Ignasi Aballí
Listado (15 Dudas), 2009

Manuel Borja-Villel: (…) There is another aspect that interests me about your work that you have often spoke about: its anamnesic quality. This is, of course, opposed to the kind of collective amnesia imposed by the excess of information and fake news. But I also believe that there is a disjunction with respect to the archive rhetoric which found its way into contemporary art in the nineties. You make inventories and lists but the result is not obvious. And although some people have discerned the influence of the theories of the French critic Nicolas Bourriaud in your practice, your art is not formalist, because it questions our very possibility of perception and decision-taking ability. The spectator is not part of a supposed ideal community nor a member of a group that relates in space with forms and colours. I would say that the spectator of your work is always perplexed.

Ignasi Aballí: It has probably something to do with the attraction I feel towards absence and emptiness, towards speaking of things through their traces and not explicitly, but through what the events and the passing of time have left behind, their prints. I am interested in speaking of things indirectly, in a roundabout way, to circle around them. (…) Picking up on your reference to the archive, a part of my work is in fact based on gathering certain materials over long periods of time which I then classify, order and present in a form different to how I found them. An example of this would be the works I made from newspapers, Listados [Lists] (1998–2015) and all the projects based on the use of this everyday object.

Excerpts from a conversation between Manuel Borja-Villel and Ignasi Aballí published in “Correction”,
Spanish Pavilion, La Biennale di Venezia 2022.