Let’s talk about <em>Fina Miralles. I Am All the Selves that I Have Been</em>

Activity
November and December 2020

Let’s talk about Fina Miralles. I Am All the Selves that I Have Been

in progress

The programme Let’s talk about generates discussions on the Museum’s exhibitions between the different agents and artists in the city and our regular public. It is a meeting point that regards exhibitions as powerful devices capable of activating the imagination and generators of discourses that often go beyond the preconceived readings of the institution or the curatorial team.

Video capsules

Let’s talk about The tree of life in Fina Miralles. I Am All the Selves that I Have Been, with Juan Canela, independent curator and critic. I met Fina several years ago in Cadaqués, where she lives faithful to her daily dialogue with the earth, the sea and the rhythms of nature. The connection was quick; visit succeeded visit and we soon began to make shared plans. I remember that the first time we talked about her practice, one feeling emerged above all else: that we were talking about life. All the superfluous rhetoric that sometimes surrounds artistic practice disappears with Fina, and you engage in an honest conversation about something inherent in the human condition. Fina overflows the contextual, and her work becomes a vehicle for the primitive and the essential: ancestral knowledge, earthly life and bodies-trees full of sap. Highlighting the knowledge that seems to be diluted in global uniformity, understanding a common world in which humans are no longer the centre of anything and where life emerges inevitably in the face of everything else.

The Tree of Life is a story that interweaves personal experiences with curatorial readings of Fina Miralles’ practice, among which the voices of other artists appear, conversing with her work. The idea is to generate a dialogue with Fina’s exhibition at the MACBA, trying to convey some vital links that have developed around her, touching on some essential aspects of her journey and her relevance at the present time.

Let’s talk about I went out to listen to the noise of the leaves under the weight of my passage, in Fina Miralles. I Am All the Selves that I Have Been, with Maite Garbayo, art historian and researcher, in conversation with Fina Miralles. For Fina Miralles there is a thread that runs through her life and her artistic practice: The thread of nature, which has revealed itself in different ways and through different materials. The images remain and, clinging to each other, make it possible to reveal the bond of having belonged. For the artist they are testimony to what one has done, either because of being unable to do anything else or because we do that which, for some reason, we have to do. Maite Garbayo has always believed that Fina’s works are part of a continuum in which bodily knowledge is transmitted and updated. They can be read as gestures of dissent in the face of the aestheticized and aesthetically naturalized representations of the female body. They show that there is something in the fact of having to exist in the feminine that is violent and traumatic in itself.

Let’s talk about A Well in the Word Artist with Fina Miralles. I Am All the Selves that I Have Been, with Mar Arza, artist. The work of Fina Miralles covers a long period of time and reflections that mark different successive stages, like the correfoc of a very personal brain that ignites and connects them. Creating the work and living life is the same task. There is a background of harmonics around her awareness of artistic fact and the fact of being and recognising herself as an artist. It identifies an inner force that pushes her irresistibly, which detaches and distances itself from the established artistic system, but recognizes a well in the word artist. She feels herself to be a mother, and I understand and share the sense of welcome generated by the observation and the sheltering of the world’s autonomy.

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