Amid the Stones. Thirty Years of La Capella

Amid the Stones is a celebration involving many voices that places the emphasis on all the publications issued at La Capella during its existence. Hundreds of editions of books and other formats that have, paradoxically, generated a certain historiography of the present. A remarkable volume of publications that are the foundations of a possible history of contemporary art that does not claim to be – nor has any interest in being – history. And for this reason, we have decided to display all these books with no interpretative intention or pretension at categorisation.

To do this, we have invited SSOP, a collective that specialises in exhibition design consisting of Nerea de Lezana, Mateo Palazzi, Juan Ezcurra and Ignacio Ezcurra, who have offered us a support structure – not an item of furniture – on which the publications engage in a dialogue with each other and also with the impression of this architecture. An impression that in one way or another all of you who have passed through La Capella have had. SSOP have designed a display on which all of La Capella’s publications coexist on the same level, mixed up and without hierarchies.

In addition, the celebration of La Capella’s thirtieth anniversary includes public programmes entitled An Oral History – overseen by Oriol Gual, director of La Capella between 1994 and 2020 and hence a person with especially close connections to the centre over the course of its history – that revive significant testimony in the life of the centre. People who, at different times and in different roles, have strengthened that idea of the present continuous that has defined and must always define La Capella.

Image: Jordi Calafell. Courtesy of Arxiu Fotogràfic de Barcelona