‘Shipwreck Studies’ is a collection of objects brought from my home island in Menorca that used to belong to my great-grandfather’s ship. Craftsman and a man of anarchist beliefs, his last project was the building of a 26 meters long vessel with reclaimed materials from the sea that was to remain moored in the middle of a barren field. Unexpectedly a provoked fire destroyed it.
Twenty-five years on I came back to the same plot of land and gathered few of the remains of materials and objects I could find of his little utopia and travelled with them to my studio in London.
Erola Arcalís (Menorca, 1986) graduated from MA Photography at the Royal College of Art (2017) and is currently based in London. Recent exhibitions include: Rehearsing the Real, Peckham24, London, May 2019; Paisajes Esenciales, JustLX, Lisbon, May 2019; A Corner With Erola Arcalís, solo, A Corner With, London, May 2018.
Arcalís uses the lyricism of the black and white photograph to create fictional narratives that navigate between the stage and the encountered. Her practice combines abstract landscapes and sculptural still life to generate different voices. Arcalís’ images are inspired or make use of poetic text to construct fictions that revolve around myth, dream and personal experience. Central to her process is the materiality of the large format analogue print and the slowness of the 5x4 camera.
Lethe
A voice comes to one in the dark
Imagine.
S. Beckett
'With this sentence, Erola Arcalís invites the viewer to an intimate space. We enter into a cave with only a few references to Greek mythology as a guide. The words “Lethe” and “Aletheia” in Greek translate as “to forget, to conceal” and “to remember, to reveal”, respectively; but it refers also to truth and its negation, untruth. Abstract images coexist with figurative ones, playing with scale and subject. A fragmented still life, an orphaned trace, a singled stalagmite; constitute different voices of memories.'