Curated by French thinker Georges Didi-Huberman, the exhibition In the Stirring Breeze sets forth a political anthropology of emotion in a poetic tone, sketching channels of respiration and resistance to confront the persuasive culture of capitalism which has filtered into everything. The title, taken from Federico García Lorca’s Romancero gitano (Gypsy Ballads), invokes emotion that flows beyond and is not constricted to one sole subject, where the Lorcian idea of “duende” (a state of heightened emotion or expression) comes into play. Where emotion is understood here as a movement transmitted to collectiveness via a unique body, one that is predisposed to develop into a “commotion”; namely, into a concatenation of emotions that affects a whole, an environment, a relationship.

The show’s point of departure lies in the words En el aire conmovido (In the stirring breeze) from Romance de la luna, luna, with which Lorca binds together, in a combined movement, two invisible elements: one atmospheric (breeze), the other psychological (emotion). By way of a thought-provoking ensemble of artworks and documentary sources, the concept of the show takes on the form of an essay around emotions that go beyond individual and collective psychology to focus on the connoted meaning of the places, times and spaces of poetic percussion, where emotion and politics coalesce.

The exhibition structure is divided into different sections which investigate the potentially transformative side of emotion and its capacity to disrupt and search for otherness. The chapter Thoughts considers how, in approaching the experience of commotion, two focal points can be applied: generating taxonomic systems which allow us to classify emotions and control them, and endeavouring to understand how they pass from one subject to another, making the surrounding air a space that flutters, a “stirring breeze”. In Faces and Gestures, which includes works by Auguste Rodin, Alberto Giacometti, Salvador Dalí and Unica Zürn, among others, the psychoanalytical notion of “symptom” is a central component, an occurrence which expresses a pain originating from a kind of profoundness, be it psychological or bodily, and which, as it is triggered, disrupts reality in its entirety. Underscored in Sites are the limitations of the Cartesian conception of space and the outpouring of emotion within it, with works by James Ensor, Tatiana Trouvé, Joan Miró and Lucio Fontana. The power of emotion in embodying the social, in becoming an action of the masses and power, the transformative effect of which can give rise to new social arrangements and, by contrast, can also be used to legitimise and convey new and old forms of violence, repression and domination is explored in Politics through works by Pier Paolo Pasolini, Käthe Kollwitz, Bertolt Brecht, Goya and survivors of the bombings of Hiroshima. As a prologue and epilogue to the show, the section entitled Infancies vindicates the poetic and political strength of innocence, taking on its contradictory and multifaced nature. For the child, with her chaos and fears, often views the world better than the adult, crossing the surface of things and facing reality from an insubordinate ethos.