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ARBAR

Plaça de la Catedral 6 · 17489 La Vall de Santa Creu (El Port de la Selva)
Thursday to Saturday, from 18 to 21h (from July the 20 th to September the 9th)
CENTRE OF PRODUCTION, DIFFUSION AND EXHIBITION OF ACTION ART / PERFORMANCE PROJECTS IN A DISUED RURAL SETTING

ARBAR (Associació per a la Recerca Biocultural i Artística de Rodes [Association for Biocultural and Artistic Research in Rodes] is an initiative that was founded in 2012, as a centre for contemporary art production. Its aim is to establish production conditions, which enable artists to create ephemeral works throughout the year in the countryside environment of the Rodes massif and/or in the disused rural setting of the Santa Creu valley in Port de la Selva (Catalonia).

ARBAR’s mission is to become an incubator of ideas that allow artists to develop projects, which minimally manipulate the surroundings and emphasize what is symbolic and essential for the Santa Creu valley. Furthermore, its purpose is to contribute to redefine and reactive this geographical area as a specific-site for contemporary culture based on the dual nature of action art. On the one hand, to develop live and real-time ephemeral artworks, in which the action is assimilated with the environment’s dynamics. On the other hand, to encourage projects in which the action is a seed of a long-term performative artwork and process, such as artistic interventions or video art, which capture the connections established between each artists’ experiential exploration of the rural entourage and their line of work.

The results of this artistic research are shown both in the rooms of the ARBAR Centre and in its outdoor spaces. So, the ARBAR Centre’s objectives are to promote art as a tool for intersubjective dialogue, to enhance politico-cultural decentralization, to stimulate new dialogues for cooperation and understanding of unique art scenarios in order to redefine a new conceptual map for contemporary art and to spawn a new notion of landscape: the transition from an agricultural culture to an artistic culture. Finally, and especially, to encourage artists to have a critical idea of how to revitalize this territory in contemporary times and to focus their interest on the urgency to shift present-day views. That is, to foster an aesthetic reflection on the need to change an anthropocentric position to an ecocentric one.