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