• ◯ Intro

Infos

Intro

Adrià Julià will present “Hot Iron” and “Hot Iron Marginalia”, the titles of his two exhibitions using as a springboard a family photographic archive that catalogued 556 Romanesque churches, most of them in Catalonia, and south of France, between the 1950s and the 1990s. The titles comes from the saying “to strike while the iron is hot”, which means to take advantage of an opportunity when conditions are favorable. Julià found the phrase “the iron is now hot” in a letter dating from 1917 in which Gustavus T. Kirby, from the American Art Association, talks about a commercial interest in acquiring Romanesque artworks.  In Hot Iron and Hot Iron Marginalia the effects of the economic transactions involved in cultural imports and exports are cross-linked between seemingly unrelated events such as the sale of Catalan Romanesque paintings to American buyers in the early twentieth century and the introduction of American football in Barcelona almost a hundred years later, just as Montjuïc was being transformed into one of the city’s main sports venues for the Olympic Games. These configurations also intersect other areas such as the exploitation of land, of cultural heritage, of women’s bodies, and the role of photography and image production in the redefinition of culture through the imposition of tourism and sport.