Exhibition: Let the Future be decided in Small Places 

About Lariot Collective: 
Lariot Collective is a nomadic gallery based in London launched in January 2021 and founded by Carla Lariot  and Luca Sandigliano.
The gallery works with an itinerant model that tries to rethink the classic concept of a static gallery, and represents emerging artists and new talents in order to promote their work creating a synergy and interchange between different spaces and cities.
They promote dialogue and international exchange between art, architecture, design and other disciplines; between artists and their audience with them as the bridge keeping this synergy constant in order to become cultural agents.
 
About Santiago Talavera: 
The central axis of Santiago Talavera’s work is the reflection on the human condition through the investigation of landscape and its symbolic, narrative and spatial possibilities. The absence of the human being in his works, in combination with an intimate and absurd atmosphere in which past and future seem to intermingle, accentuate the need to think about the place we occupy, rather than as mere observers.
Through drawing, painting or video, Santiago Talavera prefigures and reconstructs space by investigating the imaginative possibilities of nature. His scenes seem to form a fragmented story where the newly occurring and the imminent open paths to speculation, and in which conflicts arising from the relationship between culture and nature are filtered.
 
About the exhibition:
Let the Future be decided in Small Places:
 
“In my works there is an abundance of semi-abandoned constructions that appear contained by theatre stands. As if we were the last spectators of some function to which we either arrived early or late, in these works the surrounding natural space appears to take the central role. The apparent “lack of event” allows me to develop scenes where the dispute is situated inside and outside, as if centre stage comprised the stage, the backstage and the surrounding building.
 
The landscape allows me to displace the main role of the human in order to propose places where, although we are “out of shot”, we are no longer the only actors. The series of works “The past will have been a strange planet” shows small canvases painted with acrylic and graphite where storage rooms, obsolete machinery and improvised tests on architectural remains coexist with our waste, vegetation and non-human animals.
 
This interaction allows outcomes and narratives to develop on another scale. Perhaps the “time without time” that we have experienced during the pandemic could serve as a guide, as it has undoubtedly amplified already existing needs and intuitions: the desire to live in a time not chained to the means of production, to be able to attend to the secondary or almost insignificant and, above all, overcome the hauntological anaesthesia that reminds us of the nostalgia of any prospective attempt to realise the future.
 
In some works in this exhibition, improvised signs appear, recently dismantled or in the process. “No more dystopia” shows the Hollywood sign transformed into a new emblem on Mount Lee in Los Angeles. Made during the months of confinement in 2020, this work proposes a reflection on how to imagine better worlds in which to be together again. A group of inter-species workers toils in the groping search for a habitable future despite the fact that it is proved, again and again, that all futures are cancelled.  
 
With each work I try to place the viewer outside the time scales and perspective that we are used to. In the series “En la vida anterior” I develop a narrative thread in a loop between a past disaster and a utopian future. The window of a dismantled car opens up a new scenario where we regain hope, a “New Island” that returns to give way to the same cycle. This lack of definition seeks a way of looking, in which the past and the future are intertwined, the small and macro follow each other, the details are decisive and perhaps, like a butterfly effect, it is about being able to observe very big things from a reduced scale.”
 
Santiago Talavera (Spain, 1979)

The exhibition is free to enter. To find out more contact the organisers