“At first I think it’s impossible, that I can only invite one or two artists,” the Spaniard goes on. “Then I think, [the challenge] is good for me, and at that moment – El ángel exterminador!”

Like a light being switched on, Castro Flórez realised that this was the ideal opportunity to pursue an idea that had been at the back of his mind for many years: a project centred around Luis Buñuel’s 1962 cult film El ángel exterminador (The Exterminating Angel), with its themes of entrapment and claustrophobia.

In the past, he had toyed with the idea of using the film for “maybe a book, an essay, a documentary” but it had never seemed quite right. This time, however, he knew he was on to something.

Buoyed by his flash of inspiration, the Madrid-based international curator set about contacting Spanish artists whose work had links with the subject matter or ideas in the film. The result is 28 artists’ paintings, sculptures, photographs, videos and installations in a snapshot of Spain’s contemporary art scene.

Lending a theatrical dimension to the concept, there are also five evening events by dancers, actors and other performance artists. Films (including, of course, the title film) will screen next door at Cinematek. The exhibition, organised as part of the European Union’s Spanish presidency, is the biggest of its kind in Brussels since Europalia Spain 25 years ago.

Hamster wheel

Javier Pérez’s “60 Steps” consists of a video projection and a hollow wheel a couple of metres high, with steps around its outer edge that keep rotating like a huge hamster wheel. Looking through the wheel, you see a video projection of a naked man just managing to clamber up a white wall.

But after watching this hypnotic movement for a while, you realise that he is in fact climbing up very large steps that keep rotating around and around. The fragility of man and the seeming futility of actions are themes of Buñuel’s film.

“Luis Buñuel has always been a reference in my work,” Pérez tells me, standing in front of “60 Steps”, which he had to adapt to the smaller-than-usual space. “The screen is usually four times bigger than it is here,” he says. “It’s the first time it has been so small, but we discovered that it works anyway.” Buñuel himself, in fact, originally wanted to film El ángel exterminador extravagantly in Brussels but had to settle for Mexico, where he was living in exile.

Just as Pérez’s work was on show at the Guggenheim Bilbao a decade ago, almost all of the works have been exhibited before. But it’s the first time they have been brought together.

The painted mural on the wall leading down to the exhibition space, however, is site-specific. Painted by Enrique Marty, it’s full of larger-than-life, brightly coloured figures – sometimes grotesque, sometimes mad-looking. The naked figure at the top pointing down the stairs is Castro Flórez – “a ridiculous fat man,” the curator laughs, describing the painted figure of himself.

A forgotten problem

Jacobo Castellano also came to Brussels to stage his “Serie Corrales” (2004), photos that depicts what the artist calls “a forgotten problem”: the refugee camps in Western Sahara. An area that used to be a Spanish colony, since Spain’s withdrawal in 1975, it has been the subject of ownership disputes taken to the United Nations. The camps are “a closed space...you can’t get in or out,” says Castellano.

Opposite the photographs is an installation that Castellano made after a visit to his old family home, long abandoned, in the Spanish village of Villargordo, part of the city of Jaén. Having asked his father for the keys, he set off to explore the past and found “a house in chaos”, full of long-forgotten objects covered with thick layers of dust.

His installation incorporates some of those objects, including floorboards and cinema seats that had belonged to his grandfather, who owned the village’s first, and last, cinema.

Houses and rooms are a recurring theme in the exhibition, from Xavier Arenós’ black-and-white photo series “Escape plan” to Bernardí Roig’s “Wittgenstein House”, a model based on the Vienna villa of the same name that philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein had built in the 1920s for his sister.

There are no long, explanatory texts around the exhibition as Castro Flórez wanted to avoid the written word taking over from the visual element. What he has mounted on the walls in large letters, though, are snippets of dialogue from El ángel exterminador. Some are in the original Spanish, others translated into French, Dutch or English, such as “You must forgive him. Tonight he feels young again.”

The curator says that the “trivial, very simple” sentences reflect our own minds. “We don’t have philosophical minds. We forget sentences don’t always have the perfect words.”

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The film that sparked a festival

Luis Buñuel’s 1962 surrealist film El ángel exterminador follows what happens to a group of upper-class friends who, after an evening at the opera, go back to one of their luxurious villas. They have dinner and then find that, inexplicably, they are unable to leave the house. Trapped in a room for days, tensions mount. There are quarrels, hallucinations and suicide, as the bourgeoisie succumbs to its animalistic instincts.