Parla, parla
Parla, parla (Speak, speak, 1992) is a work by Antoni Tàpies. It is also a series of guided visits to the exhibitions currently on show. Each accompanying guest speaker will share their account of the exhibition, or a particular work, with those attending, highlighting their personal impressions and experiences, while recounting details of their professional careers.
Dates:
Wednesday, 22 March 2023: with Marina Monsonís, visual artist.
Wednesday, 19 April 2023: with Josep Maria Esquirol, philosopher and lecturer in Philosophy at the Universitat de Barcelona.
Thursday, 15 June 2023: with the artist Antoni Llena
Marina Monsonís is a visual artist who works with hybrid and heterogeneous processes of social transformation rooted in the specificity of place, in collective, community and pedagogical projects that bring together marine sciences, site-specific design, gastronomy, graffiti, radical geography, ethnography and critical, oral and gestural memory. She works on projects that connect cooking with political, social and transgenerational issues to create debates and transmit knowledge about the complexities and conflicts related to km 0. She is interested in the coexistence of radical spaces where people join together in research, techniques, local and global, ancient and emerging knowledge, retaining a generous and enriching ecosystem, where joy, exchange and harmony are given pride of place.
She has directed MACBA’s La Cuina (The Kitchen) since its inception in November 2018. Together with the cultural cooperative La Fundició, she is working on Conserves litorals, a project engaged with the culinary memory of agriculture and fishing in the Barcelona coastal area. She is co-author of the illustrated book La Cocina Situada, un diccionario para la soberanía alimentaria (The Situated Kitchen. A dictionary for food sovereignty) published by Editorial Gustavo Gili. Most recently, she has become part of Tools for a Warming Planet, an archive of collaborative tools for climate resilience.
Josep Maria Esquirol lectures in Philosophy at the Universitat de Barcelona and is the director of the Aporia research group. His main field of study is contemporary philosophy. Some of the authors around which his work is based are: Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, Edmund Husserl, Alejandro Kojeve, Emmanuel Levinas, Emmanuel Mounier, Jan Patočka, Gaston Bachelard and Paul Ricoeur. He has participated in national and European research projects. In 2003, he received a distinction in research from the Generalitat de Catalunya.
He has published a dozen books and around a hundred contributions including chapters in books and articles in specialist magazines. He has been invited to give courses and lectures at different European and Latin American universities. He has put forward his own philosophical proposal around what he calls ‘proximity philosophy’, in a language based on first-hand experience. It is a philosophical anthropology with Socratic and Franciscan resonances. His publications have received various awards, and some are being translated into Italian, Portuguese, English and German, such as La resistencia íntima (2015), La penúltima bondad (2018) and Humano, más humano (2021).
Antoni Llena is an artist. He was born in Barcelona in 1942 and became known in the mid-sixties for pioneering ‘poor’ and ephemeral art in Catalonia. Between 1964 and 1969 he produced his first ephemeral sculptures. These are works made with shadows and paper, with boxes that had to be destroyed to see the work, and paintings made with talcum powder, among other basic materials. When Pop art was in fashion, he practised Conceptual art. Later, when Conceptual art prevailed, he opted for silence. By the eighties, he was still working with cut paper, creating an ephemeral and fragile art that led him to rethink the constructive space and the idea of volume. He has also made public works for the urban space that communicate the same fragility as his work on paper. In parallel to his visual production, Llena has created literary works, such as La gana de l’artista (1999) and Per l’ull de l’art (2008).
With the group formed by Sílvia Gubern, Àngel Jové and Jordi Galí, he participated in several pioneering exhibitions of ‘poor’ art. Together they exhibited at: Jardí del Maduixer, 1969–70 (where they lived and worked); Col·legi d’Arquitectes de Catalunya, Barcelona, 1969; and the Aquitània gallery, Barcelona, 1970. His first solo exhibition was in the Petite Galerie, Lleida, in 1969. After a long creative break, in 1979 he rejoined the artistic scene and is still practising today. He has participated in exhibitions at the Patio Herreriano, Valladolid, 2004; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, 2005; the Fondation Maeght, Saint Paul-de-Vence, 2007; Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona, 1988; and the Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona, 1991; among other spaces. His work is included in collections such as: Artium, Vitoria; Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona; Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid; and MACBA.
