The exhibitions of the 21/22 season focus on the figure of Fabià Puigserver, set designer, stage director and founder of the Teatre Lliure. On the occasion of the 30th anniversary of his death and the 70th anniversary of his arrival in Warsaw, we dedicate two exhibition projects between Montjuïc and Gràcia, focused on his formative period in Poland, in the 50s, when the country was considered a mecca of the artistic and intellectual world.
Exhibitions and installations
Slèvia: ecos i ressonàncies Fabià Puigserver
02/23 - 06/19/22
Montjuic foyer
Marking the thirtieth anniversary of the death of Fabià Puigserver, this installation is the second exhibition project to focus on his relationship with Central and Eastern Europe, after the exhibition at the Lliure in Gràcia.
SLÈVIA was the pseudonym he used as the author of his plays while living in Warsaw and sometimes in Barcelona, and we have returned to the name as a symbol of the bridge that Fabià built between Warsaw and Barcelona, between his cultures and above all, between their theatrical traditions.
Our aim with 'Ecos i ressonàncies' [Echoes and resonances] is to highlight his legacy. The 'echoes' are those that are still being heard in the legacy that Fabià Puigserver has left us in Catalan and European theatre. The 'resonances' are those created in two iconic theatres - the Fabià Puigserver and the Lliure in Gràcia.
For this reason, we have created a sound box with dimensions that are proportional to the original Lliure theatre. It is a stage area where actions that honour the memory come into play: saving it, nurturing it and arranging it so that nothing is forgotten - not even the smallest detail.
This area will be the setting for three actions that will take place consecutively until the end of June. The first (23 February - 22 March) involves 80 books and some documents that Fabià left us from his time in Poland, and we will have experts who will be helping us to study and catalogue them. The second action (23 March - 21 April) includes more than 300 photographs that professionals and friends closely related to his work will be helping us to catalogue and describe. And the last action (22 April - 19 June) is the collective creation of a curtain in order to pay tribute to both Fabià and his mother, who was such a great influence on him in terms of the care and detail with which she sewed.
This is a live installation, created with experts in the Slavic language, theatre professionals, friends and even members of the public who did not know him, whose participation will resonate and leave a very significant imprint in the Lliure Archive. It is a documentation space containing the entire history of this theatre, spanning more than 45 years. We believe that a memory that is built together is the most fitting memory to pay tribute to the legacy of Fabià Puigserver.
Slèvia
12/10/22 – 18/06/23
Montjuïc's Hall
‘Puigserver planned and built the Lliure as a vast container of mirrors, where even the spectators could see themselves as actors-observers on the other side of the fiction’.
We recovered in Montjuïc the exhibition on Fabià Puigserver that could be seen in Gràcia last season.
The theatre space, the stageless stage box that Fabià Puigserver dreamt up, created a play of mirrors, as the dramaturg and director Jaume Melendres describes, which not only placed the audience within the fiction but also played with arranging them on different sides so they could gain different perspectives on the same action. It thus broke with the architectural perspective of the Renaissance, better known as the Italian style, and created a freer theatre.
In this photograph exhibition, we are also suggesting a play of mirrors, a first step towards a retrospective on Fabià Puigserver during his sojourn in Poland, where he encountered a new social and cultural landscape that proved to be essential in his years of training. Without that life experience, we would be unable to understand the artist we know today. And the mirrors also help us see ourselves reflected in his life because, the way the Teatre Lliure was conceived, neither life nor death has lost sight of us—we, the audience.
Slèvia is the pseudonym he used to sign his works when he was in Warsaw, and even a few of them after he had returned to Barcelona. By this name, he acknowledged both cities, and we have revived it as proof of the bridge he built between them, always crossing the two cultures, especially the two stage cultures. The texts we present are part of a conversation with his close friend, the architect of the new Lliure venue on Montjuïc, Manolo Núñez Yanowsky, who also has ties with Eastern Europe. In this conversation, Fabià explains the open choir as the way his life in Poland was, and his vision of the countries of Central and Eastern Europe.
The influence of the theatre from these European countries in reconstruction and the 30 years that have elapsed since the death of Fabià Puigserver converge this season in a retrospective that we are presenting both here and later in Montjuïc. Mirrors that tell us who Fabià was in Poland, and that reflect us, like a rear-view mirror, via the mementos that we conserve from that stage in his life.
[quote by Jaume Melendres (Fabià Puigserver / overseen by Guillem-Jordi Graells and Antonio Bueso. Diputació de Barcelona : Fundació Teatre Lliure: Associació d’espectadors del Teatre Lliure: Institut del Teatre, 1996. p. 71)].