Newsletter
by Cayetano Truyols
29th - 31th August, 2025
C/ dels Codols, 16 08002 Barcelona
Here we go again, what can I say? MECLAP1 is nothing more than an acronym for me- cago-en-la-puta, I swear. It was supposed to help me, to support my endeavor, to do things better and with more care, but my time at the academy has been more like a Kunstellipsebewegung—an artificially elliptical turn—two years spent tracing a long parabola: in the process you go insane, though somehow it feels more like being drugged with lucidity, watching it become unbearable. I think meaning and coherence can no longer go hand in hand for me from now on, which is a serious problem when it comes to producing an art whose mechanics rely on drafting projects and selling them. Maybe I’ve institutionally broken myself.slftUp to now, this was how I had learned to make my way through. Two years in which I haven’t done much in artistic terms. One conclusion, or moral of the story, is that thinking too much stifles action or productive acts, and therefore Poiesis. Another: talibán comes from Arabic/Persian (ṭālibān), which is the plural of ṭālib (طالب) and literally means “students” or “those who seek (knowledge).” to use talibán sarcastically to refer to people who are stubborn, intransigent, and deeply dogmatic, pseudo-instituters of an authoritarian and fundamentalist regime dressed up in morality and values. What if the heroes of thought are potentially a kind of terrorist? Watch out. On rare occasions I’ve been able to free myself from my restraints. Listening to music has been one of the few experiences that allowed me to channel emotions. Normally I spent my days from waking up until bedtime doing the MECLAP1 homework and studying without listening to music, I only made time for it on the way to the supermarket, during breaks. One day Disasterpiece by Slipknot queued up, and it played right as I was at the checkout. From my headphones came the line: “I’m gonna slit your throat and fuck the wound.” Since this was a somewhat hysterical reality, emotionally excessive, I paused a moment to think whether we lower ourselves to choosing this kind of frustrated situation, to live this way, so naturally alienated. The combination of Mercadona and Spotify is pretty brutal. Disasterpiece is like a catharsis, a way of facing inner demons and the darkness we all carry inside. What if, maybe, through art, rather than trying to distill or awaken some kind of supreme feeling, it’s better to try to express something super-emo? Curiously, hysteria is what happens in response to a void, one that by its very nature calls to be filled. About the desert: it is in fact its emptiness that conditions it to be conquered by the settler, as in the case of the American Wilderness, which became an analogy to the biblical desert as a founding myth or promised land. It’s as if it had a giant sign promising debauchery without consequences. That empty place is where the most fantastic and excessive narratives live and proliferate, without laws or restraints, without limits to imagination. Roswell and UFO sightings, westerns and the vicissitudes of a freedom without limits, Billy the Kid and Stoner Rock also inhabit the desert. The desert: an ideal place to rewrite history however you please, also fantastic for getting high. Mary, Meth, or Peyote. The game has simple rules: Mexico -> New Mexico -> New Old New Mexico, similar to Camp Nou -> Nou Camp Nou -> Nou Nou Camp Nou, or masculinity -> new masculinity -> New old masculinity / Old new masculinity.
1. MECLAP. Máster en estudios comparados en arte literatura y pensamiento.