‘Hot Iron’, the new project at Espai 13 in the Joan Miró Foundation

The Joan Miró Foundation is holding the new cycle of exhibitions ‘One Foot Out. Expeditions and Diasporas’ at its Espai 13 until September 2017, with the collaboration of the Banco Sabadell Foundation. The programme seeks to reflect on questions of pertinence, continuity and the rupture of the established model in the Barcelona art scene.

Hot Iron’ by Adrià Julià is the current exhibition and will be open to the public until 2nd July. This project is based on the photographic archive of Catalan Romanesque churches which had not been made public until recently, prepared by Ramon Julià Alemany, who catalogued 556 churches between the 1950s and the 1990s. This exhibition shows the effects of economic relations involving the import and export of cultural artefacts on collective thinking. To this end, the artist has used the results of a lengthy research process and different conceptual strategies to address the notion of the transfer of culture and the effect of economic relations involving the import and export of cultural artefacts. Specifically, it addresses the cross-relationships between seemingly distant subjects, such as the sale of Catalan Romanesque frescoes to United States buyers at the beginning of the twentieth century, the introduction of American football in Barcelona at the end of the same century during the 1992 Olympics in the city.

The result of this exhibition threads together memory, resistance, displacement and erosions based on the interdependence between people and their environment.