Maladaptive Daydreaming. Within the exhibition cycle “20 Minutes on the Margin”, curated by Bernat Daviu

Elena Garrigolas
With the contribution of Mar Bosch
Curated by Bernat Daviu

Bòlit Sant Nicolau
Cycle: 20 MINUTES ON THE MARGIN
13.03.2026 to 06.09.2026

In the midst of August 2020, a three-year-old girl riding an inflatable unicorn accidentally disappeared on the beach of a Greek island, carried away by sea currents. A ferry located her in open waters, firmly holding onto the float, and she was rescued safe and sound. But what if the girl had decided to run away? Who hasn’t, at some point, wished to divert the course of the story they were meant to live?
This cycle, curated by Bernat Daviu (Fonteta, 1985), unfolds across three exhibitions conceived as chapters of a collective novel. The works bring together narratives and characters inhabiting the margins: figures who challenge imposed limits, question dominant imaginaries, and assert themselves within de-idealised or dystopian contexts. Fiction becomes a tool for generating escapist and metaphorical narratives, while remaining critical of reality, articulating a discourse on identity, resistance, and memory.
“Maladaptive daydreaming”, at Bòlit Sant Nicolau, presents an installation by Elena Garrigolas (Girona, 1998) that combines painting, drawing, and animation to explore bodies that exceed the limits of normative humanity. Drawing from a lived experience marked by emotional repression and the denial of the body, the artist constructs a visual universe of surrealism, satire, and excess, populated by anthropomorphic and grotesque figures that address bodily restraint, guilt, beauty ideals, and the mother–child relationship from a feminist perspective.
In the exhibition, excessive daydreaming emerges as an ambivalent strategy of escapism and survival, oscillating between refuge and alienation. A text by the writer Mar Bosch (Girona, 1981), written for the occasion, delves into this phenomenon through a protagonist from Garrigolas’s work who fantasises about another way of being, caught between a body confined to purity and the temptation of desire.
The three exhibitions in the cycle —“Un joc de criatures”, at Bòlit Rambla; “Aquí mateix en un altre lloc”, at Bòlit Pou Rodó; and “Maladaptive daydreaming”, at Bòlit Sant Nicolau— share the most subversive spirit of marginalia. Marginalia —a word from Latin meaning “in the margins”— originally referred to a diverse repertoire of written and, mainly, iconic elements placed in the margins of Western books during the Middle Ages, allowing the copyist —beyond their clarifying function— a playful or satirical means of escape through which to evade their monotonous task and break with the rigidity of the main text.
Twenty minutes is the time the unicorn girl spent missing —or perhaps escaped— at sea. It is also, according to various studies, the average time a visitor spends at an exhibition. The cycle “20 Minutes on the Margin” proposes an immersion into dissonant narratives that open up spaces of questioning, displacement, and possibility.