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.
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
A project by Deckard for the Xarxa de Museus d’Art de Catalunya.
In the interactive version, works are presented with an essential credit line. Full references for each work, as provided by the respective museums, can be found in the complete text of Nora Ancarola’s essay. These have been respected in their original form as part of the curatorial work.
Ambient audio sourced from Freesound and used in accordance with its Creative Commons licences.