Exhibition
Rodoreda, a Forest
The exhibition delves into the imaginary of the Catalan writer by focusing on the radicality of her literature. The exhibition proposes a journey through the major themes of her work, understanding them as a complex network of signifiers that, like the roots and branches of a tree, spread out in complex and intertwined ramifications of meaning.
The poetics of this great 20th-century novelist are made up of certain gestures that are repeated in stories and novels – spying, watching, witnessing death, choking, drowning, transforming, etc. – there are many houses with or without gardens, streets and squares, but above all it is full of trees and botanical tropes.
Delving into Rodoreda's writing, which is always and at the same time innocent and cruel, childish and macabre, realistic and fantastic, bright and gloomy, implies embracing the inseparable unity of opposites that defines her imaginary: to show, in short, that, next to the kindergarten with grandfather Gurguí, is a growing space for rebel cacti, giant wisteria, evil flowers, suicide forests, and all kinds of misdeeds.
Conceiving the space as a large tree that organically connects the different rooms, the exhibition itinerary explores the work and the writer as if they were a forest: the literary and vital roots and the experience of uprooting caused by exile; trunks that are the backbones of the experience of war, full of lumps and evil; the branches that want to brush the great names of Western culture – writers, artists and filmmakers; the treetops that that house birds and touch the sky; and also the seeds, which end up germinating and bearing fruit in the imagination of a group of visual artists who will create artworks from scratch, inspired by Rodoreda's work.
The exhibition incorporates original documents from the collection of the Mercè Rodoreda Foundation, historical materials, photographs, fragments of the films and plastic and literary works that made up the intellectual and artistic constellation which Rodoreda absorbed, and at the same time, the work of contemporary creators such as Èlia Llach, Mar Arza, Cabosanroque, Oriol Vilapuig and Carlota Subirós, among others.
Curators: Neus Penalba, Martí Sales