Rodoreda, a Forest

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Image courtesy of Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona

The exhibition delves into the imagination of Catalan writer Mercè Rodoreda by focusing on the radicality of her literature. Curated by Neus Penalba, the exhibition proposes a journey through the major themes of her work, understanding them as a 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. Delving into Rodoreda's writing—which is always simultaneously innocent and cruel, childish and macabre, realistic and fantastic, bright and gloomy—implies embracing the inseparable unity of opposites that defines her work: to show, in short, that, next to the kindergarten with grandfather Gurguí, is a growing space for rebel cacti, giant wisteria, evil flowers and all kinds of misdeeds.

Conceiving the space as a large forest that organically connects the different rooms, the exhibition uses the simile of trees to explore the work and the writer: 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 brings the author’s literary body of work into dialogue with the plastic and audiovisual work of artists from different periods, and also incorporates original documents from the holdings of the Mercè Rodoreda Foundation, and photographs and contemporary works by artists such as Èlia Llach, Mar Arza, Cabosanroque, Oriol Vilapuig and Carlota Subirós. 

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