Cardiogram is the new site-specific project proposed by the artist Lola Lasurt for Gallery 6 at the IVAM. The work will involve the creation of two large graphics formalised in the manner of a historical frieze for installation around both the floors making up the gallery.

The starting point of the project was the artist’s visit to the Museu del Gremi Artesà de Fallers de València, a museum dedicated to the festive art of Valencia’s Fallas, where she came across a ninot, a figure spared from the usual destruction, with the name of “Democracy”. Its maker was the Fallero artist José Azpeitia. The project proposes transferring this mysterious ninot to the lower floor of Gallery 6 in order to encompass it spatially within the two graphics.

The graphic on the lower floor will be produced in digitised black and white analogue film with projections of pyrotechnic displays of various types during the Fallas from the 1930s to the late 1970s. The different temporal layers of film will be edited in the manner of an atonal score, with a rhythm marked by the bonfires and the fireworks.
The project proposes an analogy between the aesthetic potential of the sequenced fireworks and the foundations of abstract painting based on twelve-tone scores. The cardiogram is a reference to the idea of a diagnosis of the state of the system, personified in the timeless ninot of “Democracy”. We can also understand the fiesta of the Fallas in its turn as an annual exercise in collective diagnosis that responds to current social and political affairs, doubly suspended this year owing to the pandemic.