La Gent

Confluences. Between the archive and intervention is an exhibition proposal that reports on, archives and updates events that have taken place since 2021 in various towns with fewer than one hundred inhabitants in the Valencian Community as part of the programme Confluences, and displays twelve new interventions and pieces by the team of artists created specifically for the IVAM Valencian Institute of Modern Art.

‘La Gent’ is Makea’s proposal for the exhibition, which continues to focus on the collective capacity to construct messages of hope in order to transform the dull and cruel reality in which we live.

The intervention takes the form of a mobile wooden bench engraved with the inscription “LA GENT”. It is a handcrafted piece that makes use of the rest of the original reclaimed red pine beam that we used for the interventions in the Sacanyet cave (Alto Palancia) and the square in Puebla de San Miguel (Rincón de Ademuz). It is accompanied by Joan Brossa’s poem “La Gent” (Askatasuna, 1970), also engraved on a large blackboard that visitors to the exhibition can interact with.

Both pieces construct a proto-space for reflection and action within the museum.

LA GENTE (the people) are the element that fills the void in the TOWN, completing it, giving it life, giving it a voice and making it what it is. It is no longer an inert and static element, but a mobilizing force.

This artefact brings together the reflections and lessons learned from previous interventions and transfers them to another context where, together with Joan Brossa’s poem La Gente, they are reinterpreted and take on a new collective and transformative meaning.

LA GENT

People don’t realize the power they have:

a week-long general strike would be enough

to collapse the economy, paralyze the state,

and demonstrate that the laws they impose are unnecessary.

Joan Brossa, 1970

(Translated)

For the archive section, two publications have been produced that bring together the experiences and materials from the interventions in Sacanyet and La Puebla de San Miguel, as well as the activations in the territory.