¿Alguna vez has visto la nieve caer? (Have You Ever Seen the Snow Fall?)

This piece, created specifically for a particular space at Museo Reina Sofía, is the last of a series of works within a large project by Mario García Torres about the relationship that another artist, Alighiero Boetti, had with the city of Kabul from 1971 to 1979. Following meticulous research lasting over three years, García Torres shows us a new episode: the One Hotel that Boetti opened in the capital of Afghanistan. The images projected in ¿Alguna vez has visto la nieve caer? (Have You Ever Seen the Snow Fall?), along with the off-screen voice, tell of a conceptual journey somewhere between history, myth and fiction, where the past and the present flow together in a story that takes place within other stories. The political substrate can be felt in the film’s reflections on the changes occurring in the landscape and daily life in Afghanistan, especially after the 9/11 attacks in 2001.
Mario García Torres makes use of the works and vital processes of artists linked to conceptual art in the 1960s and 1970s to produce his own work, in a search for the fissures and displacements present in memory, in the construction of history and in the evolution of Western thought.

Lola Hinojosa