Eulàlia Rovira and Anna Fontanet. “Thorax, thorax”

Tòrax, thorax is a performative reading by Eulàlia Rovira, in collaboration with Anna Fontanet, that emerges from an unusual encounter: the presence of a baby —a pre-linguistic, pre-upright body— before Roman remains that embody a legacy of domination, hierarchy, and separation.

In this encounter, the piece observes how language falters before a body that knows nothing yet of the structures of Western thought or of the logics of exclusion; a body that has come out of another body and still lives as though they were the same thing, or perhaps as though there were no such thing as what we call skin to separate us, no name by which we can distinguish ourselves, no hinge or axis that sets things against one another, and certainly no axis mundi, castrum, or cardo maximus.

From this collision between a body unfolding into the world and ruins that still uphold it, Tòrax, thorax begins to take shape—or to lose it.

Eulàlia Rovira

Her practice examines how certain Western ways of defining and ordering the world become inscribed in bodies, environments, and language. Through installations, sculptures, and performances, she has explored issues such as gravity, vision, surface, and inert matter, proposing a perceptual plasticity that resists fixed certainties. She has received the Generalitat de Catalunya Grant for Artistic Creation and Research, the Barcelona Crea Grant, and the GAC Award. Since 2013, she has collaborated with artist Adrian Schindler, with whom she shares an interest in displacing both the gaze that observes and the voice that narrates. www.eulaliarovira.info

Anna Fontanet

Anna Fontanet’s practice unfolds at the intersection of the body, sound, light, and digital sonic arts. Taking listening as a driving force for creation, she investigates self-generative systems that activate sound and light landscapes in real time, in dialogue with voice and gesture. Her performative language is poetic and sensory, focusing on fragility, perceptual tension, and presence as a form of resistance. Her latest work, N. A. N., premiered at Mercat de les Flors in February 2025 and was subsequently presented in the Sound and Body Wednesdays programme at Santa Mònica. www.annafontanet.com