Pau Ardid
October 1st - November
The title of Ardid’s exhibition emerged from the architecture of Under the Spell itself. Two tiled walls in the basement predate the gallery. Over time, pressure has caused the tiles to shift and crack where the joints could no longer accommodate their movement. This architectural fracture became the starting point from which Ardid gathered the photographs presented in the exhibition. The movement joint appears here both as a concrete construction device and as a proposition: how much movement can a structure accommodate before it breaks? How can individual parts retain the freedom to move while continuing to form a collective whole?
Ardid’s photographic practice is deeply contextual. He does not generally work through predetermined series or themes; his photographs emerge from encounters with everyday life, accumulated through chance and attention, and only later brought into relation with one another. An image may acquire its significance years after it was taken, through its proximity to another image or a new historical circumstance. Photography becomes a kind of zeitgeist capsule assembled retrospectively.
In Movement Joints, Ardid extends the architectural term towards time itself. Leisure, boredom and patience as forms of movement joint: intervals in which experience can settle without the necessity of becoming productive. These apparently inactive periods provide room for thought, learning, play and forms of attention without an immediate purpose. Against the logic of semiocapitalism, which increasingly converts attention, communication and even free time into productive activity, leisure and learning for their own sake become conditions for the production of democratic subjectivity, or what writer and architect Jack Self has called the civic soul. Throughout the exhibition, however, these spaces are also shown under pressure: interrupted, monetised and, like the tiles themselves, sometimes cracked.
A recurring tension is therefore established between movement and its management, inaction and productivity, attention and capture. A mobile phone announces a “meeting” during a crowded bus journey; a delivery motorbike has been adapted to hold three phones simultaneously; a woman photographs her coffee before drinking it; an advertisement urges passers-by to “see Vienna, not #Vienna.” Rather than illustrating a thesis about technology, the photographs register a world in which experience increasingly arrives accompanied by its own recording, circulation and conversion into information. The phone does not simply document the present; it begins to reorganise how the present is lived, already anticipating its future image.
The exhibition opens with different forms of movement. In Shifty Landscape Shot by J several weathers occupy the same scene, sunlight remaining in the distance as a dark rain cloud moves in, a prelude to the shifting conditions that run through the exhibition. A package containing an artwork, opened and torn apart by Border Force, presents another kind of movement: circulation interrupted by suspicion, the object quite literally broken open by distrust. Nearby, a plant pushes through cracked pavement. Together, these photographs establish different conditions under which bodies and objects are allowed, directed, interrupted or forced to move.
Other works turn towards forms of suspended time, but importantly, not all suspension is the same. A Deliveroo rider waits in the snow because someone has yet to open a door; elsewhere, a conversation unfolds in the sea, seemingly detached from the demands of productivity. In another photograph, spilled milk spreads across the pavement while a figure in the background appears almost Beckettian in their removal from purposeful action. These intervals might arise through obligation, pleasure, or social exclusion. They sit in tension with the woman photographing her coffee, where an everyday moment is immediately captured and folded back into the digital economy. The photographs ask who has access to unoccupied time, who is forced into it, and what happens when even leisure becomes something to record, circulate and monetise.
The exhibition also moves through different temporal registers. radio nostalgia looks backwards; fortune teller attempts to anticipate what has not yet happened; lottery scratch cards occupy the narrow interval between possibility and result. Across these works, time folds back, hopes for the future, or projects itself elsewhere. Movement Joints repeatedly returns to the threshold between waiting and acting, wasting time and using it, participating in a system and momentarily slipping beyond its demands.
This instability becomes particularly explicit in paper slide, a work made from a newspaper spread. Through the mechanics of printing, folding and sequencing, images belonging to separate stories fall into accidental adjacency. Here, Ukrainian soldiers encounter the interior of a members’ club, producing an uneasy proximity between war and leisure, collective emergency and protected privilege. The physical structure of the newspaper generates a relationship that neither image contained independently. Chance, so central to Ardid’s practice, enters not only through the act of photographing but through the material systems that organise and circulate images.
A similar principle structures the installation itself. Photographs of markedly different dimensions are distributed across the walls rather than arranged into a uniform sequence. Ardid composes through colour, scale, visual direction, architectural interruptions and the distances between images. Red and yellow figures are set against the presence of a blue wall, creating a chromatic anchor through the three primary colours; smaller photographs punctuate broad expanses of wall before the rhythm is disrupted by the scale of Paper Slide. The exhibition operates almost as a score, establishing beats, pauses, accelerations and silences. Like a movement joint, the intervals between photographs allow separate elements to retain their autonomy while remaining part of the same structure.
In a photograph of a demonstration organised as a parade demanding the creation of a public park in Brazil, a boy turns his head and looks backwards while the crowd continues forward. The gesture is tiny, almost incidental, but within an exhibition concerned with collective structures and individual movement it becomes particularly resonant. He remains part of the group while directing his attention elsewhere. The image condenses the proposition of the movement joint: cohesion doesn’t require identical direction.
Movement Joints ultimately asks what kinds of gaps a collective life requires. A joint succeeds not by preventing movement, but by allowing it without fracturing the structure around it. At a moment when the intervals between work, consumption, communication and leisure are increasingly compressed, Ardid’s photographs insist on the value of what happens in between: waiting, looking, learning, wandering, getting bored, changing direction. A structure capable of holding difference must also leave room for movement.
On the occasion of the exhibition, Under the Spell presents two new editions: an artist’s book, also titled Movement Joints, which expands the photographic body beyond the works installed in the gallery, and Meiji Jingu trees (one second edition), ten unique photographs made at the sacred forest in Tokyo.
Looking upwards, Ardid photographed the movement of the forest’s upper canopy in burst mode, producing ten slightly different successive images over the course of one second. The branches exhibit what is known as crown shyness, in which neighbouring crowns leave channels, rivers of sky, between one another rather than fully overlapping, allowing light through. The resulting gaps offer a striking counterpart to the exhibition’s title: proximity maintained through the preservation of space between individual bodies. The forest returns us to the architectural joint with which the exhibition began. In both, the gap is not the absence of structure but one of its conditions. Tiles require room to expand; trees grow alongside one another without entirely closing the space between their crowns; photographs acquire meaning through the intervals separating them; people require periods of leisure, boredom and inactivity in which experience can sediment rather than immediately becoming productive.
Jéssica Varrichio
October 2026
October 2026