Visual Arts

Joan Brossa didn’t make me

A play without actors? A musical performance without musicians? The voice of the poet Joan Brossa inspired this installation with the theme of landscape. This is a poem that the audience can walk through to explore different scenes created by everyday objects. 

Plastic cups, spoons, typewriters, measuring tapes, plugs and combs, among other items are the stars of a set that transcends conventional theatre and stage design. It is a mechanical opera, a huge installation without any apparent narrative, a piece of object theatre with neither actors nor handlers, only a heap of objects which move on their own and create ever-changing landscapes. 

They may be the misty forests of Wagner’s Parsifal, or the mountains on the Segre Front during the Spanish Civil War, or telluric, mythological volcanoes with hints of Mesopotamia. The audience will have to figure that out when they are confronted with this collection of objects which form a kind of walkable poem in which voices have been stripped of their bodies. The starting point of the installation is Joan Brossa’s earliest and least known prose and the sounds of his own performance poetry from the 1940s, recited by people with disabilities.

Visual Arts

Demons. Verdaguer's exorcisms and inorcisms

In late nineteenth-century Barcelona, which was shaken up by anarchism, communism, Darwinism and spiritism, the writer and priest Jacint Verdaguer attended a series of exorcism sessions in a flat on Carrer de Mirallers in the Born neighbourhood. Mossèn (Father) Cinto, as he is affectionately called, took notes on everything he saw in notebooks which were never published during the poet’s lifetime. This is the starting point of this experimental work that combines unconventional theatre and acoustic installations and allows visitors to move about freely.  
Cabosanroque used fragments of the annotated edition of these texts published by the poet Enric Casasses in 2014 to create this acoustic and visual ceremony set in a re-creation of this turn-of-the-century Barcelona flat. They enlisted the collaboration of artists such as the cantaor Niño de Elche and the bailaora and choreographer Rocío Molina, in addition to recorded anthropologists, scientists and poets talking about the concept of possessions.

Visual Arts

Flowers and journeys

Mercè Rodoreda’s short story collection Viatges i flors inspired this immersive installation which explores war through the voices of women who have been forced to flee from a current war.
Cabosanroque proposes a journey full of beauty amidst the flowers of a world crippled by war. We enter a forest, or perhaps a garden... or did it use to be a village? The work combines literature, anthropology, sculpture, music and artefacts, all orchestrated under the baton of sound. 
We’ll hear excerpts from the short story collection Viatges i flors in the voices of women who have been forced to flee from a modern-day war. Translated into Ukrainian, Mercè Rodoreda's words become incomprehensible sounds for us while also revealing a musicality in the text that persists even in translation. 
Cabosanroque found Svetlana Alexievich’s The Unwomanly Face of War and Last Witnesses to be the perfect partner for this journey, which helps us to understand the transition from reality and memory to fiction, and to what extent we need fantasy to prevent reality—which can be neither digested nor explained—from decimating us.

Visual Arts

The women are coming - 150 years of activism on the streets of Barcelona

Public spaces are living spaces in constant construction where people occupy and have historically occupied certain roles. Public spaces are gendered, and many women writers have observed and described their appearance, tension, affects, dynamics, struggles and the constant negotiation for social rights. Barcelona has been the perfect backdrop for many women writers who have written and spoken about what it means to be a woman in a city like this one. For many of them, their activism moved seamlessly from the domestic sphere to the public sphere; they are struggles that began with the onset of modernisation and the city’s growth in the nineteenth century and have continued over the decades.
The exhibition does not offer a chronicle or a nostalgic retrospective, nor does it focus on a single class discourse; instead, it offers a diverse yet partial picture of the city. It is a poetic, political journey, a time lapse of a city over a century and a half. It aims to convey what women’s eyes saw, have seen and are seeing today; to open the archives, lift up their voices and listen to their stories.

Visual Arts

Barcelona’s books. Design and publication

Barcelona’s books. Design and publication presents a survey of the history of editorial design in Barcelona and shows the city to be a leading hub for editorial design and the publishing industry.

Curated by Enric Jardí with guidance from ADG-FAD and the Library and Archive of Design (BAD), the exhibition presents a selection of more than 300 books whose covers are design elements that personalise entire collections and have become a defining feature of certain publishing houses.

The 300 pieces also feature a selection of objects from the collection of the Museu del Disseny and the BAD, both housed at the DHub.