In 1985, Marcel·lí Antúnez began to produce books and artist codices, which he called Artcagarro. ‘I poured my worries into it during the continuous tours with La Fura’, the artist explained in 2001. While his collaboration with La Fura dels Baus required collective work that was repeated over multiple public performances, his artist books allowed him to experience the opposite: a solitary, immediate task guided by constant experimentation and a more direct conceptualisation. These books became a kind of material and textual diary of those years.

Made from recycled materials, they are based on the idea of collage and the fusion of different elements that are thematically eschatological and sexual. The works combine short texts and words, sketches, drawings, painting and photography with more unusual materials such as food scraps, dead animals, body fluids and debris. This heterogeneous work numbers more than fifty notebooks, travel diaries and other material that refers to the idea of a codex or notebook folded and sewn by hand before printing.

Amor es, India, Australia, Artmalsexpoc, México and Códices are some of the series or books that make up this unique diary. With numerous references to the collective imagination and a very baroque visual code, they borrow linguistic influences from comics and ‘poor’ art, while sharing a certain affinity with psychedelic aesthetics. As in all his stage productions, in his artist’s books Antúnez is committed to experimentation and an iconoclastic and irreverent attitude towards social conventions, as the title of the work shows. Here we find animal impulses, a taste for ritual and ceremony, humour, an idea of the grotesque and Antúnez’s interest in great human themes such as passion, sex, violence and death.

Complied over seven or eight years, among the more than fifty items that make up this project are notebooks of drawings and aphorisms, travel diaries (these incorporate elements of places visited, such as press cuttings, icons that identify locations and tickets) and sequential copies in the form of a codex that invite a unitary and literary reading. The MACBA Collection contains books and codex from the series Amor es and Los pluralistas.