Guaret

Guaret [fallow land] is a system of cultivation that consists of leaving the land unsown, after a harvest, so that it rests and becomes more fertile. In the temporary space between two exhibitions and located between the Ramblas and the Santa Mònica exhibition space, we use guaret as an invitation to rest, a conscious opposition to the oversaturation of contemporary life. Guaret is a temporary state of rest; where something leaves and something else comes, where each participant can take away a piece of the experience and thus sow an intention.

We inhabit a hyperstimulating and chaotic world, with an anxiogenic FOMO that turns up the stupefying volume of what is outside and seeps inside us, causing a narcotic dizziness that anaesthetises our bodies and our emotions.

Faced with the apparent impossibility of even imagining other ways of doing and living, we have thought of guaret as a heterotopic space where we can intuit the possibility of other worlds or other ways of doing. We therefore propose this guaret, a guaret den, a silent guaret, a guaret that silences the outside to listen to the voice that really knows what our land needs. It invites us to reflect and contemplate what is happening inside us, pausing the noise and allowing us to be imperfect, incomplete.

This project arises from the joint work of the participants of (create) Situacions II, the curatorial training programme proposed by Santa Mònica, and is the result of several conclusions on the themes that have been discussed: collective creation and participation within cultural institutions, relational processes, curating and utopia.

We invite you to stop, to step out for a moment from the wheel of hyperproductivity to which capitalist logics push us daily and to heal and take care of each other.

Instructions to guaretar:

• Transit or inhabit the space
• Take a piece of seed paper
• Write down what you want to transform or let go of
• Take a pot and add soil
• Bury the paper and seed it
• Take it wherever you want

Activity promoted by (creating) Situations II

(creating) Situations is a training programme that analyses the exhibition cycles of Santa Mònica and its collective creation processes from the inside. It is a tool designed to understand and become immersed in the close and radical curatorial practice from the heart of the centre.

With this programme, Santa Mònica opens its doors to people interested in curatorship as a practice of attention and care, and in these exhibition processes. Guaret materialises the process of joint and situated co-creation of the course participants.