Inhabiting Johanna Failer’s painting

Javier Díaz-Guardiola* on the exhibition
„Cómo vivir en los intersticios“ at CAAC, Seville, 2026.

* Javier Díaz-Guardiola (Madrid, 1976) is a journalist, exhibition curator and art critic. He is currently coordinator of ABC Cultural (the arts supplement of the national daily ABC), editor-in-chief of ABCdeARCO, and author of the art blog “Siete de un golpe”.

(…) For some time now, the subject of housing and the instability that haunts it have been the constant companions of Johanna Failer (Tapfheim, Germany, 1993), for whom the Iniciarte programme has now opened the doors of the CAAC in Seville, the city where she has lived for the last five years. The title of the exhibition she devised for this highly significant venue, which “housed” Carthusian monks for several centuries, is How To Live in the Interstices. To the artist, it feels like an accurate description of the increasingly difficult task of finding a little corner of the world in which to peacefully hang one’s hat, especially for someone like her who bounces back and forth between two cities (she still has ties to Dresden in her native Germany, where she is a PhD candidate at the HfBK Hamburg and frequents the city’s libraries to conduct her research) and has chosen to pursue a career in art, which, as everyone knows, is a “high-risk” occupation with completely unpredictable income levels.

The rhythm and reality of the world around us are frenzied, and her intention is to find a space within that frenzy, a haven where she can concentrate and put down roots. „How To Live in the Interstices“ addresses the insecurity of the housing market by using the architectural form of the bunker as a point of reference. Through a series of paintings and the way they are arranged in space, she is able to “imagine utopian shelters that satisfy a collective longing for privacy and protection which, in these times of perennial crisis, seem increasingly unattainable”. The isolated space of the bunker becomes an echo chamber for this artist’s housing-related needs and desires. And the fact that her show occupies a former chapel in what is now a museum only facilitates the transposition and amplification of her message. 

This is not Failer’s first artistic foray into these domains. I am thinking, for example, of her Place To Sit series, where she explored interior design as something imbued with political power and far from neutral. The more organic, playful forms that design adopts in times of crisis express the (neo-Romantic) longing for a refuge where we can turn our backs on the world, but they also represent an attempt to conceal the power mechanisms at work. However, the most important precedent for understanding the artist’s latest proposal is A Bunker of One’s Own, the series immediately preceding this show, which was based on two antithetical building types: the solid, windowless bunker, and “glass architecture”, those immense transparent facades favoured by banks, government buildings and private luxury properties. Despite its suggestion of visibility, glass can simultaneously conceal and be a symbol of power. For philosophers like Walter Benjamin, the glass house even embodied a utopian ideal: a society with no secrets, no private property and no social barriers. Today, however, that promise seems to have been reversed. While glass facades continue to suggest transparency, in reality they often represent financial and political might. Glazing thus becomes a technology of visibility that paradoxically hides the structures it supports. Concrete, on the other hand, is exactly what it claims to be and reserves its occupants’ right to opacity. For this very reason, in times of climate change and housing shortages, it appears that the revolutionary thing is actually to occupy a vacant bunker.

At this point, a new element is added to the equation: the difficulty many experience in gaining access to housing. And human beings, those rational animals that never cease to amaze us, are capable of coming up with the most unexpected solutions. While half of the population (if not more) are racking their brains to find a halfway decent place where they can lead a more or less respectable life as they drown in debt, another (fortunately not very high) percentage is thinking about constructing a private bunker as a second or third home, believing it to be the wisest course in these days of global crisis. As Johanna pointed out to me, the proliferation of privately owned bunkers—it is estimated that there are about 400 in Spain, in contrast to the scarcity or non-existence of public shelters—reflects a growing fear of global threats (nuclear war, another coronavirus, a “black swan” that causes financial markets to crash) as well as the privatisation of the concepts of protection and refuge. 

Specialist firms market such spaces as the ultimate guarantee of security, comfort and exclusivity, reinforcing the idea that protection is a privilege rather than a universal right. And this reminds me of the recent Netflix series Billionaires’ Bunker, in which a clever bunch tries to bilk another foolish yet filthy rich bunch by selling them places in an underground shelter equipped with every possible comfort and convenience to survive an imminent global cataclysm, which the first group actually fakes to keep the second group cowed and willing to cough up the cash. 

As I continue to dig, I find that this Andalusian initiative by Johanna Failer has its source in the anguish and despair of some, the stupidity of others and the conclusions of her next-to-last project. But I’m going to drive the spade even deeper to uncover a bit more history: a temporary residency in Hamburg and an attempt to establish ties with that city, combined with an unproductive search for housing there, opened Johanna’s eyes to the fact that that German city-state is riddled with countless old bunkers. Most of them are visible (Hochbunker or “high bunkers” are above-ground boxes of reinforced concrete that look quite odd—or not so odd once you get used to the sight—between the facades of apartment blocks and corporate buildings), a few were converted into cultural centres or restaurants, and almost all of them now sit empty because drilling a single window in one of those thick walls is too laborious to be worth the cost, and demolishing them would also be exorbitant.

That gave her an idea: since there aren’t enough houses for everyone, let’s occupy the bunkers. There are over 500 of them, and they’re empty! They’d provide decent living conditions, even with drawbacks like the lack of natural light. At the very least, why not “occupy” one bunker, if only artistically? Because it’s about something far more drastic than turning the bunker into an arts centre: the ultimate goal is to remedy a chronic residential problem and so be able to live with dignity and continue making art. In any case, such spaces are cold, uninviting and ill-suited to human habitation. Failer invites us to wonder if those abandoned structures could be imagined differently: not as monuments to fear, but as spaces capable of meeting basic contemporary needs.

A Bunker of One’s Own was therefore a project that talked about needs, but also about wants and desires. And the final pictorial meditation was not motivated by urgency alone. In that respect, it already had utopian undertones. Now—returning to the present—in another setting and with a different intention, this artist unifies the vision that access to the safety of a decent home is becoming something increasingly impenetrable and unattainable, especially for the younger generations. At the same time, the image of the ideal home is being hammered into our heads by the mainstream media, advertising, social media, films and television (have you ever stopped to think, when watching a TV series or a movie, how even the most “down-and-out” characters always seem to live in massive flats or mansions in the city centre that most of us could never dream of? And yet they’re all out of work or complaining that their job doesn’t pay enough to make ends meet. I won’t cite any examples because I’m sure several have already occurred to you). 

For Johanna Failer, such idealised representations, with their promise of happiness and fulfilment, become an unconscious aspiration, a collective idea that lingers in our mindscape, even knowing that it differs radically from reality. Projecting our internalised visions of what we think the “good life” entails onto a place like an empty bunker is one of the cornerstones of this exhibition. The bunker is a metaphorical safe space that can be inhabited by anyone willing to use their eyes and imagination. That, in a nutshell, is “living in the interstices of capitalism”.

Interestingly, throughout her career as a painter, Johanna Failer has always noticed the “object” first and their “environs” second. The surrounding space only made an appearance via the people who occupied it or the things inherent to it. Consequently, evidence of humanity was perceptible despite its absence, in a sense, echoing great artists like Vilhelm Hammershøi, whose work I was recently able to admire in a memorable show at the Thyssen in Madrid. The painter’s scenes, in those early days, were ordinary yet focused on drawing attention to the domestication of the context, rather than on any political connotations it might have. This would later be one of the most apparent changes in her modus operandi, which brings us to her present-day activities, although it was not the only one, for her process has also varied. Ultimately, Johanna aims to capture imaginary spaces that do not exist, and her working process transcends the pictorial sphere. Her “fridge” is stocked with photographs that she turns into collages: a fascinating archive of appropriated images, grouped in folders (settings, empty spaces, beds, etc.), which she converts into new realities by drawing or cutting and pasting their parts, creating spaces that only exist in her imagination where she gives herself licence to introduce alien, bewildering elements. But this scaffolding, which helps her to control light and scale, introduces a hint of realism (a certain “verism”, we might say) that is later carried over to the canvas.

Additionally, her painting becomes one big trompe l’oeil, in part because of what it shows but also because it surpasses the rectangular window-frame format, using shaped canvases to defy the limits of representation. Failer thinks of trompe l’oeil as an invitation to share the illusion “that painting is capable of creating sensations and possibilities (the sensation of passing through a window or entering an adjacent space; what the appearance of a ladder or a window signifies or recreates in a closed space)”, while also making it clear that this is just an illusion, because what we are looking at is a painting. 

The same game carries over to desires: the artist proposes spaces that she or we would like to inhabit, something patently impossible. Actually, I think that’s an understatement: not only is it not possible, but we have to wonder if it is even desirable. She gives me an example: think about the confinement of a conventional happy family, boxed in amid designer furniture and recurring Sunday boredom… those images have been fed to us, shaped by long-term media exposure and etched in our minds like an unconscious (heteronormative and class-based) desire. Yet once all of that has been achieved, like the adventurers in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. when they reach the place where their deepest desires can be fulfilled, we probably wouldn’t even want it. And that plants another doubt in our minds: to what extent are the ideals of protection, stability and home that we pursue actually our own? And so cracks begin to appear in the image of our aspirations, symbols that turn what we desire into something we also fear. Another material in the painting of „How To Live in the Interstices“. For that reason, once in a while—and this is very interesting—Failer chooses to show us her hand: as our eyes wander over her pictures, we realise that the painter has left us a trail of bread crumbs to follow, clues to a process that we become aware of when we notice there are omissions, unfinished parts or hairpin turns that bring us face-to-face with paint itself (a brushstroke, impasto, colours mixing before our very eyes…). They are switches that dispel the illusion and bring us back to reality. Her process is always a return trip.

In light of the foregoing, it is easy to see why “ambiguous” and “unsettling” are two adjectives frequently used to describe Failer’s practice. Johanna told me that she divided the pictures of this Sevillian series into two groups. Her classification system is highly personal and internal, but it works for her: “pictures of paranoia”, as she calls them, and “pictures of serenity”. The former group depicts more obvious dangers, such as a snake, while the latter reflects signs of an unshakeable hope, an inner serenity in times of perpetual crisis (she is not interested in painting dystopian scenes, but rather in offering consolation or a remedy, if only emotional) or a certain kind of abstractedness (a fulfilling coexistence between people, a state of tranquillity that cannot be reduced to material wellbeing; in fact, it is in the material realm where the other side of the coin lurks, the trap). 

However, for their author, the best pieces are the ones that integrate both paranoia and serenity, that make us want to inhabit the spaces they portray but which also contain something that feels a bit off and makes us wary. In contrast to earlier series in which Failer sought to achieve results that allowed the eye to rest and soothed the senses, creating a brief pause to escape from the hectic pace of our lives, here that pleasant feeling is combined with an unsettling tendency that appears to introduce a new line of investigation in her painting. 

Failer herself uses painting to confirm that the result is painterly. Sometimes she wants us to see that painting is a process and for the outcome to be less realistic. This happened in her previous series, when she realised that a polished technique does not lead to change in the work. Yet every inhabited space is in a constant state of flux; such spaces are never fully defined. For that reason, she took more joy in painting her new settings with some imperfections, instead of the arrogantly, insultingly beautiful spaces featured in lifestyle magazines. She wants us to realise that these are places where things actually happen, not mere selfie backdrops.

Given the size of the exhibition space at the CAAC, a room brimming with character, Johanna knew that she would need large-format works for this show, because that was the best way to create the impression that a second space is unfolding before the viewer’s eyes, even though that perception is constantly disrupted. She put all this in context with much smaller pieces that feature elements of the larger ones and work with them to create an ostensible world. They timidly call attention to spatial details of the overall composition. Then there are two “vanishing points” where two small miracles are worked for this deconsecrated space: the apse, where three of the works come together to form a kind of altarpiece; and the stone slab on the floor of that side chamber marking the former location of the tomb of Archbishop Gonzalo de Mena in what was once a Carthusian monastery or charterhouse. The idea of exhibiting in non white-cube venues appeals strongly to Johanna. In fact, when talking about herself and how she paints spaces, it prompts her to orchestrate fascinating dialogues between very different spatial realities. Naturally, the storied halls of the CAAC posed quite a challenge. Their interaction with her latest series generates thought-provoking clashes that somehow end up working. Those rooms are dimly lit and impose their own rhythm and ritual on visitors, which serves to amplify the bunker idea she wants to convey. The outline of that tomb on the floor has become part of the display furniture, a makeshift yet quite suitable horizontal screen for projecting a custom-made animated video with symbols from her paintings, like the snake or panther that appear in other scenes and whose movements lend the whole thing a dreamlike quality. As she says, it was something the space demanded.

The individual in search of shelter, protection, and painting as Johanna Failer’s personal shelter: “Yes, absolutely,” she declares. The artist admits she has always wanted to tell stories through her work, and she finds that narrative potential tempered, not too literal or too eloquent—in the tempos of painting. She also likes the possibility of turning her activity into an ongoing process that expands in the studio each day. She finds its artisanal aspect beguiling: going to the studio every day and dealing with a specific materiality unique to painting, with a capacity to send messages that she hasn’t found in any other medium.(…)

As I mentioned earlier, for the past five years the artist has been living in the Spanish region of Andalusia, and she acknowledges that her painting has been affected by this change of scenery. It may partly explain why the human figure has deliberately made an appearance in her oeuvre. But the impact of that relocation is most evident in her palette, the new range of colours she uses. The

shades of grey so frequently seen in her earlier series, which kept the stage from being completely overtaken by black and white, in the same vein as Hammershøi and other northern painters, gave way to a more diverse array of chromatic proposals.

The actual location from which she paints has also changed: Johanna used to depict spaces in her works while physically occupying those spaces. In such moments, the pictorial exercise was essentially focused on the study of light, while conceptual preoccupations were relegated to the background. In Seville, she indulged her intentions even more, resorting to tools like collage and photography, the layering and rearranging that precede the act of painting. Finally, the full weight of Andalusian pictorial tradition has ended up exerting its influence, apparent not only in the use of brighter colours but also in the urge to work on larger scales. Little by little, Johanna is pushing the boundaries of her own painting while she inhabits it. 

(…) But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. For now, we must find our bearings in her Seville exhibition. Without realising it, Johanna has turned a setting that might initially seem hostile to painting and contemporaneity into a warm, welcoming environment. And that is precisely what she aspired to achieve with the group of works we are now admiring. Does this mean she has reached her destination or, better said, fulfilled her destiny, even if that destiny has an as-yet uncertain future in store for us? I think it does. Welcome home.

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