Milk, Snow, Tear, Hand

Milk, Snow, Tear, Hand. Blanca Sánchez’s Way of Making focuses on the practice of Blanca Sánchez Berciano (Madrid, 1948–2007), indivisible from her being and existence. Curator, cultural manager, and collector, the exhibition foregrounds her creative impulse, specifically focusing on the use of Camp aesthetics in her collage practice as a methodology for constructing a visual and conceptual realityof her own.

After living in London, Frankfurt, Paris and Cologne, she returned to Francoist Madrid in 1971. From that moment on she would build a career that stretched across forty years, a time during which she worked with the Vandrés (1971–1980) and Vijande (1981–1986) galleries, as well as the Círculo de Bellas Artes (1992–2006). Although many of the documents gathered here offer an insight into the vibrant Movida movement in Madrid — of which Sánchez was a central figure —, the show econmpasses the full breadth of her trajectory. The materials displayed, some uncertain date, define this curatorial proposal: Sánchez’s creative practice is understood as a constant.  

This approach takes shape in the central table of the exhibition space, which echoes Blanca Sánchez’s workspace: a locus where wide-ranging materials, from documents to flowers, worked as equals. Chocolate wrappers, sugar packets, photographs and cut-outs are arranged to create intuitive associations. Notes are displayed to refer to Sánchez’s professional side, further emphasising how the associative exercise developed in her albums constructed a collage-based logic through she used to navigate between tasks and times. For Sánchez, high- and low-brow culture were not opposites, but rather spaces of interference.   

Built on these documents, Milk, Snow, Tear, Hand revises Sánchez’s work and studies the ways in which she has become a core figure of Madrid’s culture over the last fifty years. Her presence is summoned through the anonymous visual poem that resides in the Blanca Sánchez Berciano Archive, lending the show its title. Blanca, in a glass of milk. Everyday Blanca, raw and ephemeral like snow. Blanca, who feels deeply, who cries and laughs. Blanca, who asks us to stretch our hands out to one another.