MIRA BERNABEU The work entitled La genealoga de la conciencia I, II, and III is a new mise en scne of a unitary and

complex artistic project and takes some of the issues that have for the past fifteen years been configuring the oeuvre of Mira Bernabeu a little further. The possibility of representing human beings in their relationships with others and with their group environment, in the sphere of the family, friendships or, as in this case, their associative and community environments; the possibility of working in fiction without falling into myth, confronting the factuality and historicity of events with timeless fiction and, last but not least, how to make form visible, how to convert the work of art into a space mediating between his mises en scne based on participation (his performances) and their distanced presentation by means of photographs, texts and video. All these issues are related, in turn, to a more global endeavour to define a mental and emotional place for human beings in the gap in the spectacle, to paraphrase one of his most well known series. The fact that spectacle is one of the most visible mechanisms of any power and that it is through the mise en scne, its performative capacity that it reveals its persuasive and manipulative potential could be the spark that triggers this new series, the title of which stems from a meaningful Michel Foucault quote: We call genealogy the handmade instrument that enables us to understand the genesis and transformations of the implicit systems which, without us being aware of them, determine our modes of behaviour, govern our way of thinking, in short, rule our lives. Genesis is in the service of truth because, among other things, it reveals the politics of truth and the interests at stake, it reveals the forms of truth and their hegemonic shapes.15 In La genealoga de la conciencia Mira Bernabeu attempts to define a space of personal and collective emancipation in a reality governed by games of power and social, political and cultural exclusion. Starting from initial fieldwork carried out in different associations in Valencia such as Salvem el Cabanyal, Salvem lHorta or Salvem el Botnic,16 the artist has made three series (using photographs, texts and moving images), three mises en scne related to the need to generate spaces for socialisation, spaces for public negotiation that also present their difficulties, due perhaps to the genealogy which we cannot avoid and which is too focused on summaries and rituals of power. As Xavier Antich has pointed out in an essay on the series entitled Panorama domstico. Mise en Scne X, the mise en scne mediates between the conflict and the image, between reality and the visible, in a ritualised stage design of coded gestures. Revisiting the long-standing iconographic tradition of the semantics of gestures, and simultaneously taking as a basis pre-existing gestural codes, almost comically strict, according to which each gesture or gestural pose univocally exteriorises a feeling, an attitude, a meaning, Mira Bernabeu uses these codes in a parodic fashion, on stage (), as counter-images for typifying and codifying habits, ideologies and beliefs. By making the codes visible and explicit he reveals the inapprehensible complexity of those other codes that regulate, less visibly, modes of behaviour.17 The works by Mira Bernabeu are always based on mountingpeople, texts and scenes. In their origin there is always a call to take part in a play, in a performance. As

in many of his earlier series, Bernabeu has chosen a precise setting for La genealoga de la conciencia III, although in this case, however, it is not a theatre but a public space, the course of the River Turia in Valencia, a central space in the city, a green (though developed) rea and a place for festive urban socialisation. In most cases those taking part in his works are not professional actors, albeit, summoned for the spectacle, they become pedagogical material. For in Mira Bernabeus photos gestures are always exaggerated, as an artifice of estrangement and distancing, and the photographic image is articulated around very precise structures and placements, almost always based on the relationship between different groups. But the fact is that in addition the artist has masked all those taking part in his pictures, another strategy the artist often turns to and which enables him to uphold, in some cases, the idea of an us in contrast with an individual me; in others, to make the personal me disappear beneath the archetype that represents the character portrayed; and in all cases influence the relations between individuals as opposed to individual positions. This hyper-visible dramatic composition, this structure of legibility (between theatrical staging and the virtuality of photography) is, once again and as we have pointed out in the case of other artists, what helps the image to be a bearer of knowledge and not just of illusion: We can only show, only exhibit by arranging: not things themselvesfor arranging things is making them into a picture or a mere cataloguebut their differences, their mutual clashes, their confrontations, their conflicts.18