Virgin Mary Performances / La ciutat i la por

The Lliure awards each year Creative Residencies of Exchange, in the framework of the Grants to the creation Carlota Soldevila.

This season sees a collaboration with Nowy Teatr in Warsaw (Poland), which will feature the artist Klaudia Hartung-Wójciak with Virgin Mary Performances, an exploration of the figure of the Virgin following the paths of distribution of images and places of worship and devotion. It also includes the actress and artist Paula Blanco, with La ciutat i la por [The city and fear], a project about otherness based on the contrast between silence and noise.

La ciutat i la por is an attempt to map. Maps, however, always forget something and, above all, just after being drawn cease to be current. A cartography of a moment and a country through voices, testimonies, reflections, stories and silenced landscapes. An open question like the wound left by walls and borders. An overlay of lives and stories, conversations and accents. A trip to Poland that begins with the restlessness of going to find what its soundscape is and gets entangled in its silences. From Barcelona to the eastern border of the European Union, where is one of the last virgin forests of the continent that, in addition to the bison, since June last year has new inhabitants, the forest people, the Nomen Nescio. And Warsaw as a forest, too, full of anonymous existences that are not part of the identity story but, with their presences, tell us about their silences.

Virgin Mary Performances is focused on following the paths of distribution of the images of the Virgin Mary, whose veneration, both in Poland and in Catalonia, is not weakened but migrates towards increasingly evident socio-cultural spaces, perhaps emancipating. Starting with popular places of devotion such as: the monastery Jasna Góra, Virgin of the Shrine of Częstochowa, Licheń - Shrine of the Virgin of Sorrows, Queen of Poland, or the Virgin of Montserrat in Catalonia, and also following marginal and scattered objects and places of worship, ritual, performative and visual practices of the Virgin Mary are explored. The enormous number of representations, associated with the multiplicity of revelations and the development of the artistic and devotional industry, leads to a significant expansion of the visual field of "holiness", "virginity" or post-conciliar "normativity".


Collaborate with the Biennale Warszawa in help for Ukraine here.