Meet the Artist // Carlos Bonet

Could you tell me more about your background and the project you are proposing for this three-month residency at GlogauAIR?

The project has two antecedents: one is a residence I did at the Konvent 2.0 in Cal Rosal, Barcelona, where I was working on the relationship between clubbing and the industrial area. I wanted to find a nightclub in a very big industrial area that would give me this feeling of being in a sort of ecclesiastical temple, the idea of ritual. The second one comes from a project I was doing for an exhibition in the contemporary museum of my city. The work was about “the young workers”, the people who built the museum at the end of the 90 ́s. The generation of the housing bubble, the “golden era”, political corruption, the boom of nightclubbing, people would work, buy a car, and go partying. It was a very hedonistic context and I found it interesting to work on these relationships. During this research I found an image of five friends partying at Pirámide, a nightclub in Castellón, my city. It had been taken during a night in 2009, the same year that the club closed due to the 2008 economic crisis. And I started to think about the after party, the idea of the end of the party, the end of nightclubbing, the end of the housing bubble, the consequence of extreme political corruption, and also the end of hedonistic life. It all felt to me like a poetic analogy.

Later, I found a book from my childhood called “The Famous Five” by Enid Blyton, and I instantly made the connection between the five in the image and the five of the book. What was interesting to me is that the book described a very archetypical idea of youth, which was a total contrast with the friends in the picture. So my work is about putting teenagehood and youth in perspective. I feel particularly interested in this moment of life because it’s the time when people build their identity, the identity of a group, and where all the romanticism of the absolute ideas come from, also political ideas.

Your project could be interpreted self-referential, given that you share both the age and hometown of its protagonists. How do your personal experiences after the economic crisis intersect with the characters in The Famous Five? What aspects of the contrast between the historical context in the book and your own at that moment captured your attention the most?

The question is interesting because it lets me explain this. Despite the title, this is not an autobiographical project through which I aim to narrate something personal or intimate. It is more a collective portrait in which we never see the faces of these five friends. My interest is for the viewer to fill in that gap with their own experience. I’m fascinated about what happens during the teenage years and the interpretation of social and cultural movements, by making a contrast between them and the contradictions of the famous archetypes of that era. For example, “The Famous Five” are five friends who represent idealized models of youth, figures perfectly shaped to fit in society. Their concept of life and adventure is completely different from that of the five friends after the club. For the latter, adventure is tied more to excess, drugs, and nightlife. This contrast brings up the idea of a lost innocence and reflects the signs of a depressed, troubled era.

Would you say that your very early experiences in a context of economic restriction shaped your artistic vision and trajectory? If so, how do you feel they have influenced your way of perceiving and creating?

Well, even though I try to distance myself, my personal vision is present. My memories from that time are not only mine, but also experiences from friends or other people. I lived and observed the things that most young (and not so young) people saw at that time such as the TV news shows or political speeches. Ultimately, this project is a portrait and analysis of that period of youth from an observer’s perspective, it could be me or any other viewer, interested in knowing more about the story behind this. Although it focuses on a specific time and place, I believe it transcends that local category and can be understood by any other generation or anywhere else in the world. In the end, local questions are universal.

In your project for GlogauAIR, you aim to evoke the ghostly presence of these five friends to explore the themes of hedonism, power and capitalism. Could you tell us more about the mediums you have chosen for this representation and why?

This is a project carried out using painting, photography and video. The materials I am using as references are files found on the internet or my own images. For example, I went to the Pirámide nightclub years after it closed and documented its state of abandonment with video and photography. All this with the intention of reconstructing that ghostly idea of those five friends in the midst of that abandonment and to recall the idea of what we once were collectively.

On the other hand, my walks around Berlin have given me the idea of the monumental. And the images are constructed with this intention, not only as a tribute, but also under the idea of constructing something incomplete, shapeless and antagonistic to a sculptural genre that often embraces the idea of totality and the epic of romantic ideals. Ideals that also feed into the archetype that shapes our cultural view of adolescence and youth. To this end, I have designed a kind of angel that appears repeatedly and is inspired by the one-winged hero drawn by Paul Klee.

But the idea of this project, it’s not closed. It’ll probably develop as an open painting project, or a video project. This is only one part of that. The idea is to keep working with the same generation, illustrating more stories like the famous five, happening in another context, in another place. Like the punk movement, or squatting houses for example. Bringing another perspective to the cultural movements of youth.