Institutional collection · ARCO Madrid 2025 · Alicante 2025

The Videoteca de Castilla-La Mancha is a public contemporary-art initiative formed by videocreations donated by national and international artists. Its first phase brought together 26 works by 13 artists, connecting artistic experimentation, moving image, education and access to contemporary culture.

José Cosme in the collection

• Artist: José Cosme · Valencia, 1968
• Work: ¿Dónde está el elemento 3? – Plástica del espíritu
• Date: videoperformance produced in 2015, as stated in the Alicante exhibition catalogue
• Medium: video art / videoperformance
• Collection: Videoteca de Castilla-La Mancha
• Institutional context: Junta de Comunidades de Castilla-La Mancha, in collaboration with the Centro de Arte Moderno y Contemporáneo de Castilla-La Mancha / CORPO and the regional museum network

The Alicante catalogue confirms José Cosme as one of the artists exhibited and devotes an extended individual entry to the work. It identifies him as a multidisciplinary artist, teacher, researcher and theologian whose practice is strongly connected with conceptualism and Arte Povera.

The work revisits Manresa, Joseph Beuys’s action at Galerie Schmela in Düsseldorf in 1966. It translates that historical reference into the present through a documentary structure, the reactivation of gestures and the symbolic use of felt. This continuation belongs to a longer line of research initiated by Cosme’s 2005 action ¿Dónde está el elemento 3?.

Structure and visual language

• An introductory text followed by two parts: “Elemento 1” and “Elemento 2”.
• In the first part, hands interact playfully with threads and unusual objects taken from a suitcase.
• In the second, multiple images are combined while parallel arms meet and work together to unwrap an object concealed in felt.
• Black-and-white imagery and a deliberately retro visual register.
• The simultaneous presence of a laptop and a felt-covered television.
• Typewriter sounds and analogue references that suspend the work between different technological eras.
• A slow, restrained action intended to make silence perceptible and create an affective, almost liturgical experience.

Felt is not treated merely as material: it becomes a Beuysian sign that preserves the invisible energy of what it contains. The catalogue frames the work as a search for the unseen and for the spiritual or supernatural dimension of matter.