Parlar sobre, parlar per, parlar. Les formes de l'enunciació subalterna a 25%. Catalonia at Venice

Abstract

[eng] In 2013 Catalan culture was present in the “Eventi Collaterali” of the Venice Biennial for the third time. The project chosen was 25%. Catalonia at Venice, curated by Jordi Balló from an idea by Francesc Torres, with the participation of Torres himself and the filmmaker Mercedes Álvarez. It also involved eight unemployed men and women, selected from a wide social spectrum, who were asked to choose two objects: one from their own home and another from the permanent collection of the MACBA. The final exhibition included these objects as well as the photographs taken by Torres, who had shared the daily lives of the eight participants. Similarly, Álvarez filmed their visit to the MACBA and documented their opinions about the function of art and their process of selection. In this paper, we analyze this project as an example of the difficulty of any attempt to open a new space of enunciation with full capacity of decision in contemporary arts and politics. We use the discourses and images of the exhibition and the catalogue of 25%. Catalonia at Venice, as well as its critical reception in the non-specialized press, to study the tensions caused by the assignment of authorship to subjects that are apparently situated outside the productive system. Moreover, we analyze the complexity of the scales of representation proposed by this project, where eight subjects are chosen as representatives of an unemployed collective which also represents the Catalan culture in an international artistic event.