Continue or change. Reinvent and rebuild

Reaching the future by always looking to the past. Thus, with a starter the visitor will begin the visit to the exhibition Generation [Re]. Continuity or change? at the Espluga de Francolí Museum of Rural Life. A tour curated by Anna Maria Andervert and Àlex Rebollo, both from Conca de Barberà, which will take us on a journey through the phylloxera crisis of the 19th century from contemporary art to offer us a reflection on the current with the health crisis.

Three areas to deal with complex issues of dialogue, such as depopulation, repopulation, the countryside-city relationship, isolation or hyperconnectivity, looking for alternatives based on experiences already lived to generate collective answers, questions to sometimes unanswered, awkward questions, and most of all, to draw one’s own conclusions. The current pandemic is rethinking the future and the MVR creates this path to help build a new paradigm.

This fourth temporary exhibition of the museum is a declaration of the new direction that is wanted to give to the equipment; from a museography with an optimistic message but which never stops looking at the vertigo of possible radical changes that may occur. Art and documentation take center stage in a conceptual and artistic montage based on stopping [re] thinking, with spaces for traffic and change; to transit [re] balance, where coexistence with matter is abandoned from the territory; of creating [re] connecting, a rest and rethinking, to finish, to act [re] imagining, to regenerate life.

After the uprooting, a transgenerational totem, a characteristic element of the phylloxera crisis and a characteristic machine of the rural background, there is the project Abandoned villages , where the hanging keys are synonymous with each of the depopulated nuclei in the field of Catalan-speaking territories. The keys as a symbol of opening but also of closing. Joana Moll has created the Defoooooorest project, which shows the huge number of trees needed to absorb the amount of carbon dioxide by the overall calculation of visits to Google per second. He wants to show what is invisible so that it can be visible.

There is also room for Muntanya negra , by Modest Cuixart, one of the founders of the group Dau al Set. Nature from the mountain, taking a look at the earthly and heavenly world, from the haunting point to the mysterious element. The territory becomes a participant in life and possible changes. The characteristic local words in Perejaume also have space in the Museum of Rural Life and the Gran Teatre del Liceu is exhibited, a total, immense and immersive landscape. The world turned into a spectacle.

An interpretation of the current world based on the desire for regeneration, sustainability and reconnection. A story with several spaces that can be visited until January 8, 2023.