The Arts Santa Mònica project where anything can happen

BarcelonaSanta Mónica is a hive of creativity. In the cloister, Claudia del Barrio, from the production company Merci Xula, is preparing the new video for Ouineta. Two floors up, choreographer and dancer Mónica Valenciano improvises, sharing space with the members of the Valencian collective Las Mediocre, who are working in front of their computers developing a conflict resolution office. They'll soon have to move, because the video for Ouineta will be shot here in a matter of days. Back in the cloister, the stage designed by artist Víctor Ruiz Colomer is now empty, awaiting new artists. And suddenly, a cloud of smoke, conceived by stage designer Leticia Skrycky, begins to form.

Nothing is free; it's part of the project. Without a crack there is no point of light, curated by Tomàs Aragay and Sofia Asencio (Doctor Alonso Society), who invited artists Sara Manubens and Carolina Campos to share the commission and recruit around twenty artists to participate. "What we asked ourselves was at what moment and under what circumstances something poetic is produced," says Tomàs Aragay. "We can tell you a cultural fact, but we were also thinking of a more poetic, transformative event, because cultural life is full of events, museums are full of events, but they are generally very regulated, very explained and very conditioned," he adds.

The curators challenge the more institutional nature of museums by creating the circumstances that often take the public by surprise. In other words, the complete opposite of the idea of the museum as a cog in the tourism industry, dependent on visitor rankings. Since Núria Güell realized that she ran the risk of becoming a lure, she has taken note of this fact and recruited a woman to represent her in the project's creative residency.

"The project is an invitation to come and spend some time in the museum, to wait for things to happen, not when they're planned or announced, but when they happen," says Aragay, as the snack arrives. Eating and drinking at the museum? For free? "Museum cafeterias tend to be very expensive, and there's this rather stupid idea that when you consume art you can't be comfortable. So we spoke with Cantina Migrante, which is made up of people from the neighborhood, and we proposed that they do a varied catering service from their kitchen. So every day there are a lot of them, it produces 100 menus, which is an area where there are people who don't have a good living, they can come in here and they know there's food," explains Aragay.

All artistic languages

The choice of artists was based on the desire to be diverse in terms of genre, themes, and artistic languages. There is dance, installations, video art, literature, fashion... (like Sofía Archer's clothing for non-standard bodies). Another focus of the project is gender, as is the case with the Brazilian anarcho-transfeminist artist Bruna Kury, who has developed a project about her transition and colonialism among women. performance and an installation that changes over the course of a few days. Another line involves bringing popular practices like ice nail manicures to the art institution. "We don't approach gender as a discourse, but rather as an unstable place," says Aragay.

And above all, he plans to elevate the creative processes to the category of artwork. "The processes are usually hidden, but we consider them the most important work the viewer should see. The artist's process is just as important as the result. You're not a mere consumer of a work, but rather you should be alive and in dialogue with a work that is also alive," says Aragay.