Gianluca Morini - Transmission from the Telos
“In the end, the Empty Spain is this: a vial of essences. It may be empty, but it still holds the aromas of the past because it has been kept tightly sealed.”
“Empty Spain” is a term coined by Sergio del Molino in his 2019 book of the same name. The name has since entered everyday vocabulary to describe those areas of the Iberian Peninsula where population density can, in some cases, be comparable to that of Lapland.
Empty Spain is not just a demographic territory, but a historical, philosophical, and a mental nation, deeply ingrained in its inhabitants—especially in those who have left it and those visiting it for the first time. It is a fluid outcome of specific historical and artistic processes that have shaped an imaginary which has only recently begun to change.”
I lived in this part of Spain for a year during the Erasmus program, specifically in the Autonomous Region of Murcia, before moving to Barcelona the following year—a journey similar, though only topographically, to the one taken by many people from the interior before me.
The region of Murcia was a fundamental experience: the area stretching from the capital to the sea, nestled between the Subbaetic Mountains and Cartagena, was for me like a barren arena of the time—one of the many that make up the region, where I have seen and heard this concept flowing in the wind and dust. Crossing them during my wanderings was both a formative process and a meaningful companion to my personal growth and to the deep loneliness I felt at that time.
It was a phase of life rich with internal earthquakes, and in that landscape—which, as Molino says, is an intimate description, since a landscape in itself describes nothing—I found a space I could dialogue with: the projection, I hope a shared one, of an eternal past and of a frequency, increasingly evident, of a future sense.
