Miguel Adrover
Reborn
Revered as a demigod on catwalks the world over, one day Miguel Adrover (Calonge, 1965) decided to switch off the lights in New York and return in absolute silence, like a warrior after a long battle, to his house in the middle of the Mallorcan countryside. Here, trees and flowers have ousted drugs and alcohol, and glare of the spotlights and darkness of the gloomiest basements has been replaced by the clear dawn. But one thing has not changed, and that is his need to express himself. The capacity to keep on reinventing himself, this time from the depths of his being.
text César Mateu Moyà
photography Em Garland
When you meet Miguel Adrover face to face, you get the feeling you are with a person who knows more than the rest of us mortals. A wisdom born of intuition, but also of that “je ne sais quoi” that cannot be expressed in words, which comes from somewhere very distant, something people like Adrover ooze out of every pore of their skin, and through their gaze as well.
On 9th September 2001, elevated by the Olympian gods of fashion (led by their high priestess Anna Wintour, Editor-in-Chief of Vogue magazine), Adrover presented his collection Utopia in New York, an assertion of the social reality of Islamic countries. Two days later, two planes crashed into New York’s Twin Towers and changed world history. And the history of Miguel Adrover as well.
Just as everything associated to the Arab world was being demonised, Adrover’s Utopia failed, and he decided to go and live in Egypt, where he would buy a horse and carriage to earn his living as a taxi driver in Luxor.
Many years have passed since then, as they say in stories. And on one day in May 2021, surrounded by the peace of his home in Calonge, in the southeast of the island, Miguel Adrover speaks of the past, but above all of the present, by means of an invisible line, like an Ariadne’s thread which simultaneously unites and destroys everything.
“In New York it was normal to take drugs and drink alcohol. Now, here in the countryside, I realise what the effects of that are. When I came home, I needed to connect to nature, start a new life, but not from the outside, like then, but from inside of me. I know I’m not missing anything out there, the high is inside yourself. Another of the best decisions of my life was giving up sex, which takes away so much energy, to devote myself body and soul to my work. I have liberated myself, and I know a new story is beginning. All my love is here, in my work”.
Designing clothes has been forsaken, giving way to a different way of expressing himself: photography. “Now I am an artisan who builds installations and ephemeral stories; with my hands, I create a setting I can use to express myself, and then I photograph it. I put makeup on the mannequins, I retouch them, I polish, scrape and paint them with whitewash. Like in fashion, I have found my way of expressing myself and my authentic language. Maybe I will also have my story on this path”.
At midday every day, Miguel crosses his garden full of flowers he has brought from different countries and heads to his water cistern. He lifts the lid, puts down a 3-metre ladder, climbs down and closes the lid. “Working in a cistern gives me the opportunity to experiment with naked light and the artefacts I choose, artefacts that will transmit that feeling or that beauty. The world is very different when you’re underground, because you can’t feel the outside, you’re in your own world, your own space. For me, there is peace in this cistern. Just a hole to let in the light, which changes depending on the time of day”.
And it is precisely light - La luz – that is the title of Miguel Adrover’s exhibition which can be seen at the Aba Art Lab gallery in Palma these days. “Light is what defines, marks and decides everything. The quest is to understand it, know it and expect it. Light can be seen in the darkness, but in the light you cannot see anything”.
Miguel creates these worlds “in order to feel better, because maybe I don’t like the world I live in. I create a universe of my own so as to be able to exist in some way”.
He uses mannequins in many of his works, because “I know that if they were people or models they would pretend, but mannequins don’t play any role because they are there, they are just a part of creation, another artefact. I have to capture the expression of the mannequin, because in reality, it doesn’t have any expression at all”.
In order to work and place the finishing touch on his works, Miguel uses [...]
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