What would walls say if they could speak? What questions would we ask walls if we knew they could answer us?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWhat would the walls of Hectolitre say?\u201d <\/em>Javi Fern\u00e1ndez asks me, pointing to the history of this building in les Marolles <\/em>neighborhood of Brussels, where he has been doing an artist residency over the past few months. These walls would have witnessed, among other things, the sexual encounters that took place when the building was a swingers\u2019 club. Bodies brushing against each other, exchanging fluids. Sweat. Tongues. Eyes rolling back. A way of experiencing sexuality beyond the margins of normativity and the capitalist logic of private property. Exchange. Freedom. Community. These dynamics of collectivity and communal living are precisely what still take place today, now through the artistic residencies hosted in this space.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I remember reading or hearing the artist Dora Garc\u00eda speak about the idea\u2014drawing from a point made by Michel Foucault\u2014that sex, no matter how kinky, had never really subverted the status quo. What can be subversive, she continued, is a different way of living and loving together. This is where love appears as a technology of social transformation, as a political tool.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Javi Fern\u00e1ndez, intrigued by the silent testimony of Hectolitre\u2019s walls, carried out a series of scans of details on those walls. He then proposed a collective writing exercise during a session with the other residents of Hectolitre\u2014people who had inhabited that space\u2014 where each person wrote something the walls evoked in them. Like a game of exquisite corpse, a collective narrative emerged. Beyond this experience, there is a broader interest in collective creation practices, and artistic production is understood as the generation of radical care situations. It is through these gatherings, by creating tender and affectionate spaces, that new ways of living and creating together are envisioned.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What would walls say if they could speak?<\/p>\n\n\n\n When I first encountered this project, I immediately thought of the text by psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, \u201cJe parle aux murs\u201d (\u201cI speak to the walls\u201d). In that text, Lacan plays one of his countless word games, based on the phonetic similarity in French between \u201camour\u201d (love) and \u201caux murs\u201d (to the walls). For Lacan, speaking to a wall is not simply speaking in vain\u2014it is speaking from a place of lack, from the impossibility of a response, from solitude. In other words, it is to speak of love. As Lacan suggests, between one subject and another, there is always a wall\u2014the impossibility of fusion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In this project, the walls are far from being obstacles; they become spaces of memory and inscription. A space where traces are left, where what cannot be spoken is written. These writings emerge as murmurs, echoes of bodies that touched without touching. They are also an opportunity to generate community from the singular experience of inhabiting a collective space.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There is, throughout this project, a will to care\u2014care understood as radical attention to the other, to the fragment, to what doesn\u2019t quite fit. This project does not aim to restore a history, but to open cracks through which to imagine different affective communities, where relationships are not based on exchange, but on the singularity of desire\u2014on the possibility of weaving the collective from what is fragmented.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sergi \u00c1lvarez Riosalido <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Barcelona, April 2025<\/p>\n\n\n\n