Activities, exhibitions and projects

From July 5th, 2024, to January 12th, 2025

Mari Chordà (Amposta, 1942) uses image, language, or social action as material for her work and as an inseparable part of her life. The artist, writer, poet, or activist form an indivisible bond that sustains an attitude and convictions which determine the backbone of her work and biography. She operates in a continuous present, where everything she does is a simultaneous, inherent experience. An active and attentive observer of the reality around her, she needs to take part in it, to shake and subvert what she sees, from principles determined by feminism: emerging as a response to the suffocating context of Francoism, yet enduring over time in a society that still must change many of its values and restore visibility and recognition of women's work.

She founded Lo Llar in Amposta, a space that for two years was a cultural activation center promoting concerts, exhibitions, and other activities. Upon her move to Barcelona, she co-founded laSal with a group of women, a bar-library conceived as a space for discussion, support, and advice, which evolved into laSal, edicions de les dones, a publishing house specializing in women's literature and essays. laSal was a place to have fun: "We dedicated ourselves to generating words, generating music, and above all, pleasure [...]. Pleasure is very subversive." And everything Mari does is permeated by the need for enjoyment, for play, which does not delegitimize the need to fight against women's situation but consolidates it. The claim for pleasure is very present as a necessity and as a tool to see the world and, above all, to exist, to break with the established that relegated women to passivity or denial. Play is also reflected in her sculptures based on interaction and mobility, stemming from the first one she made as a toy for her daughter.

A pioneer of her generation in expressing female sexuality freely, in speaking of pleasure, motherhood, and lesbian relationships in her painting and poetry. In 1964, while still studying at an anachronistic Faculty of Fine Arts in Barcelona, she painted her first Vagina: "I imagined the female body from the inside, with some reminder of its forms, but it was a figurative nothing realistic." She paints the body's fluids, secretions, sexual organs, or couplings not from abjection but with attractive forms and colors very close to the visual sensibility of pop or psychedelia, claiming a complete eroticism.

Her work is a constant NO to impositions, from full enjoyment. She advocates for culture and territory, the connection to her roots, which she claims as a way to move forward and progress. She advocates for promoting research as a tool to give visibility to women. She does not want to build a memory but desires to be a tool for changing the constructed memory and the gaze of present and future. Mari Chordà cannot help but denounce what she disagrees with, as she has done publicly on several occasions. Painting, writing, acting, or taking a position are ways of restoring that continuous present proclaimed by Gertrude Stein and sustaining Mari Chordà's political commitment.

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