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

Una volta i una altra i una altra

martaroc.work
Curated by Adriana Monroy Galindo
Espai Souvenir · Art Nou 2026
Opening: June 25, 7 pm
Activation: Una volta més, July 2, 7 pm
Until July 9

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.

Bio

martaroc.work is an artistic duo formed by Marta R Chust and Roc Domingo Puig. Their practice moves between artistic production, mediation and social research, working from specific contexts where energetic, hydraulic, digital or tourist infrastructures shape everyday life and its inequalities.

Through methodologies close to collaborative anthropology, they develop projects attentive to material cycles, territories and situated forms of knowledge. Their work has been presented at Bòlit Centre d’Art Contemporani, M|A|C Mataró, Centre Cultural Las Cigarreras, Museu Terra, Sala d’Art Jove, Sala Amadís, AlbumArte, Rad’Art and ICPNA in Lima and Iquitos. They have taken part in residencies at Farrera, Lo Pati, Casa Tres Patios, Correlación Contemporánea and Rad’Art Project, and have received support from the Research and Innovation Grant of the Departament de Cultura de la Generalitat, the Art and Nature Grant from Centre d’Art La Panera and the INJUVE Creation Grant.

With the support of the Institut de Cultura de Barcelona.