You have surely eaten strawberries from Huelva a thousand times. Seen through the urban gaze we usually project onto things, they may seem like just another supermarket product. But what rural ways of life are hidden behind these strawberries, perfectly transformed into a product? And under what conditions have the pickers had to work in order to bring them to us?

These are the questions that Julia Montilla seeks to answer through the language of artistic creation in Strawberry Fields, the exhibition that can be seen from 15 November to 25 January at Fabra i Coats: Centre d’Art Contemporani, as part of the audiovisual creation festival Loop, as the winner of the 11th edition of the Videocreation Award.

In this exhibition, Julia Montilla focuses on the female day labourers who work in the strawberry harvest in Huelva. Isn’t this province a true paradigm of agro-industrial capitalism and of the effects it has both on people and on the environment?

The images you will see constitute a critique of a way of seeing today’s world that is centred on cities and considers rural environments practically non-existent or irrelevant. And not only that: this urban-centred viewpoint also makes invisible the conditions faced by migrant female workers.

As you will see, the artist establishes a link between a colonial past and a current extractivist regime that seeks to obtain maximum profit from the natural environment while ignoring the consequences of intensive extraction.

A visual essay and an example of experimental cinema, the film not only uses the title of a Beatles song, but also creates a hallucinated and fragmented narrative that, in fact, speaks about the political construction of the gaze.

Everything is the work of Julia Montilla (Barcelona, 1970), an artist trained in Fine Arts at the University of Barcelona (UB), where she is currently an associate lecturer and doctoral student. She uses all kinds of media in her works in order to analyse the role of the image and the visual construction of the everyday. In Barcelona, you may have seen her work at La Capella, Espai 13 at the Fundació Joan Miró, or the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art.

The artist is presenting her work as the winner of the Videocreation Award, promoted by the Territorial Centres of the Public System of Visual Arts Facilities of Catalonia, Santa Mònica, the Department of Culture, and Loop Barcelona, to support the work of artists who stand out for their innovative approaches, incorporating video into their practice.

If you want to see Julia Montilla’s Strawberry Fields, come to Fabra i Coats: Centre d’Art Contemporani, but first check the website for full information about the exhibition.