Opening of the exhibition series 20 Minutes on the Margins. Curated by Bernat Daviu

In August 2020, a three-year-old girl riding an inflatable unicorn disappeared from the beach of a Greek island, carried away by the currents. A ferry found her out at sea, firmly holding onto the float, and she was miraculously rescued safe and sound. End of the story: accident resolved and everyone happy.
But what if the girl had intentionally decided to run away? Who hasn’t, at some point, thought about changing the thread of the story they are meant to live?
This exhibition series is conceived in three parts, like the chapters of a novel of intertwined stories featuring characters who assert themselves in dystopian or de-idealized contexts. The protagonists of the works by Victor Balcells, Rafel G. Bianchi, Mar Bosch, Elena Garrigolas, Andrea Gómez, Margit Kocsis, Will Lee, Daniel Moreno Roldan, Irene Pujadas and Sara Sadik inhabit the margins, challenging and questioning established boundaries and disobeying dominant models.
Medieval marginalia has become a key reference in conceptualizing this series. These annotations, placed in the margins of pages, not only allowed the copyist to escape monotony, but also to introduce critical comments that diverted the meaning of the text.
Following this subversive spirit, the three exhibitions highlight the power of fiction to generate escapist, metaphorical narratives that are at the same time deeply critical of reality, forming a collective account of resistance, identity, and memory. Each exhibition features a writer who constructs a narrative based on the works on display: Pujadas, Bosch and Balcells amplify these imaginaries and establish new connections between them.
Twenty minutes was the time the girl spent missing — or escaped — at sea. Interestingly, a recent study indicates that this is the average amount of time a visitor spends at an exhibition. “20 Minutes on the Margins” is therefore an invitation to delve into dissonant narratives that unfold at the margins and become spaces of affirmation and opportunity.