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Bodies that don't matter

About this project

BODIES THAT DON’T MATTER is an online curatorial project by Nora Ancarola, with digital direction by Sònia López, for the Xarxa de Museus d’Art de Catalunya. It begins with an uncomfortable question: which bodies have been represented in museums, and through whose gaze?

The exhibition proposes a journey through works from the museum collections of the Xarxa, organised into six thematic areas: historical exoduses, relocations and dreams, bare life, inner wounds, shelters and survival, and the exotic gaze. Each area can be explored independently, but all are part of the same reflection on the subjectivity of migrant bodies — with or without awareness of the very fact of migration.

The digital format is not a medium, it is a decision. It allows the dialogue between geographically dispersed collections to be strengthened and a transversal narrative to be built that would be difficult to construct within a physical space. The online edition is itself a collection of collections.

About Nora Ancarola

I am a visual artist, living and working in Barcelona since 1978.

As time goes by, my work is increasingly closely related to two aspects of reality that particularly concern me: the capacity of artistic languages ​​to provide new readings to small – or large – historical stories and social reality and, on the other hand, the observation and use of creative processes in their potential to manage individual and systemic discomfort as an instrument of transformation.

www.noraancarola.com

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Bodies that don't matter

The displaced, migrants, colonists, and travellers

A curatorial project by Nora Ancarola

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Today, 68 million people are forced to leave their place of origin for economic, religious, or political reasons, or because of their sexual orientation. Displacement creates an inevitable sense of not belonging.

Museum collections hold part of these stories. This exhibition narrates what lies behind the movements of creators and to what extent artists reflect these travels in their works. Works that speak of belonging, of wounds, of what is left behind.

Six thematic areas, multiple collections, many questions. Which bodies matter in our visual culture? How are they read? Which ones are left out of the narrative? A journey that invites us to ask whether we can read them differently.

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