Let’s talk about Fina Miralles. I Am All the Selves that I Have Been
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.
Public Programs
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Programme
Presentation of the book Germinal
Presentation of the book Germinal, with the participation of Pilar Bonet, lecturer in Art History at the UB, Lluïsa Faxedas, lecturer in Contemporary Art History at the UdG, and Montserrat Ribas, lecturer in the Translation and Language Sciences department at the UPF.
The book Germinal (Documenta Universitària, 2020), featuring the texts of the papers presented within the framework of ‘Encontres de la Càtedra’ (November 2018, Universitat de Girona), a series of lectures about the life and work of Fina Miralles. The authors explore the various aspects of Miralles’ textual and visual work, while clearly eschewing the limitations imposed by art history that too often tend to reduce complex and constantly changing biographical and artistic trajectories to more or less stereotyped labels. As a whole, the book shows that, beyond any categorisation or discourse, Miralles’ work has become a lesson in life, knitted together from everything she has learned, experienced and lived, and now offered to us as a seed for the future.
Let's talk about Trees, people and other animals
Let's talk about Trees, people and other animals, with Amelia Jones, art historian, and Teresa Grandas, curator of the exhibition Fina Miralles. I Am All the Selves that I Have Been. Conversation in English with an available simultaneous translation.
Fina Miralles’ work makes us rethink our relationship with the environment, as living beings, as individuals who respond to a cultural, social and political construction. It challenges us as individuals, as a group, as spectators. First questioning her own role as an artist and that of the work of art, Miralles then makes us re/consider what we are as subjects in relation to the environment in which we live, as well as our reaction to the work. One of the key aspects of Amelia Jones’ work is precisely her exploration of how the notion of subject is articulated. Teresa Grandas will talk to her about this issue and about how Miralles’ work is seen from the context of an international perspective.
Let's talk about Fertile Words. The work is a seed
Let's talk about Fertile Words. The work is a seed with Maia Creus, lecturer in Contemporary Art and researcher.
Since 1972, writing has been part of the creative universe of Fina Miralles. To put thoughts and experience into words; to welcome and offer words that come to her after listening with respect and introspection to what lies inside a great silence. Words that come from far away; wise words that recall human memories of all times and cultures. A living word that, like the movement of water, illuminates an art practice that is experiential because it is created in the course of the artist’s life.
We will talk about this river of writing flowing side by side with the great current of her life and work, summed up by Miralles herself with these three ideas: My body is the expression of the liberation from suffering; My life is the fulfilment of a design; and My spirit is the union with the pure child.
![Translations. Woman-Tree [Documentation of the Performance Carried Out in November 1973 in Sant Llorenç del Munt, Spain]](https://img.macba.cat/public/styles/large/public/imagenes/obras/0503_004_l.jpg?itok=G8PuG4uf)
Let’s talk about If you join life as a living being
Let’s talk about If you join life as a living being with Tamara Díaz Bringas, researcher and independent curator, accompanied by Maia Creus, professor of Contemporary Art and researcher. In collaboration with MAS.
We are holding our conversation in the Fina Miralles archive, donated entirely by the artist to the Sabadell Art Museum. From her home, she questions the conditions of truth of the archive itself, as well as the forces that are forming and transforming it, and the practices of exhibition, criticism, research and collection. She addresses the work of Fina Miralles relatedly, avoiding the operations that separate work and document, major and minor works, inside and outside a given field. She follows the threads that connect the poetry and readings of Fina’s practice through her most reproduced works: Dona-arbre (1973) and Recobriment del cos amb palla (1975). With these works as a starting point and destination, she draws the connection with other creations by the artist, suggesting intermittent links or intuitions that make connections through to the present. Learn with Fina, together with Amerindian cosmogonies, to be part of the world and to embrace it based on the experience of the living.
