Subtitles for Reality Installation

Chiquita Room and the bookstores Terranova in Barcelona and Saint-Martin in Brussels are collaborating on a triangular project by the artist Antonio Menchen (Toledo, 1983). On September 6 and 7, this room hosts Subtitles for Reality, a site-specific installation that transforms the gallery into an interactive film set and turns the audience into co-authors of a temporary fiction, using images, props, film fragments, and a soundtrack as guides to subtitle reality. Simultaneously, the artist presents another installation in the window of our sister-neighbor Terranova for the launch of the publication Colección 5.

With this action-installation, Antonio Menchen and Erich Weiss invite the audience to peek at the other side of the coin, at the chance encounters in a space-time where the rules of what is seen (and what is not seen) seem to belong to an opposite order. The detail and scale, the play of front-back relationships, chance or necessity propose an altered reading of the fiction that governs cinema or fashion. The gallery transforms into a film set with the blessing of Godard, and the bookstore’s window is wallpapered with the darkness to which Margiela condemned the fitting room of his atelier. Between these two points, a threshold filters the distorted reflection of reality.

On September 13, the presentation of Colección 6 will take place with a third installation at Saint-Martin Bookshop, another exciting project that has transformed the former studio of designer Martin Margiela into a unique bookstore in Brussels. Colección is the series of publications by Antonio Menchen that also showcases collections of images the artist has been working with for years. In each new volume, he invites colleagues who know the collection and its working process to reflect on or from the images, their forms, and the echoes between them. The text accompanying volume 5 of the collection is by the curator, editor, and researcher Laura Vallés Vílchez, and number 6 is signed by the Belgian curator and artist, Erich Weiss.