Fina Miralles: “You do the practice of art and it makes you” Catalan Conceptual Artists in the MACBA Collection (6)

In the early seventies, following on from Arte Povera, the actions of Fina Miralles developed as a reflection on the materiality of nature. Her first actions place her among a group of Catalan Conceptual artists concerned with nature, involving elements such as trees, earth, water and the artist’s own body. Most of her work was based on the dialectic between nature and artifice through a change in the context of physical elements. The Translations series documents some of the actions performed in November 1973. On a beach in Premià de Mar, Miralles set grass floating on the sea: the grass, which had been grown in Sabadell, was cut and transported in turves of 40 x 40 cm. The flotation lasted about three hours. Miralles kept the images of the action in a box-suitcase in a reference to the emblematic Boîte-en-valise by Marcel Duchamp.