Personal Diaries: The Art of Portraying the Passage of Time

People often go through life constructing a story (fictitious or real, who knows?) that will help give sense to their existence and register the passage of time. Sometimes this is manifested in the form of a diary. A diarist is someone who strives to compile notebooks recording everyday life and even their own thoughts.

Artists also strive to register the passage of time through techniques and materials that may be familiar or experimental (photography, painting, sound recordings, writings, etc.), in order to trace the evolution of their work or the reasons behind it. Some creators do this using reality as their material, others see it as fiction.

MACBA has organised a workshop where the participants are invited to create a personal diary based on the work of some of the artists in the Collection, the Library and the MACBA Archive. Their testimony will help us to register the passage of time from our own point of view, by using the tools provided by writing or other artistic disciplines, under the guidance of these creators’ artistic vision.