Bernardí Roig. HEM ARRIBAT A L’INFERN!

Hem arribat a l’infern! [We have reached hell!] A triggering statement, on the one hand, and a final destination, on the other.

Early March 1895. Son Corró estate, Costitx, Mallorca. A farmhand, whose back is broken from working so hard, suggests to his overseer that they move some huge rocks to expand the planting area and make better use of the land.

At dusk, after moving the first stones and partially digging over the soil, the tip of the hoe struck a metal object, followed by the appearance of some massive horns. At that precise moment, the farmer uttered the crucial phrase: “We have reached hell!”

That metallic sound, caused by the hoe going astray, was the origin of the exhibition “Caps [y] Bous. El tercer cuerno” [“Caps [and] Bous: The Third Horn”] at the Museo Arqueológico Nacional earlier this year.

This fable about chance shows how random events, combined with the imagination of popular culture, can alter an object’s history. The so-called Bous de Costitx [Costitx’s Bulls] had not existed for 2,500 years, although they once did: idolised, protected, symbolised and even buried. They represented fears, defeats and hallucinations, but they never had a body. In the absence of a torso and limbs, they were hung on walls and posts, or placed on columns. Their exhumation involved giving space back to the found object’s skin.[1]

 

Mid-September 2025. In the Museu de Mallorca, there is a large-scale still life installation: a reliquary of debris wilfully disposed on a nine-metre-long altar, where—punctuated by an electronic optical illusion—the presumed remains of the opulent shipwreck of memory lie.

It is a mountain of discarded fragments that attempts to give form to an absence. Here it is the original bronze Bous de Costitx themselves that are absent, currently hanging in the Museo Arqueológico in Madrid, trapped in the eternal demand for their return to the Museu de Mallorca.

The museum’s collection includes four patinated plaster casts that imitate the bronze skin of these heads, with two copies dating from the 1930s and two from the 1980s. In this installation, they are accompanied by a mountain of rubble, fragments and remnants of unstitched memory. There are ears, horns, tear ducts, snouts, eyes and plaster folds, and there is also dust, lots of it. All the residual debris from a process that is still attempting to capture an appearance, visible only in the instant of the strobe flash. It is the optical illusion of a presence that has not yet arrived. They are still in Madrid.

The continuous flicker of a strobe light creates a persistent, luminous vibration that disrupts our sense of presence, taking us to a place where experience hollows out and gives way to emptiness.

That nervous light’s gleam contains a spontaneous and interrupted eloquence; it is the echo of the absent image.

The flash is, of course, the moment when the darkness stops simmering.

This archaeology of debris, made up of discarded forms taken from the same mould, is suspended in a pattern of intermittent visibility that overwhelms our retina and disrupts the certainties of our gaze. Any image’s non-negotiable condition is to be seen, which is why what we see is not what is there, but what looks back at us.

Images bring things into being, but above all, they are what they hide.

 

NOTE:

The installation Hem arribat a l’infern! at the Museu de Mallorca is the final stage of a project by Bernardí Roig featuring the Bous de Costitx as a reference image. It began at the Centre Pompidou Málaga (2022) with “The Labyrinth of Light and the Minotaur’s Head”, continued at the Museo Arqueológico Nacional with “Caps [and] Bous: The Third Horn” (2025) and will conclude on 25 September with a lecture-performance by philosopher and art critic Fernando Castro Flórez at the post-Talayotic shrine of Son Corró in Costitx.

[1] Text by Bernardí Roig in “Caps [and] Bous: The Third Horn”. Museo Arqueológico Nacional. Madrid. January–May 2025.