polinaires

This activity aims to stimulate conversation based on the objects and materials that form the backbone of Polinaires, an artistic research project by Guiu Gimeno Bardis. This research revives the knowledge of the people who worked in the forests of the Ordal mountains. Through oral testimonies, tools, gestures, plants, and documents, the project reconstructs a way of living in the forest that no longer exists today.

The project seeks to reconstruct the ways of life and knowledge of the boscaters (as the people who worked in the forest were called), but by focusing on what has not been recorded by official archives: the gaps in queer experiences, community life, and labor struggles.

It is into these gaps that speculative fiction enters. Through the traces found in the archive, Polinaires imagines other ways of inhabiting and working with the forest from the perspective of gender dissidence and the communalization of resources and knowledge. This is how  the Polinaire is born—a figure altered by pine pollen—who recovers and collectively shares the forest’s knowledge to put it at the service of the transmaricabibollo communities in nearby rural areas.

bio

Guiu Gimeno Bardis (They/He) works with the things that shape them; this is why they are interested in traditions, folklore, and rural and peripheral knowledge—but also in how these contexts can be navigated through a queer lens. Their working methodology draws on fiction, imagining new possibilities, everyday life, failure, and institutional critique—but always in a cross-cutting way, placing desire at the center of creative processes.

This activity was carried out as part of Guiu Gimeno Bardis’s “Polinaires” research project, carried out with the support of one of the Barcelona Crea – La Escocesa 2026 Artistic Research Grants.