This exhibition is based on the artist’s personal experience when, in the summer of 2015, after many years away, he returned to the village where he was born. There he meets a childhood friend and, after a day spent reminiscing about stories, places and people, his friend asks him the following question: – Do you want to go to the place where you were born? -. Answering yes to this invitation will lead to a night-time exploration of a sprawling housing development, half-built, which came to a standstill when the property bubble burst in 2008. There, in the middle of a dimly lit street, the friend will silently search for the only remaining trace of a bygone era: a section of wall that once served as a sort of kennel where a neighbour used to keep his dogs. Taking this somewhat recent ruin as his starting point, the friend will silently, step by step, reconstruct the now-vanished urban landscape of what were once the estates and houses where the author’s memories dwelled, before finally uttering the following sentence on a silent, tarmacked street between two empty houses: – This is where your house was; this is where you were born -. Of all those memories they had spoken about just hours earlier, nothing remained. The new world had swept away the spaces and places where people once gathered. As the machines set to work, they dug up every layer of earth that contained a memento, a toy, a tool… anything to suggest that he and his family had once lived there. This sparked the unanswered question that has led to this exhibition today: What’s left over?

Marco Alom (Los Gigantes, Tenerife, 1986) presents an act of poetry in this exhibition that seeks to explore the ruins of a world that is disappearing, becoming a memory; and to delve into how we can capture lived experience when everything is fleeting and destined to be forgotten, from his perspective as a visual artist. Here, drawing is a process that seeks to make tangible something as fleeting as that which grows bigger the more one longs for it. The vanished landscape becomes a totem; old papers, once intended as metaphors for beauty, are now devoured by mould, and the now-distant experience becomes a fable.

In this series, Alom will examine the lines of inquiry that, stemming from that question, have remained uniquely his own in his search for an answer, as he considers them to be as relevant as ever and, at the same time, still unresolved and open to debate. Because, when all is said and done, the answer to the question ‘What’s left over?’ has a starting point – one that humanity has always relied on: turning what eludes us into myth, into a story that transcends and preserves what we once were, and which today is nothing more than paper and ink.