20.11.2009 Laura Plana Curadora	Text for the exhibition Identities behind the mask
01.11.2009 Laura Merino Curadora	Text for The thickness of the saw
01.11.2009 Tiana Artigues Neurofisióloga	Text for The thickness of the saw
01.06.09 Francisco Carpio Critic and comisari	Text for Generaciones Caja Madrid
29.05.2009 Eudald Camps Art critic	La fotografía como punto de partida Diari de Girona - Accents
30.12.2008 Jana Leo Artist	The non-person text for the exhibition Esteve Subirah. Les bones intencions (1997-2008)
20.12.2008 Eudald Camps Art critic	Los territorios vagos de la existencia text for the exhibition Esteve Subirah. Les bones intencions (1997-2008)
02.05.2002 Eudald Camps Art critic	Palliative cares text for the catalog of the exhibition Self-medication Cette vie est un hôpital où chaque malade est possédé du désir de changer de lit. Charles Baudelaire. “Anywhere! Just so it is out of the world!" cried Baudelaire's soul, giving way to modernity, and aware, at the same time, that Lisbon or Rotterdam, Batavia or Borneo, as the case may be, continued to be beds in that old hospital for incurable patients that the great Emilio Carrere also spoke of. The urban world, that is, the definitive split with the beauty of nature, was born, and art, in this process, appeared as the privileged space where the great fracture that is sensed above all through language takes place. As Walter Benjamin clairvoyantly announced, modernity is born as a criticism of attempts to reconcile that which is irreconcilable; something that in fact had to continue as it was, since at the centre of this split, paradoxically, lay the last possibility of aperture, of freedom, of reconciliation, or, in Benjamin's words, of redemption. This "negative" work of art, continuing with the analysis made by the Frankfurt School, and especially by Adorno, appeared as a representation of the non-existent, of the unreal; or, yet more, it represented the existent in relation to its power to be different from what it actually is: art as "aphasia" (disjointing of the language that has become an accomplice to a reality manipulated by the media and instrumentalised by the various spheres of power) or art as "shudder" (the memory of a disenchanted world). The context is that characterised by the promise of emancipation based on the discourse of technique or the absurd world that Rah (the Egyptian photographer who serves as an excuse for Esteve Subirah's exhibition) speaks of, which needed doctors (another sophisticated form of power and technique) to cure sick people that he himself (the world where Rah lives) provoked with perverse impunity. The tale told by Rah unfolds as follows: in the world-hospital, the inhabitants-sick people (not patients) decided to self-medicate themselves in a basically desperate attempt to restore their lost autonomy; many of the sick people succumbed to the powerful seduction of the narcotic and they became immersed in a new world (as real or unreal as the other one) characterised by the dramatic relationship imposed between the mind and the flesh. In the end, as with all serious stories, they discovered the implacable tragic truth of Silenus (death, after all) and they went to sleep, placidly, trusting that the inebriation would not wear off too soon. Rah's sick people (Rah is not an Egyptian God; he's a photographer) are - or can be - the characters that appear in Esteve Subirah's depictions. The Self-medication exhibition is based on a reflection that, in the first place, integrates the spectator, turning him into the "user" of a space with unmistakable hospital connotations. The visitor perceives the merger, on the same plane, of elements that are connected to the medical universe (in a necessarily broad sense) and of image obtained through technical, especially digital, means. In this sense, Subirah’s imprint tends to become minimised, with the ultimate goal of letting the "cold" media express, against all predictions, their perverse asepsis. That is: whether one is dealing with television images or manipulated photographs, the "deconstructive conscience", in the sense given by Derrida, is manifested as the will to alter reality to the point of breaking it down and re-composing it (into a work of art, as it were) into a new, unrecognisable and surprising, yet for all that revealing, shape. The best example is offered by the installation Paradisos artificials: Subirah addresses the inversely proportional relationship that is established between the number of "captured" television images and their capacity to signify: as the time of exposure increases, the true nature of the media discourse, that is, its insubstantiality, becomes clear in a process of abstraction that symbolically culminates in a vast blue where the pixel marks the frontier of nowhere. The different lighted soffits occupy their space of false intimacy in a model that approaches that of safe injecting rooms: we can imagine that, like Rah's sick people, the sweet rapture of the narcotic (narcotic also in the sense of a reality show or soap opera) follows an "hallucinatory crescendo" that culminates with the utmost alienation or complete loss of identity. Taking these approaches to the extreme, and adding to it the perplexity of memory, Subirah recreates the Artificial Paradises in a simple TV monitor and, on a small scale, situates an old museum spectator (if one so wishes) whom we sense to be defenceless before the profusion of serial images presented in unknown codes (reminiscing the magnificent film of the same title by Michael Haneke). Irony is more present in the rest of the proposals. The maximum passiveness that a barren individual can achieve as such has intravenous feeding as its paradigm; in El sèrum de cada dia, a pathetic Last Supper draws its "light" from a medical diagnostics box: different characters, lined up behind a large table, are precariously synthesised in simple profiles that remind one of the illustrations on medical prospectuses. As we were saying, the feeding of the characters does not depend on any voluntary act; rather, it results from the sweet drip of the packaged serum. These bodies, reduced to silhouettes and tired expressions, portray their own contemporary dance: as is the case with the dancer Rosa Muñoz, so liked by Subirah, the corporeal presence makes up for the lack of voices. Bread is wheat, the serum of life that Subirah, using an unveiled play of splitting, transforms into 'crop-grown' syringes: from transgenic agriculture (one of the many perversions - yet again - of the technical world) to the replacement of the sacred by the anthropological paradigm (as noted by Feuerbach), the backdrop of Subirah's discourse remains loyal to the will to dislocate normal perception, achieving in this way an opening of meanings that, on occasions, achieves the maximum clearness. It is not the case of an unfocused face occupying the same wall (white, always white) as a large glass cylinder that has been haphazardly attached in a horizontal position: the poetic minim of this intervention once again contains its disturbing element expressed in the form of a test tube. The human presence is diluted and becomes simple waste (as if it were a lowly bacteriological culture in a Petri dish) compared to the more evident and solid presence of the laboratory instruments. Life has given way to the sophistications of the intellect. Palliative Care is a provisional title that refers to the impossibility of curing but to the genuinely human need for relief. Think, for example, of the long corridor (white, always white) connecting the various rooms of a hospital like Notre-Dame-du-Bon-Secours (where Marie de Hennezel, author of the book Intimate Death, works resignedly): at the end of the corridor, a great window is the place where the sick people project their resignation. It is a world limited by a frame and separated by a glass: they know it's real, but for them, given their situation, it can only be contemplated as a portrayal. Their return to the world requires them to overcome their illness, something highly improbable in a palliative care unit: behind the glass, the people out on the street appear to be in perfect health. Eudald Camps (original text in catalan)