I met Laia in college, when we were both in our early 20s. I vaguely recall some pieces she was making with her boyfriend at the time, involving sculpture and the body. She stood out because she knew what she was doing, but she was so breezy and so daintily humble about it. I was working on some very out-there, analog sound experiments with my then boyfriend and I was to find out much later that Laia had reciprocal feelings, because she thought that we were so cool.    

I have only come to know a handful of people who live by an unwavering, deeply rooted sense of duty to their purpose, in the way that Laia does. She takes her work so seriously that you know she has always been ready to die on this hill, while being the most self-humorous being, and remaining the most tied up by the cruel demands of reality, and paying her dues to the tragicomic peaks and valleys of everyday life. 

A few years later I was starting to build the foundations of what would become my thesis, and I saw her perform at one of the institutional musts for up and coming emerging artists in Barcelona. She put on a tight show, you could tell she was in it for the long haul. Her project was a performance assembled around a very simple advertisement of herself, where she lyricized a greeting followed by her phone number and contact info. She sang but she was clearly not a singer, she produced a stage and a presence and she blew you away with the bluntness of such a risky yet somehow elegant endeavor. I immediately interviewed her about what I was academically focusing on, which was the gesture of pure self-production as a shiny and flagrant exemplification of the contemporary void left by all encompassing individualistic capitalism. Her piece was a key element in stirring my studies in the direction that shaped up to become a personal Phd ordeal over the ensuing years. 

I had seen an immersive sound installation by Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller at the contemporary art museum in the city at around that time, and a tiny part of me was, one could say, forever changed. I vividly remember mentioning this show as a personal influence at a workshop with a popular local critic and getting a condescending reaction of disdain, as the vibe of the moment was a much more stripped down, evidently conceptual to a fault, so-low-production-you-almost-can’t-tell-there’s-art-in-the-room, sort of thing. But I knew they, and Laia and I, were onto something. 

Laia went on to turn her body into a vessel for something larger than herself, and started making scripts that became scores that became sculptures that became stages. I was fascinated by the way every one of her projects put her almost over the edge, left us hanging by a thread with discomfort and awe, and made her exponentially better, all wrapped up in one. 

She was equally fascinated by words, sounds that aren’t music but have the potential to be, and our own voices as vehicles for truly independent investigation. She found her triggers in understated literary finds, secondary poetic ventures and dusty family treasures. We worked on a project named FOOD together at a small small gallery, which stemmed from the recipes found in an old English table manners and general lady duties book. The final result was an almost disturbingly discompassed sound piece blasting from the middle of the room, walls covered with large pieces of paper written in aggressively painterly black ink letters, which were the recipe scores she had activated on the microphone. One couldn’t perceive the unlikely origin of her process but the richness of the layers was present, and that effect hasn’t ceased to make an impression on us when we are confronted with her work, but instead has only grown in sheer thickness.

In her recent years’ trajectory, Laia has been graciously approaching unadorned basic themes of the interaction between the human body and its context. Water and air have been hovering over her projects. Both what they mean culturally, and how they go through, in and out of our organs: how the body performs in a strained relation with them. Tension is always induced in Laia’s work. At first, we encounter a structure. It resembles something we know, but it isn’t quite that, and it isn’t quite functional, nor completely inoperative. Then Laia comes on stage with an unassuming look, and then everything changes, no one can be left indifferent. 

Laia and I have worked together on shaping up portfolios and writing applications, putting together shows and what’s coming close to a multiple decade friendship. I have seen her making her own way into this field by depending on no one, doing everything necessary to finance her next project and being devoted to keeping herself shocked and interested by putting herself on the line. This project couldn’t be more personal for Andrew and I. And nothing would make more sense than starting it off with an artist who embodies to such an extent what we believe in, and tells a story of how trajectories are built and kept on mutual trust. We are incredibly proud to present KITE as the first production at Spiritvessel and we hope that it carries our intentions into the future for a very long time.

-Sira Pizà

Laia Estruch was born in Barcelona in 1981. She attended the University of Barcelona for Fine Arts and finished her studies at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York. This year she has been awarded the City of Barcelona Award for Visual Arts, and has showed her work at PUBLICS, Helsinki; Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary TBA21-Academy, Córdoba; Fundación Sandretto, Madrid; Erhard Flórez Gallery, Madrid; Cerezales Antonio y Cinia Foundation, León; Fabra i Coats Centre d'Art, Barcelona, amongst others. In recent years, she has exhibited in Barcelona at MACBA, ADN Gallery, Antoni Tàpies Foundation, Miró Foundation, Picasso Museum, La Virreina Centre de la imatge de Barcelona, and Joan Brossa Foundation; and performed at Antic Teatre, Festival Salmon, and Festival Grec. She has also recently shown her work at Centro Gallego de Arte Contemporáneo (CGAC), Santiago de Compostela; La Casa Encendida, Madrid; Centro Párraga de Múrcia; Teatro Pradillo, Madrid; and Deleste Festival, València. Laia is represented by Erhard Flórez Gallery in Madrid.

All images by Ana Fàbrega. Courtesy of the artist and Spiritvessel.