I had an innocent suspicion: the world of the is less fun than that of the . I only had to attend the duo of painting ladies invited to the talk “Surviving the context: Two artistic views on the nineties”. It was Roser Oliveras and Montserrat Costa talking about how they made their way—as women and painters—in years from another planet. They were crowded by an enthusiastic audience that filled the room of the Museum of History of Girona, all artists and orbiters of the art world who took the lead in a heated conversation around the theme of this exhibition, called Infralocus The 90s in Girona, a decade of 20 years. The exhibition, set in different stages of the city, inevitably raises a question: what is left of our “moved” Girona?
To begin with, there are many protagonists and the idea remains that art is the nail and life, the flesh. We will be able to see it until the month of February through a wide program of activities, all around recovering the creative and nonconformist pulse of that There remains a retrospective panorama and a little longing for those who are no longer there. There is also an ever-tentative tribute to a rebellious and very vital Girona, and an effervescent extra-museum (and interdisciplinary, we would say now) culture that took root outside the official paths. And on the official roads. And below: like summer brambles, laden with blackberries. It was the Girona of the eighties and nineties where artistic and social groups – think of the extraordinary people of La Penyora, for example – wove a cultural cosmos with a life of its own. In this sense, the curators explain, “the aim is to replace the concept of ‘counterculture’, or that of ‘alternative culture’, with that of ‘expanded culture'”. Expanded and connected with actors of different roles: from the journalistic and intellectual sphere, traversing street vindications “without making use of the usual hierarchies, starting with those that distinguish high culture and popular culture and, even less, from that discriminate between different forms of activism or everything that happens spontaneously, ephemerally and on the margins of the official circuit. A way of doing free culture, without a program or subsidy, or labels that could narrow them down, that mixed artistic disciplines, leisure spaces and the struggle of social movements”.
curated by Eudald Camps and Jordi Mitjà, tries not to fall into the temptation of narrative, trying to approach all that broth in a visual key. You will see that plurality of artists represented in Bòlit_PouRodó; the social xup-xup at Bòlit_LaRambla; and the Girona of the nocturnal party in Bòlit_SantNicolau. Finally, in the History Museum, you will find works by Enric Ansesa, Manel Bayo, Cesc, Joan Casanovas or Roser Oliveras, and posters, photographs and fanzines, witnesses of the movement of another “time of flowers” in Girona. From the time of wild flowers.
