21 Personae Encounters

The programme for 21 Personae includes the same number of encounters with people, places and collectives in Barcelona. Together, they will attempt to transform the meaning and intensity of our experience of the city. It is also an investigation into ‘ways of meeting’, ways of being and interacting in the city. 21 Personae will run between November 2018 and March 2019, with one encounter every week.

The staging of 21 Personae in Barcelona extends the curatorial pulse of the exhibition In the Open or in Stealth by activating modes of sensing – shifting grounds, dispositional sediments and the potent scenarios of life out into the city. A group of curatorial practitioners associated with MACBA’s educational programme have crafted a specific Barcelona, to be expressed on the streets, in the squares, in public spaces and among public secrets.

A range of personae — roles, places, positions, practices, persons, ports and monuments — are invoked. We encounter permanent inhabitants, transients, travellers, beings who come alive at dawn, at midnight, at siesta time or at twilight. They traverse fluid constellations across actual spaces, desired inhabitations and imagined cities.

Together, they concert an activation analogous to an ‘entourage effect’ (a debated concept in therapeutic pharmacology relating to cannabis), which argues that components act much better in a relational field of interaction and combination with others than in isolation. In nature, nothing acts in a pure state.

Directed by: Raqs Media Collective, in collaboration with Aimar Arriola.
Organizing committee (PEI - MACBA’s Independent Studies Programme 2017-2018): Héctor Acuña, Laura Arensburg, Emil Becerril, Marianne Blanco, Ricardo Cárdenas, Itxaso Corral, Vatiu Nicolás Koralsky, Julieta Obiols, Christina Schultz and Laura Valencia.