What would happen if we could travel back in time to the moment when Miquel Barceló began to forge himself as an artist and alter the order of events so that his personality would be different in the future (our present time)?
This is the central argument of the workshop that we will be developing today and until July 17 at the
Fundació Pilar i Joan Miró in Mallorca
. The workshop is part of the foundation’s educational offerings for this summer and comes in connection with the exhibition
Barceló before Barceló (pdf)
curated by Jaume Reus and Maria Hevia and co-produced by the Fundació Pilar i Joan Miró itself together with
les Abattoirs
and
Arts Santa Mónica
.
That initial question will lead us to ask ourselves what it means that there was a moment in Barceló’s life when he was not himself, what are the moments and mechanisms that define the identity of an artist or any other person. Ultimately, to ask ourselves if it is possible that one has not always been oneself.
We know that the past of the artist, of any artist (and of any person in reality) is continuously reconstructed from the present, there is an editing work on the history of his life, on his biography, which tries to build and reinforce his artistic personality.
Barceló explains that in the year of his birth Jackson Pollock died and thus traces a genealogy, marks his own personality with a series of attributes (those of the creative genius that Pollock embodies in an exemplary way) that are even prior to his own person. The truth is that Barceló was born the year after Pollock’s death and that
Directly related to the latter, we will ask ourselves throughout the workshop about who explains or explains this story to us; who intends to offer us a unitary image of the artist, laboriously constructing the story of his life and then erasing the traces of that operation; a gesture similar to climbing a ladder to the roof and pushing it over to eliminate any clue as to how one got there.
Thus, during the workshop, aimed at children and young people between 8 and 15 years old, we will investigate and create, using various tools, new stories about their own lives and about that of Miquel Barceló, stories that result in other possible models of artists beyond or before the creative genius; among them perhaps the story of a Barceló who explains how Alexander Rodchencko died the year he was born or a Barceló whose greatest aesthetic influence during childhood had been the
Chiripitifláuticos
.