The Democracia collective arrives at La Presó

Mataró City Council has transformed the building of the old prison into the new permanent space of the M | A | C, until now without its own place. Mataró | Art | Contemporani, directed by Gisel Noè, was born in 2013 as a platform for creation, production, training and dissemination in the field of contemporary art and since then it has deployed its activity in various areas of the city. in a scattered performance.

The prison building, declared a cultural asset of national interest (2001), is a historic municipally owned facility by the architect Elies Rogent dating from 1863. It is one of the eight territorial centers of the Public System of Centers and Spaces of 'Visual Arts of Catalonia together with La Panera, from Lleida; Bòlit, from Girona; Lo Pati, from Amposta; Fabra i Coats, from Barcelona; Tecla Sala, from L'Hospitalet de Llobregat; Mèdol Arts Contemporànies, from Tarragona, and the ACVic, from Vic. All of them are public cultural projects resulting from the cooperation between the town councils, which manage the centers, and the Department of Culture of the Generalitat de Catalunya, which finances a large part of the activity they carry out.

M | A | C The Prison opened its program with the exhibition 22 windows (22-01-2022 / 20-03-2022) to continue with Captures: Wild Wings, by Oscar Holloway, (23-04 -2022 / 05-06- 2022) and Site Specific, by Carlos Bunga, (30-04-2022 / 26-06-2022) followed by Order, from the group Democracia, co-produced with La Panera, Center d ' Contemporary Art of Lleida and can be visited from July 9 to September 25, 2022. It is a group founded by Iván López and Pablo España that has its origins in another group called El Gos (1991-2007 ), in which ideologies and lines of work that we see today in Democracy were already pointed out. Its recurring themes are: state corruption, criticism of the capitalist system and the denunciation of a society that lives immersed in serious imbalances.

Order is a creation that takes the format of an opera in three acts. It works like three films that tell the story of the oppressed and the oppressors in a capitalist system that does not guarantee social ascension by the same merits. Opera as a multisensory art and as a live experience of total art is a creative and expressive experience of great magnitude that shares many points in common with what we know as contemporary art. For his new work, Democracy appropriates classical operatic techniques for speaking to the elite in their own language, subverting cultural grammar into an act of deviation.

The films are accompanied by photographs, posters, objects and a mural. The title, Order, underscores the systemic and structural violence of power against the disaffected, exploited, and excluded. The first act of this trilogy travels through affluent and affluent neighborhoods before heading to the periphery showing poor neighborhoods to make class differences evident in the same urban context. But it doesn’t end there, but it continues to focus on a demonstration in the very city of Houston in which a group of activists defend gun ownership as a vindication of the black community against police force attacks.