DAMIAN´S (IN)VISIBLE CITIES

 

Parallel to the road there’s a city carved out of dreams. An unnamed city. I arrived there as one arrives at the truth: by chance. I was thirsty after walking for days in the desert. Tired of running, I rested my head on an almost-empty backpack I was carrying. There were no supplies left, and in the daydream my fears of snakes, scorpions, and so much sand without water, evaporated. I let myself flop like a feather in the quicksand-idea of fate’s inevitability — "Let God’s will be done."

 

I lost consciousness, fainting again. I think I heard the sound of a helicopter and agitated people surrounding me, and then I knew nothing more until now. I’m in a spacious, high-ceilinged room, walls without frames or decorations, vast pointed arched windows through which I like to watch this massive city.

 

I have scoured the floor looking for windows to peek into a tailspin. This building might be one of the highest in the area, and each landscape looks like a grid. The aerial perspective gives me vertigo. I have vertigo and for the first time in my life, I was joyful when I experienced this horror. It’s a delicious fear: I am alive! No matter whether asleep or awake, now I am alive.

 

I’m not sleepy. I’m not alone. I walked through every room on this floor, there are people of different ages, colors, smells...but no stairs. How long have I been here? I want to go out, to get to know the city below. I still haven’t spoken to my roommates. I don’t know what language they speak. I feel that sometimes they look at me with intrigue, and though I tried to talk to a boy with an enigmatic smile (I like happy people); it didn’t work: he can’t hear nor see.

 

Sometimes I’d like to talk to someone, to know where I am. To know who put wings on trains and tricycles (from my window I see them go past, so far away), who are these people and what does that code, F-20 mean, printed on each of the doors of our rooms, graffiti on walls in hallways and bathrooms, tattoos on the foreheads of some of my neighbors...

 

The funny thing is that our rooms are cities by themselves, the closest room to mine is a skyscraper and my bed is a roof. We also have parks, health and education institutions, banks, press, shopping malls, bars, a sky with planes, trains, boats, light and darkness, and there is also death. Our cities, post-modern by nature, have different architectural styles, emotional and physical eclecticism, marks of good and painful memories (and drugs to relieve them). While destruction is our fate (beyond the economic, ecological and moral crises that make urban living so complex), I wanted to go through countless city-planets and numbers, and other stories of the ego, reason, societies, and wars. This is not a time for gentlemen-saviors, nor have I run into Shakespeare or Freud, nor Italo Calvino or Marco Polo, or Spiderman. There is no truth or lies here, nor a space defined as a country, continents, or planets...these cities exist because they exist in my mind and in yours, and here we were (un)happy. However, there is nothing I miss more than the mysterious taste of the grass, the dawn, and the waves. Sometimes I run away to the forest, to the mountains seeking the wolf’s howl, or to the sea, to the desert ... Oh, deliver me from my bondages!

 

A piece of wood in Damian Valdes’ path became the first construction of the first city his hands assembled. He told me the plank resembled the shape of a building, then another one looked like a boat...and before he had the idea of building a city, he was creating small buildings from raw materials he found. Then with his tools he designed streets on a base where he placed those first objects he made. This procedure was repeated as new forms and inspiring elements arose: scrap metal and fragments of wood and plastic, metal filaments, old toys, etc., all this growing his city. A building today, a telescope the next day, a car with a camera and wings, another building, a Harley motorcycle, a train, a submarine, more buildings... All of them extravagant and detailed, pieces of cities that progressed and multiplied very fast. The whittling process amazes observers of his work. The Riera Studio collective knows him well and encourages him to create, just as he did when he engaged in his first drawings.

 

Today, Friday, March 13th, 2015, this gallery (re)opens its doors to Damian’s cities — (in)visible, unmentionable and timeless, hoping the viewer will discover them, go into them, walk, live their own experience, stumble, lift themselves in a timely flying-car; find the Gothic city of superheroes with modern skyscrapers, a temple, war and peace, hope and discomfort, (un)love, their history or others’ history, aquatic, terrestrial and surreal worlds… and then they find a way out.

 

Giselle Victoria Gomez, curator and specialist in Art History