BARCELONA.- The Fundació Joan Miró presents how from here, the Espai 13 season of exhibitions for 2025 mounted with the support of the Fundació Banc Sabadell. Curated by Carolina Jiménez, the programme takes the form of a structure for gaining insights through artistic practices into the concept of ‘place’, including a critical consideration of notions such as ‘household’, ‘community’, ‘presence’ and ‘belonging’ in all their multiple variants: from the territory and material culture to collective struggles for cohabitation based on solidarity and not on terms of equivalence.

The season, entitled how from here, includes four newly-produced exhibitions that address issues such as sustainability, attachment to the environment, cultural resistance and alternative forms of cohabitation. Through the four selected artists, the season explores the connection between artistic practices and the environment, including the locations where various stages of training occur and places adopted for political, professional or personal reasons. The guest artists are Josu Bilbao, Paula García-Masedo, Ludovica Carbotta and Marwa Arsanios, each of whom presents proposals that derive from the season’s initial questions.

Jiménez poses the following questions as motion vectors of the season: ‘What separates here from there? Who has the right to become a member of a community? When can we say we really belong? What does it mean to say “us”? How can we build a community without a place? How can we pursue forms of solidarity and cohabitation without falling into extractivist or appropriationist practices or speaking for others?’

The season opens with the exhibition by Josu Bilbao (Bermeo, 1978). Entitled negarràk-negarrà, the show questions the exhibition space by means of an operation to open the room, as well as a sensitive exploration of the accumulated changes to its architecture over the years. This operation has been undertaken in conversation with the GOIG architecture studio (Pol Esteve Castelló and Miquel Mariné Núñez).

The season continues in April with the exhibition by Paula García-Masedo (Madrid, 1984), who will be working on the transposition of relations of union and separation, fixed in a kind of still life inseparable from a change, which is the stabilised form of what in reality mutates in a particular territory the artist knows in depth, the Sierra de Guadarrama.

In July, Ludovica Carbotta (Turin, 1982) considers the urban issue in an exhibition posited as an exercise prior to a subsequent work in the public space in order to imagine alternative ways of dwelling in the city that imply reclaiming the autonomy of citizens and their rights over their environment.

Marwa Arsanios (Washington DC, 1978) will close the season with a new instalment of her project Who Is Afraid of Ideology?, an exercise in militant film that takes a new look at the relationship with the land from collective and ecological perspectives.

With their respective proposals, these four artists will review different modes of relationship with the space. Based on what the curator terms ‘sensitive militancy’ or ‘militant sensibility’, the exhibition proposals will be built by means of gestures, protocols, methodologies and bonds, both poetic and political, which, far from collapsing in a geopolitical context of violence and death wish, aspire to weave joint ways of doing and of living together. The season stems from a concern that is more methodological than thematic. For this reason, rather than a what, Jiménez proposes a how, followed immediately by a from where.

Rather than a simple repository of practices, each exhibition in the season is conceived as a praxis in itself. Each proposal ponders on how the intersection of the different materialities that make them up can serve as invitations to singular ways of looking and hearing, of inhabiting a place and a time in a collective manner.

Espai 13: more than four decades of emerging art

Espai 13 at the Fundació Joan Miró is an exhibition programme of emerging artistic and curatorial practices set up to meet Joan Miró’s wish to create a space where new generations could present their work. Since its launch in 1978 in the foundation’s Espai 10, over forty-five years ago, our programme of emerging art has built up an extensive background in promoting local, national and international talent. Over the years, Espai 13 has become an important turning point in the artistic and professional careers of many of its participants, for whom it has represented a major advance in terms of their professionalisation and recognition within the art world.

Through Espai 13, as an observatory and barometer of the evolution of emerging art, the curatorship of a season of four solo shows based on a theme connected with contemporary artistic practice is commissioned every year. For 2025, the appointed curator is Carolina Jiménez, who has selected the four participating artists and conceived a programme based on the relationship of artists with their surroundings, as well as on ideas around place and context. After a year during which the exhibitions emerged out of the concept of interdependence, this new programme shifts focus and invites us to step out of the museum and discover the ways in which work and life environments condition and shape contemporary artists’ productions.