BARCELONA.- The Fundació Joan Miró presents the Christmas project 2013, The Economics of Divine Chance, an intervention by Eulàlia Valldosera created with found objects.

Eulàlia Valldosera’s installation brings into a museum context a series of unlicensed stalls offering the type of objects that are usually sold on the fringes of legal markets. The intervention will be displayed at the Olive Tree Patio from 30 November 2013 to 12 January 2014.

Since 2007, the Fundació Joan Miró has presented an installation specifically created for the festive season. In previous years the Fundació has hosted projects by Perejaume, Ignasi Aballí, Tere Recarens, Antoni Llena, Fernando Prats and Jaume Pitarch.

Eulàlia Valldosera presents an installation that ‘questions the current economic flux, based on the idea of reinvesting the costs of producing a work of art’, to quote the artist’s own words. While visiting various markets, Valldosera made a number of purchases from unlicensed stalls selling objects often found in rubbish skips. She has now installed these ad-hoc stalls around the Olive Tree Patio of the Fundació.

With this installation the artist wishes to pay homage to Joan Miró’s assemblages. In common with Miró, Valldosera uses everyday objects as a discursive element resulting from chance. The title is borrowed from a sentence by Miró: ‘To make use of things found by divine chance: pieces of iron, stones, etc., just as I make use of a schematic sign drawn on the paper by chance, or of an accident that also takes place by chance. That magical spark is the only thing that matters in art.’1

For Valldosera the Christmas installation ‘pays homage to Miró while raising questions on the control of the public space’. With the reconstruction of the stalls at the Olive Tree Patio, ‘the role of the artist as a producer of forms disappears only to reappear as a manager of experience’.

On a screen at the entrance to the Olive Tree Patio, photographs taken by Valldosera of some of the illegal stalls are shown in their own context next to images of the process of buying the objects in the stalls that are part of the installation. At the request of the artist, the blinds separating the Olive Tree Patio from the shop will be raised for the duration of the installation, so that the shop and the work are only separated by glass.



1 Joan Miró. Anotacions de treball (Working notes), 1941–42. Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona (FJM 4429a).