METANOIA
since 2018
METANOIA is a group of eight women artists: visual artists Almudena Mora, Angiola Bonanni, Elena Jiménez, Isabel Arroyo, Johanna Speidel, Silvia Reneses, musician and video artist Ebba Rohweder and poet Noni Benegas.
All based in Madrid - although from different countries such as Spain, Italy, Germany and Argentina - we have held monthly meetings since February 2018 to talk about art, visit and comment on exhibitions, exchange information, present our work, give each other mutual support - creating a peargroup.
Since February 2018 monthly meetings. During the pandemic through zoom.
Neighbourhood artists- METANOIA, Almudena Mora's studio, 2019
THE FIRST WAVE
Works in times of a pandemic
Introduction
In March 2020, at the beginning of the general state of alarm and first lockdown, I proposed to our group Metanoia to send each other works in alphabetical order of our names by email.
With no restrictions on theme or medium and with an open end in time, we exchanged our creations for months in a free flow - receiving a work every day and sending a work of our own every eighth day.
The long, open-ended period of time allowed for a continuous artistic production attentive to changing moods in an exceptional and never before experienced situation: the experiences during a pandemic.
The works by Ebba Rohweder presented here were created especially for this project Metanoia en Común between March and July 2020.
The works of Ebba Rohweder
The first works San Isidro I-III are a record of observations, sensations and experiences of general confinement and reflect my specific personal situation: Being a dog owner allowed me to take walks, albeit restricted to a radius of 100 metres around my home in a green area of Madrid with large parks, several cemeteries and the San Isidro mortuary.
These walks, repeated several times a day, always walking the same route, sharpened and thrilled all my senses - sight, hearing, smell - and the rare encounters with other people became an exciting experience.
scaring away the virus NOW is the attempt to come into contact with an invisible and totally unknown virus, a conjuration through a flute improvisation from my balcony expressing the desperation that maybe the virus can hear my music and forcibly disappears.
The view from my balcony up and down San Isidro Mortuary became a painful privilege: the numbers of coronavirus deaths do have faces and were made visible and audible by the endless queue of hearses day after day. I set up the camera on any given day to record this incessant movement and with the camera running I received a call that my friend Elisa had died this day from coronavirus in a nursing home. The video Hearses is a tribute to Elisa and to all those who have died from the pandemic.
Why is there so much suffering and so many deaths from the coronavirus in Spain compared to other countries? What does the spread of the virus depend on and why do some countries seem to release it while others do not? Could the situation have been better controlled and tackled? Everyone looked with admiration to Germany, where the first wave left almost no trace, creating the feeling that everything - as always - is doing better. Now in the middle of the second wave of the pandemic we know that the virus is uncontrollable and unpredictable - the German miracle does not exist.
Gradually emerging from the astonishment of the last few months, I launched the survey Historic Moment I, asking a bird's eye view of personal experience - experiences, sensations, opinions and interpretations. Although I personally had taken it for granted at the end of May that we have lived and are living through a historic moment, the survey provoked some objections and a discussion whether the pandemic provokes a sufficiently existential change for it to be called a historic moment.
The video HARTA (jaded) expresses the feeling of tiredness and exhaustion preparing the following video ESCONDIDO (stashed) : it seems that the virus is gradually retreating but not disappearing.
 Yellow on black background III - acrylic on paper, 21 x 29 cm
Acknowledgements
To the Metanoia group: Almudena Mora, Angiola Bonanni, Elena Jimenez, Isabel Arroyo, Johanna Speidel, Noni Benegas and Silvia Reneses.
I would like to thank my travelling companions in such difficult times for being in permanent contact with me to get through this distressing and overwhelming situation. It was a priceless privilege to receive a work daily, to get answers, comments, critiques on our own work, to create a group to make sure we are alive, to virtually break the closure and to have a critical public in spite of the confinement - so necessary in times without exhibitions, closed galleries and museums and without the possibility of physical encounters.
Thank you all for so many unforgettable gifts.
The works presented here were born in the context of the Metanoia en Común exchange proposal launched in March 2020. Although each work exists independently of all the other works there is a subterranean desire for the not so distant future to complete the narrative/weave/kaleidoscope in an exhibition, catalogue et. al. bringing together the more than 130 works produced by all during the months of the first wave of the pandemic.
Madrid, December 2020
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METANOIA
ISABEL ARROYO, ELENA JIMENEZ, ANGIOLA BONANNI, SILVIA RENESES,
EBBA ROHWEDER, NONI BENEGAS, JOHANNA SPEIDEL and ALMUDENA MORA
2019
Artistas del Barrio - Metanoia
Studio of Almudena Mora
2020
The first wave - every 8 days a work of art
Project from March to July 2020
2021
Project LETTERS TO THE MAGIC QUEENS
2021
Project POSTALS
2022
METANOIA
Exposition Espacio Intermitente, Madrid
San Isidro I, watercolour on paper and text, A4
Translation:
22 March 2020
Any day
I get up and drink my coffee with milk. I get dressed and go out with my dog. It is spring. The birds are singing and many plants are in bloom. By 10 am I have already seen four police patrols and at least six hearses. The streets are empty. There are only people in masks walking their dogs. Today it is sunny.
The German Miracle - Map of Germany in gold leaf and text, 29 x 21 cm
Immersed in the stupor, overwhelmed by such intense feelings experienced during all the past weeks came at last the moment of a certain awakening. But it was not a relieved awakening after a nightmare but a bittersweet awakening from a rusty dream: a lot had changed and nothing had changed. The whole economy came to a standstill for a while and as a consequence all activity calmed down: cars stopped on the pavements, the air was for a while clean and breathable and a silence prevailed.
But one notes that social and political life went on all the time. Now they are bringing out the ecological transition, renewable energies and the EU's Green Deal with billion-dollar subsidies for the automobile industry, for example. It sounds good but it doesn't deliver what it promises and the video Green Deal exemplifies with dissonant humour how green, ecological and sustainable an electric, clean and emission-free car could be.
Hope returns and the end of the tunnel is in sight: The New Reality is being prepared and the lockdown lifted. I did not want to lag behind such optimism even though I noted in my pandemic diary on 22 June 2020: There will be a gradual transition to a new wave... and suddenly there will be another quarantine. From one day to the next. With yellow on a black background I-III I tried to force a colourful and luminous feeling although my forecasts seemed rather dark to me.
The object/book Historical Moment II closes this stage of the first wave and invites in the form of a retrospective to look back over all this time: from the first auguries, events still far away, gradual approach, suddenly full wave to the first wave in decline and the so-called new reality. Next to each sentence there is a free blank page to write one's own comments completing a personal book of the historical moment.
object/book historical moment II, 2020
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