The artistic act occurs everywhere. The lack of horizons, of reliable prospects, and the complexity of the capitalistic system make artistic work seem to vanish and become omnipresent in the fabrication of the modern fantasy of art united with life.

It is in this fading process that Alcaide situates bureau désespoir, a project that explores work through its spatial manifestation, drawing on the image of the office forged by popular shows such as Ally McBeal, The Office and Law & Order as well as a certain type of "yuppie" films. Since the 1970s, the office has been portrayed as the setting where power structures are built. On 15 August 1971, Richard Nixon announced that the US would abandon the gold standard; thereafter, the dollar’s worth was entirely dependent on the confidence of its possessor. This ushered in a new era of virtual money and virtual labour, accompanied by the rise and growth of a post-Fordist economy. Offices divided into cubicles and cut off from the outside world became the channels through which massive data streams flowed, swiftly driving virtual financial transactions to extremes with which we are all too familiar since 2008.

The sculptures that comprise bureau désespoir are the product of a quest for a new aesthetic sensibility derived from precarious collages of goods manufactured halfway round the world. That aesthetic is kitsch, "facile" and patently superficial, because what matters is not the composition of forms but the means of production accumulated in them, from invisible factories on other continents to the exclusively informational processes that make up artistic practice.

The exhibition catalogue features an essay by Jose Iglesias Gª-Arenal titled María Alcaide* *Everything changes.

Openning: September 28th, 20.30h.

Educational workshop: October 21th,11.30 to 13.30h.

Guided tour: October 21th, 13.00h.