Activity
From October 18 to December 14, 2024
If a Journey Starts Here
If a Journey Starts Here is a project by the artist Clara Nubiola that springs from the partnership between MACBA and the Catalan government departments of Justice and Culture, setting out to bring art to incarcerated people and reinforce the family bonds between incarcerated parents and their children. A work process based on observation from inside/outside, illustration and discourse.
Through art as a transformational factor, the aim is to foster reflection, communication, empathy and mutual understanding by offering spaces for participation that encourage shared creativity and include other voices that explain how parenthood is experienced from prison.
3 prisons // 7 prisoners and their families // 8 sessions // 14 log books with the aim of giving visibility and a voice to parenthood from prison.
Travelling far from our familiar environment and our friends and family to other places to discover new places, peoples and customs has always involved, on the one hand, gaining experience of territory, having the personal experience of going to new places, and on the other, creating a narrative to share and explain our experience.
Postcards, letters, emails and WhatsApps have served – and will continue to serve – as vehicles to recount and preserve our experiences, means through which to tell our loved ones that the journey went well, the place is wonderful but unbearably hot and our luggage has gone astray. The If a Journey Starts Here project is and will be the story of two journeys: that of six fathers and one mother who travel from their prisons to discover Barcelona, and the journey made up of humdrum things and everyday tasks on which their families set out every morning.
Through two logs, one for the parent and the other for the family, a weekly correspondence is begun, forming a mutual narrative of this journey that needs no flights, luggage or Instagram; a journey that takes place when the pace slows, when attention is paid to what you see when you observe your setting as if for the first time. Because to discover you need not go away, and being surprised is just steps away. The idea seeks to strengthen bonds between parents serving sentences and their families, through travel logs that constitute a dialogue and are written for the other.
If a Journey Starts Here consisted of eight sessions – one a week – that showed us good journeys are those that, after planning the route, are not afraid to improvise.
With the collaboration of the Department of Culture and the Department of Justice from Generalitat de Catalunya
Clara Nubiola 
Anita García