A day of premieres at the art space on Barcelona’s Rambla, where four exhibitions will open simultaneously and can be seen from 17 April to 28 September in all cases: ‘La meva aportació’ (My Contribution), on the documentary film by the Cuban Sara Gómez; “Cultiva l’estrany” (Cultivate the Strange), which reviews the production of Álvaro Perdices; “Autopenetració” (Self-Penetration), which introduces us to the “third theatre” of Eugenio Barba and his company, Odin Teatret, and “Stripsody” (pictured), about an unusual creation by Cathy Berberian.   

In ‘La meva aportació’, the curator Valentín Roma manages to bring to a museum the work of an Afro-Cuban documentary maker, Sara Gómez, who is still little known. She died young, but she was one of the most recognised figures in Cuban documentary cinema in the sixties and seventies of the twentieth century. She distinguished her cinema as an ‘anti-ethnographic’ vision, based on the political power of testimony. She analysed her time from a triple conflictive perspective: as a young woman, as a woman and as a black person.

Also with Valentín Roma as curator, La Virreina is hosting a second exhibition that opens simultaneously: ‘Cultivating the Strange’, which takes an anthological look at the career of Álvaro Perdices (Madrid, 1971) and brings together his projects from the first half of the nineties to 2022, as well as others conceived specifically for La Virreina Centre de la Imatge. Moreover, in the exhibition you will be able to see some of the old installations presented in a modern version.

The performing arts will be installed until September at La Virreina Centre de la Imatge. There we will meet an innovative figure of the stage in ‘Autopenetració. Eugenio Barba / Odin Teatret’, which will be performed by a well-known name on the local scene, Roger Bernat. We will meet the father of the so-called ‘third theatre’, created by people who define themselves as actors, directors or theatre workers in general, even though they do not have a specific and traditional training and therefore are not recognised as professionals.

We thus come to the figure of Eugenio Barba, an Italian born in Brindisi in 1936, who founded a stage movement aimed at the search for roots, in collective creative experiences that were not subject to hierarchical rules. This third theatre designates the work of those groups that work on the fringes of the ‘first theatre’, represented in the theatrical institutions, but also of the ‘second theatre’, championed by the avant-gardes.

The exhibition traces the career of the Nordic company founded by Barba, Odin Teatret, between 1971 and 1979, when it consolidated dissident stage forms that would open up what Barba called ‘collective self-penetration’ and which would end up spreading to the stages of Europe and Latin America. The exhibition was co-produced with the Biblio-Museum Centre of Apulia.

Finally, La Virreina Centre de la Imatge and the curator Arnau Horta will present ‘Stripsody’, an exhibition named after the first opera by Cathy Berberian, the artist to whom the exhibition is dedicated. She imagined one of the strangest and most difficult to classify vocal creations of the last century, with the collaboration, moreover, of one of the great names of Italian semiology, thought and literature, Umberto Eco. Image, performance and experimentation are combined here with the… the word? Here the language of the comic is spoken and, therefore, the whole composition is full of onamatopoeias, gesticulations (you should see the score, full of drawings!) and many other things that you will find in this essential exhibition.

If you want to see the new exhibitions at La Virreina Centre de la Imatge, come to La Rambla, but first check the website for all the information about the exhibitions.