A universe within four walls

A board hanging on a wall, overflowing with photographs, magazine clippings, stickers, concert tickets… is a familiar image to anyone. If you don't have one at home, it is easy to find one in someone else's. All the images and words, our own and those of others, coexist without prejudice on the canvas imposed by this surface. The life of its owner becomes hopelessly intertwined with memories, childhood idols, and prints of distant and unknown places. In a similar way, the Beatles showed us their own cosmos on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, where they posed alongside a curious group of characters as disparate as Oscar Wilde, Albert Einstein, or Marilyn Monroe.

Many years earlier, Max Ernst, one of the main figures of the Dada movement and Surrealism, defined creativity as “that wonderful capacity which captures realities different from one another and strikes a spark with their juxtaposition.” The board works the same way, but in a material form. Outside the individual, hanging on some wall, it joins distinct, seemingly irreconcilable realities without any connection, so that a flame may ignite between them.

This may perhaps serve the artist as a call to the muses, with which to propagate the Promethean fire through a new creation. Who knows if those were the reasons that led Ramón Gómez de la Serna—a perfect Hispanic representative of that effervescence that was the historical avant-garde—to build his famous estampario. Photos and clippings summarized his personal universe in a gigantic collage that he was elaborating in his studio on Calle Velázquez, in Madrid, while he collected all kinds of trinkets from El Rastro. His office thus became a warehouse of everyday clutter, old wonders that he rescued from oblivion and accumulated as if he lived and worked in a museum.

Today, many kilometers and many years away from that congested room that was once a factory of greguerías, on Calle Fernando IV in Seville, someone passes by our studio from time to time. Inevitably, they stop to peer inside a little longer. In the end, they cannot contain the perplexity, the astonishment, and the resulting questions that pile up in their head. The situations that follow this scene, which is entirely usual, are also surprising.

At Nömad, we have also been collecting a multitude of objects that, extirpated from their context—thanks, this time, not to El Rastro, but to Wallapop—transform themselves as they coexist with one another. An old turquoise oven welcomes those who enter through the door. In any unexpected place, typewriters, video game consoles, and photo cameras cross your path. A wooden ladder goes nowhere, and a motorcycle hangs from the ceiling as if all this were a mechanical workshop. Every now and then, someone even comes in asking to use the restroom. Little can be held against them: decades ago, the premises were occupied by a bar, from which the counter and the tiles on the facade still remain.

After hours of work, following a continuous flow of ideas, creative gifts eventually fade. The capacity Ernst spoke of is not eternal; not everyone has developed it, and those who have, barely manage a fleeting flicker. In these cases, one can only slow down, change location, and try a new perspective. For this, a good option is found behind the studio bar, where our particular board was hung. A huge chalkboard that collects the impressions of anyone who wants to draw or write on it. If this doesn't work, you just need to look up. A slot machine lying on the floor acts as a table, and a cardboard deer questions anyone who dares to withstand its gaze.