Hysteria- De Secretis Naturae, AlbumArte (2018). Curated by Paola Ugolini.
Workshop at the Royal Academy of Spain in collaboration with the National Academy of Dance. Critical text by Paola Ugolini.
In the spaces of AlbumArte, María Ángeles Vila Tortosa intervenes with a large site-specific installation that almost completely covers the walls of the first room with a series of engravings on paper and works on canvas of different formats, as in a Renaissance picture gallery. In the center of the room, in a theatrical atmosphere, a large wooden box is the container inside which Alicia Herrero performs a dance performance. In another room there are numerous light boxes, in which the four elements of the earth are represented (air, water, earth and fire) present among the iconographies of the eighteenth-century arch, also called "alchemical door", of the village of Rivodutri in Sabina, in Lazio, connected with human organs (heart, liver, brain, intestine, lungs, kidneys) so as to transform them into symbols of an esoteric research that aims at the union between body and spirit. The play of volumes created by the artist on the walls of the 'room-box' becomes a metaphor to represent both the body and the mind. This giant envelope becomes, for the artist, the conceptual and formal representation of hysteria.