Eugènia Balcell: She, Once and Again

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Image courtesy of Fundació Vila Casas

1993. Eugènia Balcells makes a clear plastic coat which all women of the present, past and future can fit into. Àlbum portàtil (Portable album). She presents it for the first time at the Tartessos bookshop in Barcelona. The books caress the coat. They are one of the few public domains in which women have always been present.

It was not until 2018 that her long list of installations dedicated to tracing the presence of women in contemporary history actually included her. She recorded a seven-minute video: Selfportrait.

Among the works Àlbum portàtil and Selfportrait—both included in the exhibition She, Once and Again—there have been many questions about women’s lives that Eugènia Balcells has explored.

The installations Reprise (1977), Boy Meets Girl (1978), Going through Languages (1981), "\Fin (End) (1978) and Esdevenir (Become) (2007), were selected to be part of the exhibition. They explore the female and male characters who occasionally meet to form couples; the perception that an alien would have of human beings based on images collected in the printed media; the distance between beauty pageants and women's domestic lives; and the uncertain origins hidden beneath the end frames of Hollywood films.

Throughout the exhibition, female archetypes—all mutually inclusive and exclusive—draw their own vocabulary from which one can rethink human relationships we experience today.

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