Aesthetics of Transit: Ancestral Memory and Collective Subconscious

The Museu Tàpies presents a seminar with the aim of exploring the language and cosmology of Marta Palau. On the foundation of indigenous cosmovisions and ancestral rituals, topics such as shamanism, healing and sacred symbolism will be addressed.

This event enables us to reflect on how Palau uses practices that channel concepts of magic and history in relation to artistic practice, developing a visual poetics that connects with the collective subconscious and ancestral memory. Her use of natural materials and traditional textile techniques, as well as the creation of symbology rooted in personal experience, help us speak of art as a creative tool for cultural resistance, accentuating the spiritual abundance of native cultures.

As the closing event of the film series ‘The (In)visible Exiles’, this seminar contributes to a rupture with anthropocentric and Eurocentric consciousness, so as to inhabit the world on the basis of other narratives, focusing on collective imaginations. In this regard, the work of Palau should be understood as an act of memory and resistance in the face of dehumanising processes, and as a gesture favouring understanding of the world as a concentric, relational whole.

PROGRAMME

· 6 pm. Presentation of the session by the Museu Tàpies

· 6.10 pm. Lecture ‘Marta Palau Amongst Paths of Exile’, by Mari Paz Balibrea

· 6.50 pm. Lecture ‘Between Two Worlds: Women, Art and Exile’, by Gemma Domènech

· 7.30 pm. Lecture ‘Those Female Visionaries, We Female Visionaries: The Cosmology of Marta Palau’, by Pilar Bonet

· 8.10 pm. Poetic interlude ‘The Word: Exile of Exile’, by Maria Sevilla

· 8.30 pm. Debate with Mari Paz Balibrea, Gemma Domènech, Pilar Bonet and Maria Sevilla, moderated by the Museu Tàpies

· 9 pm. Closing

Mari Paz Balibrea

Balibrea is Professor of Contemporary Spanish Cultural Studies at Birbeck, University of London. Her work explores the political dimension of culture, focusing particularly on 20th-century Spain. In this line of research, she has published widely on the role of left-wing intellectuals, as well as on the legacy of Spanish Republican exiles and the construction of the idea of the citizen in the creative city. She has been an advisor on the art and culture of Republican exiles for the recent remodelling of the permanent collection of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía.

Pilar Bonet Julve

A researcher, historian and art critic, Bonet is a professor at the University of Barcelona. She is an expert on the art and spirituality of visionary European women, and is president of the Fundació Josefa Tolrà – Art Visionari, as well as creator and co-director of the research group Visionary Women Art (ACCA Research Prize, 2023).

An exhibition curator in contemporary art, in recent years her shows have been centred on graphic and textile creativity by heterodox artists: Josefa Tolrà i Madge Gill, dones visionàries, Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya (MNAC), 2023; La mèdium i el poeta. Una conversa astral entre Josefa Tolrà i Joan Brossa, Fundació Joan Brossa, Barcelona, 2020; ALMA. Mèdiums i visionàries, Museu d’Art Es Baluard de Palma, 2019; Josefa Tolrà i Julia Aguilar. Art des de l’altre costat, Les Bernardes de Salt, Girona, 2017; and Josefa Tolrà. Dibujo fuerza fluídica, Can Palauet, Mataró, 2013.

Gemma Domènech

Domènech is Serra Hunter Plan Adjunct Professor in the Department of History and Art History of the University of Girona (UdG), and since 2022 has been the director of the Institut Català de Recerca en Patrimoni Cultural (ICRPC), where she had been a researcher since 2009. Alongside these activities, from 2019 to 2021 she was general director of Democratic Memory of the Government of Catalonia.

She has a PhD in Art History from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (2000), and has had an extensive career in research, with over one hundred publications and presentations at national and international conferences. Highlights include her line of research on the repression and exile of Spanish Republican architects and the Mexican exile of female Catalan artists. These studies have led to collaborative projects with the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and the Colegio de Jalisco (Guadalajara, Mexico). Domènech is co-author of Segundo diccionario de los catalanes de México (Porrúa, Mexico City, 2022), winner of the 56th Serra d’Or Critic’s Prize in Catalan Research.

Maria Sevilla

Sevilla is a researcher and precarious professor in Catalan language and literature at the University of Barcelona, while also working as a poet and rhapsodist. She has published four books of poems and a plaquette: Dents de polpa (2015), Kalàixnikov (2017), if true: false; else: true (2020), Plastilina (2021) and La nit ovípara (2024). In 2024 she published her first essay, No desitjaràs els béns del proïsme. She has experimented with liminal genres such as sound poetry and video recitals, and since January 2019 has been one of the three programmers at Horiginal. In the performing arts, she has recited her work in many national festivals, as well as in cities such as Quetzaltenango, Istanbul, Vilnius, London, Paris and Calcutta.