PORTABELLA: PROVOCATIVE AGENT

A CYCLE BASED ON THE CINEMATIC AND POLITICAL LEGACY OF PERE PORTABELLA
from April 16 to June 18, 2026

Antifascist variety exhibition
Curated by Marcelo Expósito with artists Joan Brossa, Pere Portabella, Carles Santos, Paula Artés, Mabel Palacín, Abel Jaramillo, Núria Güell and Daniela Ortiz.
From April 16 to September 27
One of the central axes of the cycle Portabella: provoking agent. This is a complete and complex project that takes as its starting point Concert irregular (1968), a stage work that constituted the first joint creation of the triangle formed by Brossa, Portabella and the musician Carles Santos. Concert irregular premiered at the Fondation Maeght in Saint-Paul-de-Vence —on the occasion of Joan Miró’s 75th anniversary— and had a second performance at the Romea Theatre in Barcelona, becoming a quintessential work of the aesthetic and political ruptures characteristic of the global uprisings of 1968. The exhibition takes this context as a frieze in order to work with contemporary artists who today continue the radical attitudes of creators such as Portabella, Brossa or Santos.

Antifascist variety concert
Directed by Pere Faura

Performances:

The Politicians
by Leonardo V. Granados
From April 9 to 26
The Politicians is a theatrical poem that addresses, in an incisive, ironic and absurd way, the role of politics in contemporary society. One of the most radical texts by Wolfram Lotz, from which emerges a music of words that ignites the essence of thought in the ear, to the point of making us dizzy. A mixture between a mantra and an apparently associative stream of thoughts that speaks of the awareness that politics is society and that we are the politicians.

Fasting girls
by Marta Azparren
From May 14 to 16
Fasting girls proposes a possible cartography of voluntary fasting as one of the symptoms of the contemporary tendency toward disappearance in the image, from Victorian Fasting girls or “hunger artists” to contemporary TikTok “fasters.” A reflection on the relationship between hunger and images as nourishment, even if only symbolically, in order to rethink voluntary fasting not so much as a clinical diagnosis of an individual illness, but as a collective symptom.

Happiness doesn’t matter
by Tomàs Aragay and Societat Doctor Alonso
From May 21 to 24
I am now driving to work. You see it on the screen. The film is a descent into hell. Hell is getting to work. During this journey there are all kinds of thoughts that I am reading aloud. These are them. I start somewhere, let’s say the bed. And the first thing I think is that I am waking up to go to work, today something was happening. Something like Godot. Then the thoughts while I head to work. (Tomàs Aragay)

I transform myself! Strip-conference
by Banda Esfèrica
Performative lecture
May 29 and 30
A scenic exploration of sensuality, the eroticism of the image and movement that proposes to deconstruct the poetics of striptease by relating it to the narrative of the cinematic suspense genre, in order to understand how the management of expectation, suggestion and the construction of sensory images can generate new forms of expression and cultural contestation.
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Guerrilla
by El Conde de Torrefiel
From June 11 to 18
Guerrilla presents the inner, confused and contradictory universe of people who coexist in the same historical time, move through the streets of the same city, share the imaginary of the same continent and are affected, to a greater or lesser extent, by the same consequences. Even so, they do not know how to face a world that has changed too much since the beginning of the 21st century and that constantly requires new rules, symbols and tools to be interpreted.