which introduces the presence of choristers in the room. Their bodies occupy the space without interacting, each producing improvised vocal tones that at times overlap, generating brief moments of harmony before dissolving again. The action amplifies the condition already evoked by the installation: an image of coexistence that never fully becomes encounter: bodies sharing the same time and space, together yet irredeemably separate.

 

In this state of suspension, the work opens itself to the distracted gaze of those moving through the station. As the title of the exhibition season suggests, co-presence takes shape through minimal and temporary gestures: fleeting encounters between bodies, glances, and situations that emerge and dissolve in the time of passage.