Installations
From the 8th of September to the 24th of November, Manifesta 15 Barcelona Metropolitana presented a comprehensive programme featuring installations, archives and performances by the participants of the edition.
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Milk, Coca Cola & Balut
- TypeInstallation
- ParticipantAntoni Miralda
- VenueThe See of Ègara
Milk, Coca Cola & Balut,1986 © Antoni Miralda, Vegap, Barcelona 2024. Photo © Manifesta 15 Barcelona Metropolitana /Cecília Coca
The Catalan artist Antoni Miralda has a longstanding interest in rituals. He is particularly fascinated with rituals that are related to food – from preparation to ingestion. Over the course of his career, he has explored the religious dimension of food rituals. Having received a commission to make a new work for an exhibition about Barcelona in Toulouse in the mid-1980s, Miralda elected to research other places named Barcelona around the world. Ultimately, he found around 40 Barcelonas. He then chose to visit one of the “other” Barcelonas – a Barcelona in the Philippines, previously a Spanish colony. He did so during Holy Week, a momentous occasion in the predominantly Catholic country. During his visit, he filmed a young girl re-enacting the Crucifixion, representing the religious divinity of the Holy Child. In Miralda’s footage, we see the girl recovering from the ritual. For her recovery, she is given milk, Coca Cola and balut – a fertilised goose egg that had been incubated for 11 days. In a later version of the film, Miralda juxtaposes these recordings with footage from Barcelona Gran Menú (1984), a film that he made a few years prior in the original Barcelona. In between, the social anthropologist David Barradas is heard explaining how Westerners tend to gaze strangely at those who they consider to be “other”, perceiving them as exotic. Barradas argues that this can lead people from the West to assume a superiority complex (e.g. intellectual, moral, economic, cultural) that has prompted, and continues to prompt, Western powers to forcefully intervene in the internal affairs of the “other”.
Milk, Coca Cola & Balut,1986 © Antoni Miralda, Vegap, Barcelona 2024. Photo © Manifesta 15 Barcelona Metropolitana /Cecília Coca
1986
Single channel video, colour, sound, 18’00”
Courtesy of the artist
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