Y la visión lejana del centro apenas visible, y la visión que los claros del bosque ofrecen, parecen prometer, más que una visión nueva, un medio de visibilidad donde la imagen sea real y el pensamiento y el sentir se identifiquen sin que sea a costa de que se pierdan el uno en el otro o de que se anulen.

María Zambrano, Claros del bosque

[And the distant vision of the barely visible centre, and the vision that the forest clearings offer, seem to promise, more than a new vision, a means of visibility where the image is real and thought and feelings are identified without being lost in each other or cancelled out.

María Zambrano, Forest glades]

An exhibition is a landscape, an ecosystem of vulnerable relationships where we are summoned by the thickness of the environment, by the complexity of what surrounds us. The landscape in which we situate ourselves is not the clearing of the forest, but it has it as its centre and as a promise of the existence of a slow and luminous horizon, always beyond but always nearby. Thus, we take the idea of landscape not as a reference point of what is ideal, but as a space of tension, as a framework where the problems that affect our present flourish and where binarisms are unravelled.

What does an empty room sound like when it is no longer empty? What does a forest sound like when seeds sprout? How do you pay attention to background noise when there are so many voices? The echo is the breath of the forest. The echo does not anticipate and dilute when it is born, but stays to live within us like a wave, like a subtle impact on our body that reminds us that we are accompanied. The echo does not give away its origin; it invites us to follow it, to reorient ourselves without a reference point. The echo is not unique, but multiple, it points to many directions and resonates in unexplored corners. Directing oneself towards the echo can be a way of entering the unknown, of losing our autonomy, of leaving behind our humanity, of understanding that we are part of the becoming of the whole.

Un paisatge reverberant, laberíntic, fangós, dens i estrellat is an initiatory journey in which, through eighteen projects, we become the hermit’s arcane: in search of light, we only find more textures in the darkness. In any case, the artists are the lighthouse that reorients us, the tool with which we plunge into the depths of being, the misaligned compass that invites us to spiral towards where the body falls apart.

Partipants: Aeren Sànchez, aïda e. borràs, Alicia Arévalo, Caterina Miralles Tagliabue, Duna Llobet Soto, Eduard Olesti, Elsa Casanova, Emma Prats, Gerard Borràs, Helena Calafell Muñoz-Castanyer, Laia Velasco Flo, Abril Carretero i Balcells, Maria Roy Deulofeu, Mikel Adán Tolosa, Irene Rojo, Mireia Molina Costa, Oscar Moya Villanueva, Pseudodiseño (Júlia López y Roger Monfort), Salem Amar y teresa w ･*:｡.｡:*･゜ﾟ･*.

Crestas [Ridges]

ridge: a line dividing the two slopes of a mountain or mountain range; the line of intersection of two slopes.

Caterina Miralles Tagliabue, Sala de materials jove

Overproduction, accumulation and storage. These are the gestures that mark the histories of the building materials of our immediate surroundings. In a gesture of revelation of what is strategically hidden, Caterina Miralles Tagliabue opens the doors to the city’s public warehouses, characterised by dust, disorder and the sensation of abandonment, where the pieces wait to be needed and held again. As if they were sites of contemporary ruins, the project invites us to see these non-spaces as testimonies of the frenetic tendency towards construction that characterises the last decades of Barcelona’s urban planning. What story does a tile hide? What failures does a stone support?

Salem Amar, Slang

The body is an archive of gestures, an almanac of strategies of what cannot be said or of what does not want to be said. In this short photo-essay, Salem Amar proposes a polyphonic journey based on a gesture linked to the promise: the hand on the heart. To whom do we promise loyalty, love or honesty? How loyal, loving or honest is a gesture in which one body, in front of another, points to one’s own body? Where the hand does not extend, but retracts, does it self-refer to the need to be respected?

Duna Llobet Soto, La Fosca

How do we enunciate what has no name? How do we enter the darkness without being engulfed by the void? Through various workshops in institutions, Duna Llobet Soto aims to collectively develop other languages to make the monsters that inhabit our bodies appear, to find ways to coexist with the intrusive thoughts that haunt us and pursue us, like phantasmagorias. Using the arts as a technology of self-expression, the project aims to engage adolescents in conversations about mental health without having to resort to the harshness of words.

Eduard Olesti, Una cosa teòricament divertida

Eduard Olesti has vertigo and suffers from social anxiety, but he has gone on a Mediterranean cruise with public money. He describes the experience as ‘terrible, traumatic and depressing’. Wanting to boycott the machinery that turns Barcelona into an uninhabitable city that creates a brand for tourism, Eduard Olesti embarks on the MSC Grandiosa, where he intends to consume nothing apart from the food included in the ticket. The project aims to scrutinise the aspects of the material reality that intervene in the malaise of a culture, and peels back one of its great symbols to the core, where perhaps the answer can be found in the bittersweet sensation they produce, halfway between repugnance and aesthetic fascination.

Laia Velasco Flo i Abril Carretero i Balcells, Una dècada de somni profund

Participants: Àngels Balcells, Clàudia Barberà, Abril Carretero i Balcells, Maria Castillejo, Natàlia Flo Lario, Col·lectiu Fortuna (Paula Machota, Anna Pontes, Roger Sagarra), Memòria, Lluita i Resistència (Adrià Bardagí y Marc Sureda), Nieves de Montserrat, Martí Orriols, Eva Paià, Paula Perarnau, Bet Rosell, Víctor Rubio i Maturana, Eloi Sánchez, Laia Velasco Flo.

After many years of hibernation, the Estel building – located on Avinguda Roma, in the Nova Esquerra de l’Eixample – woke up: it fractures the neighbourhood and reactivates the logic of gentrification in Barcelona. Based on stories created collectively in a workshop, the project by Laia Velasco Flo and Abril Carretero i Balcells generates a space of rest from which to counter-cartograph this monster that is being reanimated. How can it sleep? How can we negotiate with it? How do we dream together with it? How do we synchronise its breathing with ours to make the city more habitable for everyone?

Pseudodiseño (Júlia López i Roger Monfort), Decaf[et]era

With the desire to rethink the coffee break as a space of resistance, Pseudodiseño creates a coffee pot with materials from construction warehouses in the metropolitan area of Barcelona, where people from all over the world wait, first thing in the morning, to be selected and work for hours in precarious conditions. Thinking of the coffee pot as a paradigmatic nucleus for moments of relaxation during the working day, the artefact aims to become a meeting point to stop producing collectively and reflect on not doing and waiting.

Senderos [Paths]

Path: path, road, path, path, trail, gully, track, track.

Helena Calafell Muñoz-Castanyer, A les dotze al pont

This contact worm is presented as a trace and a guide to a wandering gesture. In the photograms that make up this meandering body, the neighbours of Guimerà meet up on 15 August 2023: they compass their gait and (con)merge between towels to generate a collective, sombre body capable of resisting the high summer temperatures. Trying out ways of surviving the aridity of the town – where the path to the shared oasis, the municipal swimming pool, has no shelter from the sun – this mass of towel-people carve out a path of shade wherever it passes. This is how Helena Calafell Muñoz-Castanyer proposes to rethink urban territory and neighbourhood choreographies based on collectivity, drift and play. With the collaboration of Jordi Calafell.

Mikel Adán Tolosa and Irene Rojo, Carn i pedra

These sculptures are the material trace of a process of constant translation between the sculptural practice of Mikel Adán Tolosa and the dance of Irene Rojo. With the desire to explore synergies between disciplines, the artists engage in a conversation in which the gesture softens the sculpture and the sculpture, in turn, seeks – without finding an answer – ways to fix the movement of a body that never stops. A curve initiates the movement and the hand follows it, generating a continuous fold between flesh and matter. From an extended contact between dance and sculpture, between contact improvisation and new materialisms, Mikel and Irene invite us to create the limits between body and matter, subject and object, process and result more flexible.

Elsa Casanova, La banalitat de parlar del temps

Referring to the very conversations about the weather that one has in the lift with one’s neighbour, this ongoing project investigates the imaginary of the weather in order to review the influence of meteorological representations on our relationship with the climate crisis. Nowadays, we no longer go out to experience the weather, but it has become a permanently monitored technological fantasy in which the superimposition of images and data shows us a “whole” from nowhere. What biases exist in these ways of looking at and representing the weather? Elsa Casanova invites us to understand meteorological imaginaries of the climatic reality not only as descriptive or interpretative, but also as orientative and prescriptive of our relationship with this crisis. To represent the weather also means making time.

Alicia Arévalo, Un cotxe sense clau no arrenca i s’oxida (projecte Magical Theys)

According to some sources, the word sword comes from the Greek spathe and the verb pathein (a root that also shares the word pathos, ‘passion’). Based on the recovery of the manga and anime genres magical girl and shōjo – full of sapphic and non-binary characters – Alicia Arévalo reimagines the archetypal sword of the knight and gives it the form of a fragile sword that does not serve as a weapon, but as a performative complement to devise a non-binary mythological subjectivity. The sword does not cut but pierces and unlocks identifications and becomes a key capable of opening what is assumed to be closed.

With the collaboration of Ferran Collado and the support of L’Estruch, fábrica de creación (Sabadell), and Petrohradská Kolektiv (Prague).

The piece will be activated during the performance Magical Theys.

aïda e. borràs, una voluntat anticipada

How can the archive function as a space of posthumous resistance? How do we care for the relationship between the queer both living and deseased, defying the division between living and dying? aïda e. borràs proposes an exercise to rethink how to live with the dead, but also how to die with them, thinking about activist practice as a condition of artistic practice. The piece is, at the same time, a tribute to the lesbofeminist genealogy – specifically, to the legacy of the activist Gretel Ammann Martínez – and a proposal for the future, a gesture for collective becoming. Before us, the word lesbian is slowly inscribed – by hand and with care – on a tombstone that will one day serve as a niche while a moving image is superimposed. It will ask us, aloud: how do we preserve the memory of those erased by silence and systemic oblivion?

With the accompaniment of Renata Gelosi. Acknowledgements: Dolors Majoral, Marta Estella, Centre de Documentació de Ca la Dona (CDOC), La SAL – Suport i Autonomia Lesbofeminista, Anna Cornudella Castro, Valo Sonoro, Sara Tobio Lamoso, Beatriz Guijarro Turegano, Maio Serrasolsas.

Gerard Borràs, Cova bonica

Some scenes filmed in a cave in Vallirana provide information about the geological times of the people who, at some point, have inhabited its cracks. Like someone who, out of love, takes care of the history of the mountain, Gerard Borràs combines the medieval melody of a video game from 2011, articles on Neolithic remains and a dance class to trace a map of temporalities set among the rocks and bones of the people who have been, are and will be in this place. It may be that in this darkness we think of other caves, mines or wells. It may also be that something is written about future times or that we have not abandoned the past.

Rendija [Slit]

Slit: 1. A narrow opening between two rocks, in the ground, etc., through which air and water or any other fluid pass. 2. a fissure in rocks caused by the relaxation of the internal forces of the rock during the consolidation of sedimentary materials, by the cooling of eruptive masses by desiccation, or by the detachment of a hard layer on clays.

Oscar Moya, Estructures per sostenir la memòria

How can violence be denounced without being reproduced? How can reparations be offered to bodies that, while alive, were not respected? Using a figure as present in Barcelona’s imaginary such as Copito de Nieve, Oscar Moya Villanueva invites us to think about how to sustain and heal the remains of bodies that have been subjected to socially accepted acts of violence. Juxtaposing metal -cold and rigid- with paraffin -undone and adaptable-, the pieces invite us to think about the processes of abandonment of skins socialised as subhuman, which, it seems, are about to reanimate at any moment. By returning the animal to a dormant state, it ceases to be an object of study or entertainment and becomes a compass that redirects us towards the path of animalisation or dehumanisation.

Emma Prats, L’atenció és una pregària

In order to be able to see it, we must bend down, bend over: we must lose verticality. To connect with it, we must get close to the earth, take root. With this project, Emma Prats transports us to a burnt forest on the outskirts of Manresa where traces of fire function as alternative methodologies of orientation, where the crack can be an alternative to the map. On paper, the crack of a burnt tree appears as a door to the hereafter, as a way to blend in with the territory, to become part of a horizontal, intertwined and profound whole. With this piece, Emma Prats invites us to rethink the relationship between body and environment: she proposes a displacement of the gesture from capture to approximation, from understanding to listening, from analysis to reverence, from research to offering. With the support of the Ateneu de Fabricació de Ciutat Meridiana.

Mireia Molina Costa, ama ara l’eco nua

We submerge ourselves into the aquatic depths to listen to how the sea sings a habanera. Changing the logic of this musical genre – so closely linked to Catalan folklore as well as to its colonial legacy – Mireia Molina Costa offers us the possibility of a new kind of listening through hydro-feminist consciousness. Resounding through the depths of the sea, these melodies ask us: what new sounds emerge from the salty mouth of the water? Non-human vibrations, magical chants of the women of water, the silences that still murmur in the violence of transatlantic routes. In this way, the habaneras are transformed into a device that allows us to pay attention to all the stories that rush in, to the rhythm of the sea, between each and every wave.

Aeren Sànchez, L’aigua i el futur

When a tap opens, a territory dries up. When a rice field dries up, a house is flooded. Based on the current climatic situation in Les Terres de l’Ebre, where the river becomes both the paradigm of life and death, the image that both affirms and denies the possibility of a future, Aeren Sànchez’s project seems to ask us: how do we persist with the problem? How do we find the energy to continue fabulating about other possible relationships? How do we re-enchant the world, a wounded world? In an apocalyptic landscape, water – flowing, unstoppable and ancestral – appears to remind us of the agency of the earth, but it also emerges as a model of an alternative relationality, as a reminder that another future – where humanity takes second place – is not only desirable, but also viable.

teresa w ･*:｡.｡:*･゜ﾟ･*, del més enllà

teresa w ･*:｡.｡:*･゜ﾟ･* presents us, among stars and weightless wiring, the trace of a sound research with which to rethink how space-time is articulated after death. What limits does a body without matter have? What space does what occupies space take up? What overlapping times do we find beyond time? What does what is no longer there sound like? Linking voices from several generations, the piece constructs a score of gestures or a choreography of sounds that invites us to imagine a speculative and polyphonic beyond. With sound as a guide, we cross the veil that separates the dead and the living, the visible and the invisible, to transit in a collective ritual through nothingness.

As part of the project, the artist will collaborate with the Escola d’Art de Vic in the realisation of several workshops linked to the sonorous representation of the beyond that will eventually feed this cosmic heart.

With the support of grants for research and innovation in the field of visual arts, Es Far Cultural, ACVIC, Escola d’Art de Vic and CC Guinardó. Acknowledgements: Júlia Suñer, Alba Mendoza, Mireia Cuesta, Estel Boada, Martina Petric, Fito Conesa, Joan Claudi Minguell, Albert Gironès López, Albert Gironès Vallverdú, Diego Simone and the team at Sala d’Art Jove.

Maria Roy Deulofeu, Can Fanga

How do we pay attention to what the bowels of the earth are telling us? How do we sift through clay to understand the murmur of a soil that remains silent beneath the asphalt we walk on? The ceramic pieces of Maria Roy Deulofeu are presented as traces of a constant stirring. By getting muddy in the clay of the roundabouts under construction next to the Besòs, the hands of Maria Roy Deulofeu dig until they discover archaic gestures that bring buried temporalities and telluric knowledge to the present. Collecting, hooking, kneading and cooking, the earth speaks to us from each of its strata and guides us towards the damp, dark and soft to contradict a present linked to expropriation, expansion, hygienisation and the hardening of the surroundings.