Inmaculada Salinas (b. Seville 1967) often works with standard paper formats – A4 or A3 – to create large mosaics or sequences that typically include photographs from various sources: taken from the press, from the artist’s own extensive photographic archive, from art history, or by Salinas herself. These photos are integrated into her compositions through drawing or physically as collage. Many of these collages incorporate drawings – made with graphite pencils, markers, and colored pencils – whose origins, arising in many cases from art history itself, add systematic patterns that further complicate the relationship between art and productive labor.

Viral Diary (2020) is presented as an installation of 48 drawings, one for each day corresponding to the period from 15 March to 1 May 2020 – the first 48 days (of 100 in total) of the COVID-19 lockdown in Spain – during which time leaving one’s home even for a walk was officially prohibited. Each drawing is accompanied by a postcard depicting a natural setting, of the sea or the mountains for, as the artist notes, “When I’m in a crisis, I’m not interested in the mundane, only in nature.” The drawings dialogue with this collection of idyllic places, which at the time represented an unattainable desire. If Inmaculada Salinas’ pieces are often permeated by exhaustive detail of the days on which they were created, Viral Diary also involves the memory of a specific historical episode, influenced by the administrative ban on going outside imposed by the Spanish government, a situation each affected country managed differently.

From this stimulus emerges a geometric pattern of twenty-four triangles, one for each hour of the day, converging at a central vertex to form a rectangle. The color schemes are determined by the artist’s box of pencils, which loses one color each day and adds a new one, distinguishing each drawing and underscoring the uniqueness of the days they represent. The dates are noted at the bottom, along with the subtitle “Besos, abrazos, caricias (kisses, hugs, caresses),” a phrase, according to the artist, inspired by Desobediencia, por tu culpa voy a sobrevivir (Disobedience, because of You, I Will Survive), written and published during the early weeks of the lockdown by Bolivian activist María Galindo. Additionally, Salinas highlights the crucial influence of the the idea of "making love to the days" promoted by the Japanese conceptual artist On Kawara, whose practice carries on a historical correspondence with Inmaculada Salinas’s work.

This piece was included in the group exhibition Discurso de incertidumbres (Discourse of Uncertainties) at the 1 Mira Madrid gallery from 10 September to 14 November 2020, featuring works by artists associated with the gallery that were created during the same period or with chronological links to it, as well as during other periods of productive idle time. The relationship between the temporalities of art and its historical position in contrast to capitalist unproductivity is reflected in Inmaculada Salinas’ Viral Diary, a work that not only alludes to a now historical event but is also temporally inscribed within it, tying its form to the very event it references. Additionally, the use of images relates to an exercise in resignification common in Salinas’ work, where she draws from her extensive photographic archive (postcards, family albums, etc.), connecting it with pieces such as Microrrelatos en rojo (Microtales in Red, 2012), Trabajo I and Trabajo II (Work I and Work II, 2017), or others like Recuerdo de Sevilla (Memory of Seville, 2014) and El Turia como ninot (The Turia River as a Ninot, 2017), where she explores the postcard format in diverse ways. In Viral Diary, we encounter a series of views that, when decontextualized, might seem devoid of political purpose. However, chosen at that moment, they take on a completely different meaning. Similarly, the decision to include an inscription like “kisses, hugs, caresses” introduces the presence of a hand that not only executes but, above all, feels and expresses itself.

Viral Diary features in the monograph Inmaculada Salinas completed in 2021, which was published by the Instituto de la Cultura y las Artes de Sevilla as part of the exhibition Memoria del presente, curated by Joaquín Vázquez, at the Atín Aya Hall (2020). 

Ángel Calvo Ulloa