We need stories. Our collective imagination works from narratives that, from the stories we are told as children before going to bed, help us to distinguish our emotions and overcome our fears. Stories accompany us throughout our lives. Politics also creates stories, as a tool of political communication that allows us to build a novel of power, in which there are heroes and villains, good and evil, light and dark side, ancestral myths, which we constantly revisit, from Greek mythology to Star Wars or The Lord of the Rings.
The production of meaning often involves the construction of a narrative. And a story is also the differential aspect of a project. A restaurant is a restaurant, but if we add a story, it becomes something more. Ferran Adriá is a good example, with his story of experimentation and unique experience. Or the Iglesias brothers and Messi with the Bellavista restaurant in Jardín del Norte. We are in a restaurant that is also a village with a bar, a casino, a barber shop, a kiosk and a fountain.
A museum and a collection also need a story that defines its route. The Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya explains Catalan artistic expression, from Romanesque mural painting to modernism, and the MACBA is explained from the present, as the space for testing a micro-utopia on issues that have to do with emotional and intellectual ties between people. Every private collection is also articulated from a story that is biographical, it is a journey and a route, which shows the experiences, the encounters and also the mistakes, the doubts and the discoveries.
There are artists who have understood very well the need to tell. Francis Alÿs was clear that his works, often actions or routes, should also function as a small story that could be easily explained and remembered: the artist who pushes a block of ice until it melts; The artist who manages to gather 500 volunteers who congregate on a dune in Lima and by working all day with their shovels, manage to move the dune a few centimetres.
More stories, this time very tender. In Mataró these days a pilot project El relat d’una exposició is taking place in Can Palauet, curated by the 5th grade girls and boys from the Angeleta Ferrer and Montserrat Solà schools in Mataró. The 10-year-old curators have decided what they wanted to tell with the exhibition, they have chosen the works and have written the loan request letters to the artists, they have decided how to arrange them in the space, they have written the labels, the room sheets and have defined the educational activities. In short, they have written the story of the exhibition and with it, its mechanisms and, with it, to cultivate a more critical eye to analyse them in the future.
[Article published in Bonart, 2017]
