UNED Exhibition Hall, Barbastro. 1999
And what about that discreet, enchanted, frozen and strange aesthetic of the closed rooms we find when browsing the corridors of sleepy country houses, Portuguese guesthouses, small-town theatres, mansions devoured by their own tangled gardens, bourgeois flats blackened by faulty chimneys and other unlikely constructions? In this room, a child died many years ago, consumed by fever, and since then the blinded windows have not been opened to the sun, nor have the sheets on the neat little bed been unfolded, nor have his favourite toys been wound up. ‘One more angel in heaven, everyone said… He would be your age now.’ In that other room on the top floor, the deranged relative spent half his life in seclusion, inventing parties on winter nights, playing a whiny jukebox, dragging chairs across the floor, imitating the popping of an imaginary champagne cork with a click of his tongue, and now sleeping a fatal real estate quarantine made of silence and leaks.
Forty years without cutting her nails. All her things are still up there, just as she left them… One of these days we’ll have to call the junk man.‘ And what about that pompous and sinister villa, built by a wealthy Indian who made his fortune in Venezuela, spied on with reverential fear on the way to the beach, through the disorderly masses of oleanders and laurels? ’The maid heard nothing. They were found embracing at the foot of the stairs. They say their hearts were torn out… The jewels were never found.”
Emili Manzano