El cocoliche en la epopeya. Forms of Immaturity between Buenos Aires and Barcelona, 1932–2025

Works and archives by: Rosita de la Plata- Batato Barea- Ocaña- Roberto Jacoby-Jorge Gumier Maier- Jaume Clotet- Paul Grodhues- Julien Antoine- Jorge Bergara Leuman- Rosa Codina- Marcia Schwartz- Camilo Lorenzo- Lluís Masriera- Jean Marais.

One returns to the circus seeking relief from crisis and war, and one returns to the circus to generate habits, a rule of one’s own, a self-managed discipline: doing what others cannot do but want to see turned upside down. Apart from the circus reclaimed by the European avant-garde, there exists the desolate and provincial circus embraced by the Argentine middle class in the 1940s and 1950s: the circo criollo, a version steeped in localism and representation.

The story begins with Rosita de la Plata, an Argentine equestrienne famous worldwide, who connected cities—especially Barcelona and Buenos Aires. Her seduction in the ring and her ambiguous gender performativity placed her within histories, myths, and references. Her figure tints the history of the circus, renders it strange, and at the same time establishes that the big top has been, since the nineteenth century, the only space—alongside carnival—capable of turning the world upside down.

The exhibition begins with the circus because it is there that immaturity is managed, and because it is there that laughter, dance, sport, and balance/imbalance were formed. Faced with the question of which forms and materials best contain immaturity, one can also think about those who chose to sustain it as a life consulate: they are the clown, the angel and the magician, the old woman and the amazon.

The project presents certain artists and stories, working with these figures through images, between Barcelona and Buenos Aires, where the circus returns in some way, or where there is a need for the circus. It asks why to continue thinking about it—not so much as a theme, but as a method or manual—and draws a line between artists who returned to the clown, as an anti-clown, and to the forms of the angel, the sorceress, and the old woman, from the 1930s to today.