On the 25th of November, Fabra i Coats: Fàbrica de Creació presents the second edition of (Bread and photocopies), a sharing of work developed by resident visual artists during their residency, under the curatorial mentorship of Rosa Lleó and Pilar Cruz.
Pa i fotocòpies is not an exhibition, but rather a presentation of the production processes behind the projects, many of which are still “in progress”. Pa i fotocòpies is a hybrid presentation format with participation from the resident artists, led by Lara Martínez, in which each artist will discuss or demonstrate the project they have been working on. Pa i fotocòpies is also an opportunity for the artistic community to meet and exchange ideas in a casual communal setting. The exhibition is part of the various actions to support and raise resident artists’ profile promoted by Fabra i Coats: Fàbrica de Creació.
GRAF, together with Fabra i Coats: Fàbrica de Creació, has invited critic and curator Jordi Garrido to write about the work that the 21 resident artists will present in this session.
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Chronicles of Insistence by Jordi Garrido.
0. A Necessary Friction
Since the early 20th century, the Fabra i Coats factory has been an engine of friction: a space where manual labour —first textile, now artistic— has united matter, time and community. Where previously, worker women spun cotton, now artists spin ideas, affection and resistance. The factory no longer weaves fabric, but relationships and shared trains of thought.
Pa i fotocòpies is the result of a shared process spanning months; initiated by the curators’ support for each artist and the co-creation of a common space where together they could decide how to present the year’s worth of work. The idea of “bread” arose from the desire to turn this moment into a warm gathering, inspired by former artist in residence at FiC, Joana Capella‘s project Guanyar-se el pa (Earning your bread), a practice of self governance that combined learning a trade with reflecting on the value of artistic labour and its collective dimension. From this mundane yet critical gesture stems the spirit of Pa i fotocòpies: working together, with our hands and ideas, turning bread into a metaphor for co-existence and the photocopy into a tool of resistance. This combination, both domestic and symbolic, gives shape to a community working on the basis of persistence: go back, try, fail, go back.
At the pace of a doomscroll, to a backdrop of increasingly fragile certainties and stories we consume in TikTok-like snippets, the artists in residence at Fabra i Coats: Fàbrica de Creació propose a form of critical insistence. This is not simply repetition, but a necessary friction: the act of looking closely, of pausing where the gaze usually glosses over, of questioning what is taken for granted, and of deliberately obstructing dominant narratives. Collectively, their work draws a cartography of contemporary persistences, traced not with clear and simple answers, but with fertile and pertinent questions.
This narrative is articulated around four thematic through-lines which, acting as cross-cutting axes, connect these creators’ diverse practices. We will explore the body as a battleground and healing ground; the fractured memories that seek a tool for resistance through archive; the ambivalent relationship with technology, which oscillates between prosthesis and phantom; and finally, the poetics of subversion, where critique becomes a form of beauty. Perhaps the function of art today is not to offer consolation nor solutions, but simply to improve the quality of our questions. And it is on this task that the artists insist.
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1. From Wound to Power: The Body as Territory
Barbara Kruger said “your body is a battlefield”. But it is not just that: it is also a space for healing, the ground zero where tensions between the individual and the world, between wound and power, are written. It is not a passive entity to be represented, but an active subject that speaks, remembers and resists.
In Lo que una cuerpa puede, (What a body can withstand) María Florencia Cid Berdeal explores resilience and reconstruction after trauma, conceiving the body as a possible site of repair—a space that can only emerge from militant feminism. In the piece Cartografías sensibles, (sensitive cartographies) derived from this research, the artist articulates a living tension between the intimate and the public, between the gesture of craftwork—sewing, embroidery—and sculpture made from organic materials. The result is a practice that transcends the body’s boundaries to transform it into a map, a symbolic territory of memory, power and social transformation.
In dialogue with her, the women’s bodies of Carmen de Ayora, in Rastros del cuerpo común (Traces of the common body), turn sculptural matter into revolt and form into dissent. From intimate reparation to collective revolution, both proposals reclaim the body’s materiality as an irrefutable political space. The she-body reclaims herself as a political subject in public space; and consequently, vulnerability is transformed into politics of intimacy: fragility ceases to be a weakness and becomes knowledge and strength, another way of facing/standing up to the world.
Hashimoto: Pieza #3, by Pilar Talavera, translates autoimmune disease into sonic matter, opening a collective approximation to something that is normally silenced. The piece is part of a series of actions that explore the nature of autoimmune diseases, turning the body into a landscape and sound into a space of empathy. Through her research into Hashimoto’s disease, Talavera proposes a shared listening to imbalance, a way of recognising vulnerability as a common frequency capable of resonating in the other.
This impulse connects with Cura, curar, curar-se, by Mar Flores Flo, where the question — ‘What do we do when medication prevents access to thought?’ — reveals the friction between body, mind and machine. In it, mechanical writing is a crutch, but also an act of persistence in the face of fragility.
Bodies, pierced by wounds, illness or dissent, are living territories, inhabited by memories that are written over and over again. Vulnerability does not hide in them: it persists. This persistence — whether silent or furious — beats on there, as its most radical form of resistance.
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2. Fractured Memories, Resilient Archives
If the body is the initial territory, memory is its map: an unstable cartography that is constantly being rewritten. For this collective, memory is not just a nostalgic recollection, but raw material and a battlefield where the meaning of the present is contested. The archive, therefore, ceases to be a passive deposit of information and becomes an active tool for reinterpretation and resistance.
Several practices directly challenge mainstream narratives and official historical memory. In Palaus de la memòria (Memory palaces) Biel Llinàs, uses the architectural space of Casa de Velázquez as a starting point for a speculative reinterpretation of the Madrid Front and Franco’s reconstruction, calling into question the narrative fabricated by those in power. Similarly, in Floquet de neu: revisitar una icona de Barcelona (Snowflake: remembering an icon of Barcelona), Oscar Moya Villanueva investigates how the iconic figure of an albino gorilla was used as a political smokescreen to whitewash the social context of the time, demonstrating how a pop icon can conceal mechanisms of control.
Personal and cultural archives also become spaces for poetic resistance. In De pliegues y subrayados (Folds and Underlines), Sara Agudo revisits her relationship with what she herself has highlighted from her past readings, rereading and giving new meaning to these quotes from the past. Similarly, in Rotativa que mai no s’atura (Non-stop rotation) Chuso Ordi, brings personal archives to life as poetic and critical spaces, connecting illustrations on the AIDS crisis—though not exclusively—of the 1990s with the present, to highlight the persistence of social struggles. This activation resonates in the work of Tatiana Donoso, who in Poemes per a l’amnèsia tèxtil (Poems for Textile Amnesia) explores the importance of bearing the memories linked to textiles in mind: both on an everyday and on an industrial scale, from the T-shirt we wear to the workers who make it; not forgetting is the only hope we have to avoid perpetrating the collapse we are headed for.
Meanwhile, in Disminuir un punt cada dues o tres passades (Decrease one stitch every two or three rows), Mireia Garcia uses textile language as a support for memory, where errors and glitches in inherited patterns serve to intertwine individual and shared memories. This intentional glitch is a material manifestation of the necessary friction that defines this collective: a productive mistake that opens a crack in the blind repetition of tradition.
This constant overwriting of memory does not happen in a vacuum. It is mediated, accelerated, and distorted by technology, which becomes both our most vast archive and our most fallible mnemonic prosthesis.
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3. Neither flesh nor circuit: Beyond the ghost in the shell
The relationship between artists and technology is often deeply ambivalent. Far from celebrating it uncritically or rejecting it outright, their works approach it as an inescapable force that acts as an extension of the body and mind, but also as an agent that alters our perception, creates new dependencies and redefines our intimacy.
Critique of technological over-dependence finds its central axis in Lorena Ruiz Pellicero’s La mort del parpelleig (The death of blinking). Her research into how overexposure to screens transforms an act as natural as blinking reveals a toxic relationship between humans and machines; a dependency that alters even our most basic biology. Beyond its relationship to the individual, technology is redefining spaces and social interaction. In Daniel Cao’s project, Jardines, espacios de recreo y zonas de subjetividad (Parks, play areas and zones of subjectivity), the boundary between a real and a virtual garden collapses, forcing us to question whether contemporary male subjectivity is forged at night among park bushes or in the pixels of a rendered landscape.
Finally, technology emerges as a device for mediating sensory experience, capable of creating new forms of connection. The project Postales sonoras de la intimidad (Sound postcards from intimacy), by valo sonoro, begins with the recording of everyday sounds, turning the medium of sound into a bridge between the intimacy of each and every body. The act of recording allows us to hear details that normally go unnoticed, transforming them into a tool for collective reflection. Along similar lines, in Una qüestió de ritme (A question of rhythm), Maria Pipla investigates the sensory connection between bodies, spaces and cinematic devices, exploring the poetics and politics of rhythm in musical communities. This critical and sensitive use of technology opens the gates to a wider strategy of subversion, not just technologically, but also socially and conceptually.
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4. Poetics of Friction: Insist, Shift, Subvert
Further to specific issues, the common thread that unites this collective is a shared vocation for subversion: a desire to short-circuit the logics of power, consumption, productivity and truth. This subversion takes on various forms—from direct social critique to conceptual falsification or the subtle displacement of perception—but it shares a single intention: to open up fissures in the system.
In Ríos, oasis y tumultos, (Rivers, oases and turmoil) Arturo Aguilar reclaims the right to leisure as an act of resistance against a society that confuses rest with laziness and consumption with happiness. Halfway between memory and social critique, his project proposes pausing as a form of collective well-being and as a political space from which we can question productivity as a contemporary dogma. Aguilar transforms the river—a flow of images, interruptions and transience—into a metaphor for this silent resistance: a place where time is not something to exploit but something to breathe.
From a close yet more analytical perspective, with Entre poc i res / Microhistòries de l’estandardització (Between Little and Nothing / Microhistories of Standardisation), Pol Pintó dissects the invisible mechanisms that regulate everyday life. His work is a form of archaeology of the present: bringing to light the tension between the norm and unique, individual experience, revealing how the micro-structures of everyday life — though seemingly banal — contain critical and poetic potential. Whereas Aguilar defends the right to rest as a form of resistance, Pintó dismantles the cogs that propel routine, demonstrating how subversion can also spring from the most minute repetition.
Other artists opt for a more cerebral sabotage, using forgery and parody as agents of chaos. The project Keep dumb and have a knife day by Maria Castillejo Fernández is a prime example: via the concept of shanzhai — Chinese copywork as a form of resistance — the artist explores how falsification can contaminate the notion of truth and short-circuit authority. The fake becomes a lucid and parodic weapon, reminding us that, in a world saturated with brands and performative identities, perhaps shameless copying is the most honest form of criticism.
We also find more subtle forms of subversion operating in the perceptual, affective or ecological realms. Nieves de Montserrat García Botella, with Papallona (Butterfly) —part of the project #FFOFF. Todo Comenzar se Da en el Delirio (Every beginning begins with delirium)—, imagines a future post-climate-collapse not as a catastrophe, but as an opportunity for a new beginning. In dialogue with works such as Torre en Alta Tensión (High voltage tower), where material fragility becomes an ecological warning, the artist explores glitch and error as metaphors for a transforming world, where failure can open spaces for life.
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Other proposals shift the focus towards the margins of attention: in Males Herbes (Weeds), Gemma París rethinks the relationship between wild plant species and spaces on the city’s outskirts through a combination of drawing and sewing, using them as a metaphor for things that grow out of control but also as places of care and encounter. On a similar note, in get ahold, get a hold, lorna jordà, explores the tensions between language, image and materialities to displace architectural and visual elements from her immediate surroundings. Direct intervention on objects and spaces provokes small errors and misalignments that compel us to rethink our habitual modes of perception and the way we interact with everyday environments.
Gloria Bonet Batalla, and her literary project POEMA (working title), tackles love, death and the absurd through the filter of sarcasm and melancholy, demonstrating that poetry can also be an instrument of emotional and political subversion — especially as she champions the importance of writing in Catalan. Her words, like her colleagues’ practices, do not seek to convince us but to make us hesitate; they do not impose certainties, but open up spaces for doubt.
All these practices, from outright criticism to almost imperceptible gestures, share a common obstinacy: resisting consensus, interrupting the flow, introducing friction in the place of inertia. They are poetics that do not seek to close meanings, but to keep them open; that do not aspire to resolve, but to insist. In a time that demands clarity, efficiency and measurable results, these creators claim the right to doubt, to complexity and to the beauty that emerges from the cracks in the system. Their work is a powerful and necessary reminder that, sometimes, the most radical form of resistance is simply to keep insisting.
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