It began in a casual and festive way: in 2003, Mario Flecha invited a group of friends to hold an art event in a house he had just bought in Jafre, a town in the Baix Empordà with 300 inhabitants. With all the irony in the world, he called it a “biennial.” It was the time of the boom of the great international biennials. That same year alone, there were those in Venice, Sharjah, Istanbul, Beijing, Cairo, Havana, Kyoto, Mercosul, Lyon, Prague, Gothenburg… A couple of years earlier and with a similar knowing nod, Maurizio Cattelan had organized the 6th Caribean Biennial, a semi-false biennial that offered the ten invited artists a week of vacation without art or obligations on the island of St. Kitts. Ironies aside, Jafre continued to be held every two years and established itself as the “shortest and smallest biennial in the world.” With a duration of two days, a list of fourteen invited artists and a scope of action that has extended to the whole town, this summer has celebrated its sixth edition. Curated by Mario Flecha and Carolina Grau, who this year have been joined by the composer Daniel Teruggi, far from competing with other biennials, the Jafre Biennial offers artists, visitors and inhabitants of Jafre a pleasant experience, a series of interventions of an ephemeral nature and above all experiences and encounters. National and international artists of different generations and careers have participated in the biennial, such as Muntadas, Miralda, Ignasi Aballí, Jordi Mitjà, Jordi Colomer, Francis Alÿs, Yamandú Canosa, Martin Creed, Bestué/Vives, Patricia Dauder, Dora García, Wilfredo Prieto, Oriol Vilanova or Tamara Kuselman, to name just a few. “Escampar els fems” has been the title of this edition, which, alluding to the semi-rural environment, can be read as a metaphor for the current situation, in which the crisis has revealed all the hidden filth. Of an optimistic nature, the premise of the commissioners contemplates the possibility that shit and the unbearable smell can have the positive effect of fertilizing and making new things grow. In any case, the present edition of the biennial is an appeal to the critical capacity of artists and visitors, with the complicity and participation of the inhabitants of Jafre. And these have been some of the highlights: Perejaume offered a bouquet of flowers picked from the highest to the lowest point of the municipality; Ryan Rivadeneryra traveled along a part of the Ter river at night in an inflatable boat that ended up puncturing; Daniel Steegmann installed a version of the “Cirque de Relations” (with a tractor and other elements) in a threshing floor; Julia Mariscal carried out an intervention with chickens and sculptures in the Raliu butcher’s shop; Ruth Proctor wrote the phrase “Se’n va anar cap enllà” in front of a sanctuary; Bea Turner appealed to mystery and uncertainty in an action that involved a cloth, a tarp and a lot of smoke; Salma Cheddadi projected the film “Sweet Viking” about the journey of the Icelandic singer Jara to the house of her sick father, during which she tells stories of the country, of elves and trolls. There was a concert by the composer Diego Losa in collaboration with Daniel Teruggi. And there was also paella and a celebration. In its origins, the Jafre biennial was not about professional strategies for artists and curators to build a curriculum or international career, but about working from the freedom that micro allows to enjoy, maintain direct dialogues, so that art is something close, unpretentious and open to everyone. After six editions and an increasingly ambitious list of artists, it is clear that it is no longer just a meeting of friends, and its scope of action is also increasingly broader. The risk is institutionalization, the approach to marketing and cultural industries. The smart move would be to emphasize small scale, proximity, “do it yourself”, authenticity, experience and living.
[Article published in Bonart, 2013]
