Collectable

Eros and Polis: The Multiple Voices of DESIRE

The Collectables of the Year Thirty

We also celebrate MACBA’s Year Thirty through a series of collectables. Week by week, guided by the works and artists of the Collection, we will navigate 30 concepts that shape and accompany the museum. And we begin with DESIRE: a concept to celebrate, to gather, to invite, to uplift, and to persevere for thirty more years.

In 1992, Ramon Guillen-Balmes asked his close friends to share with him a dream, a fantasy, something they desired or lacked, and then created a specific object for each one of them. Some wanted more time to rest, others to have wings and others to re-encounter their absences. The artist turned their desires into sculptural objects and drawings that reinforced the fertile and inexhaustible link between the richness of the unconscious and the indestructible freedom of art.

Years later, in 2006, Mireia Sallarès did a research project on pleasure and eroticism in the lives of thirty Mexican women. To do so, she had a pink neon light made with the words Las muertes chiquitas (Small Deaths). With this strident device, she toured the country interviewing women of different ages and conditions to ask them about their experiences of sexual pleasure. Shared or solitary, liberating or frustrating, orgasms are a powerful starting point for establishing links between eros and polis, between what is never expressed and the biopolitics of desire. The many small deaths of these women, their bodily experiences and their testimonial stories denote positions of subject and also of resistance.