2015 TO KILL IT November 1976. Three radical actions - Art in Mataró 1959-1983

In November 1976, the Museum hosted three very radical actions, both from a symbolic and critical point of view, based on the concept of power and signed by Ferran Garcia Sevilla (Palma de Mallorca, 1949), Fina Miralles (Sabadell, 1950) and Jordi Benito (Granollers, 1951-Barcelona, 2008). Almost 40 years later, a rereading is done by Marta Pol Rigau.

The title“PER MATAR-HO”

The title comes from the pun of KILL IT. From a first reading you can perceive that the title arose from the splitting and/or decomposition of the city's toponym, Mataró. But, at the same time, if the first part refers to the word kill, that is to say, to take the life of a living being, the second part seems to allude to the expression of wanting to let a matter run its course, is to say, not to talk more about the matter to leave it as unsolvable. From a sound poetry reading, it seems that with the exclamation "KILL IT" they wanted to definitively fulminate the recent past, full of oppression and lack of freedom, both from an aesthetic approach and from a political perspective. It should be borne in mind that the cycle took place in November 1976, a year after the death of Franco - the moment of the transition from dictatorship to democracy - which coincides with the beginning of the political transition in the Spanish State.

The motive of the cicle “PER MATAR-HO”

The cycle of conceptual art "PER MATAR-HO" was organized by the Mataró Museum and coordinated by Miquel Reniu. This project arose with the intention of establishing a point of connection between the exhibition program of the Museum and the most daring and radical conceptual proposals of the art of the moment, at the same time, being another bet of Matarona's cultural life to bring the citizenship to the new aesthetic languages. In 1976, the artistic trajectories of Jordi Benito, Ferran García Sevilla and Fina Miralles were linked to the practice and theory of conceptual art.

he “PER MATAR-HO” exhibition 2015: the dematerialized work of art has been reconstructed with the documents.

The exhibition does not aim to make a faithful reconstruction of his ephemeral interventions, but to collect the spirit of the moment, based on the documents found in the art collections and the archives of the respective artists and the accounts of the organizers and participants, to build a discursive thread of their creative processes. The idea is to offer a contemporary reading - one among many and many possible - in order to establish a thread of continuity in the creative processes and give conceptual visibility to the temporal interstices, the current reconfigurations will be complemented with previous and/or subsequent works, which are supported by the photographic documents of these interventions of 1976. In this way, the proposal presented at the Ca l'Arenas Art Center aims to insert and insist on the desire to involve the visitor/spectator in an unexpected way in the works, not only to awaken their curiosity about these works but to make them accomplices of this rereading..

Credits

Curator: Marta Pol Rigau
Place: Ca l'Arenas de Mataró