Artists: Lena Laguna Diel, Ana Lucia Garcia Hoefken, Sejal Parekh, Pol Pinto, Carla Rebelo.

Curation: Fiona Fell, Michalina Sablik

A dirty monitor screen, a scratched desk, a mouse that follows the movement of the hand. It is from behind this desk – an inconspicuous anchor point – that we stay connected to the world. Every day begins the same way: walking along a familiar trodden path past a vegetable shop, passing a bar run by migrants, then walking the dog in a small park. The repetitiveness of these gestures does not mean stagnation – it is in them that we begin to perceive the map of our own presence and gain attentiveness to the material entanglements in which we are tragically entangled. 

The group exhibition “Hyperlocality: Personal Cartographies” is an attempt at grounding. In a time of constant mobility, working remotely, migrating and being “in-between”, the participating Barcelona artists direct their gaze towards the close. They note connections with their everyday surroundings, record the movement of the body in space, and create personal maps and geographies. It is a turn towards locality – the most concrete, felt with the senses, experienced in everyday rituals and places. The artists attempt to find and locate themselves in the many overlapping locations (physical, political, symbolic, phygital and glocal) in which they simultaneously function. The exhibition was created in response to an open call in which artists shared their interpretations of the notion of hyperlocality. The result is a collection of diverse voices – personal, migratory, rooted and suspended.

Pol Pinto notes his virtual journeys with a pen attached to a computer mouse, pointing to the materiality and corporeality of everyday movements. Both Carla Rebelo and Sejal Parekh’s practice grapples with the experience of migration and being in between. The former uses poetic photographs to create emotional, intimate geographies, exploring places and bodies in transit. Parekh, on the other hand, creates collage objects based on photographs of places she feels connected to, and includes El Raval, where the gallery is located and which is important to the Indian community, in her archive. 

Ana Lucia Garcia Hoefken works with the living matter of clay, archiving it, mapping her daily journeys through it, and combining material particles often from distant places carrying stories beyond human perspective in her painted compositions. Lena Laguna Diel refers to the memory of her home and also to a nearby island, which, inhabited by seagulls, has become a liminal space between the human and animal worlds.