Una volta i una altra i una altra. martaroc.work

Una volta i una altra i una altra is an exhibition project by martaroc.work that transforms used olive oil, collected during the summer season, into pieces of handmade soap.

The exhibition begins with an everyday residual material —burnt oil from a restaurant on the Costa Brava— to observe how tourism, seasonal labour and cycles of consumption produce forms of material memory. Through soap sculptures, vertical sheets, blocks and suspended elements, the project turns a waste product associated with tourist activity into a sensitive device where smell, transparency, repetition and wear intersect.

Olive oil, a central symbol of Mediterranean culture, appears here in an ambiguous state: it is no longer food, but it has not disappeared either; it has been used, degraded and transformed. In this transition, matter operates both as residue and as archive. It contains working days, moving bodies, seasonal economies and forms of dependency that repeat year after year.

On July 2, the exhibition will be activated with Una volta més, an action in which some of the pieces will be fragmented and put into circulation by weight, opening a new phase of transformation and wear. The activation insists on the dynamics of repetition, consumption and transfer that run through the exhibition.

The exhibition proposes a critical reading of the souvenir. Not as a pleasant object attached to a place, but as what remains after the experience: a material, uncomfortable and persistent trace. From Espai Souvenir, the show invites us to think about the contemporary Mediterranean through its residues, its productive rhythms and its forms of exhaustion.

Curated by Adriana Monroy Galindo.
With the support of the Institut de Cultura de Barcelona.