C0MUNIC4ND0

On the occasion of Telefónica’s 100th anniversary, Fundación Telefónica invites five Spanish creators to reinterpret the company’s enormous technological and audiovisual legacy, made up of more than 85,000 pieces. The result is the exhibition “Miradas que Comunican” (Views that Communicate), a set of newly created artistic installations, addressed from different disciplines and approaches of their authors, which give value and new meaning to these funds. In addition, there is a sixth piece created in the 1970s, which connects us with the telephone as an instrument of human communication.

The multidisciplinary artist Eugènia Balcells; the experimental sound collective Cabosanroque; the visual artist Daniel Canogar; Pep Gatell and the filmmaker Núria Giménez have used key objects in the history of telecommunications for the conception of their pieces. Various models of telephones, distributors and cables, as well as photographs and films from different periods  lead to installations in which history and technology merge with the artistic possibilities of light, sound, color and image. A piece by conceptual artist Isidoro Valcárcel Medina closes the exhibition. The exhibition can be visited for free on the 4th floor of Espacio Fundación Telefónica from June 11, 2024 to January 12, 2025.

Our president and co-founder and artistic director of La Fura dels  Baus, Pep Gatell, together with the team of the Fundación Épica proposes the scenographic installation ‘C0MUNIC4ND0’, deployed in three acts. Three approaches to the immense documentary archive and the technological heritage that Telefónica has been guarding for 100 years and that, under his transforming gaze, acquires a new meaning. 

The first episode begins with moments that illustrate, through anonymous faces and unsuspected objects, the formidable technological feat that made voice communication possible during the first half of the twentieth century. Next to a forest of poles, we find images of the photographers Alfonso and Marín, who, at the end of the 1920s, documented the deployment of telephone lines on behalf of Telefónica.
 
Next, an imposing shortwave transmitter, which between 1927 and 1968 enabled intercontinental communication with America, gives voice to unexpected records. And in the last act, a Rotary section stands as a tribute to the most durable switching equipment in the history of Telefónica; machines that over 70 years served to automatically connect two telephone lines without the intervention of an operator.  

Location:  Espacio Fundación Telefónica C/ Fuencarral, 3, Madrid
Calendar:  From June 11 to January 12, 2025.
Schedule:  Tuesday to Sunday, from 12:00 to 20:00.