MURMURS I: Ceremonials, with Jorge Dutor and Guillem Mont de Palol | Activity

To kick off MACBA’s Year Thirtieth, Montdedutor (Jorge Dutor and Guillem Mont de Palol) revisit the enigmatic collective rituals organized by a group of young Paris-based artists between 1969 and 1973. Set up by Antoni Miralda, Dorothée Selz, Joan Rabascall, Jaume Xifra and Benet Rossell, the ceremonial were carnival-style events that attracted large crowds and encouraged active participation from the public. Their ephemeral nature has given them an almost legendary reputation, and today they are mainly known through fragmented accounts and partial memories that are difficult to capture in a single representation.

This time, Jorge Dutor and Guillem Mont de Palol are inviting us to bring the festive and countercultural energy of the ceremonial back to life, activating a fresh interpretation informed by their own theatrical practice, characterized by humor, theatricality and bodily experimentation. Rather than providing a historical reconstruction, their proposal is a free evocation, open to the vitality of what is present. In short, it is about celebrating the power of art and play to open up spaces for imagination and encourage us to think about alternative ways of living, feeling and inhabiting the world, while highlighting the need for profound social transformation.

Montdedutor’s contribution to the museum’s anniversary celebrations does not seek to freeze past gestures in time, but rather to engage with them and bring them into conversation with the present and the immediate future. In doing so, they defend the relevance of these forms of collective experimentation and their ability to generate community bonds, shared narratives and new horizons of possibility. At the intersection of memory and invention, of living archive and celebration, the whisper of what was never fully documented is brought to life again: the potential that was never realized, and the past that still resonates.

This action is part of whispersa live arts program running over twelve months to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the museum. The program makes use of the poetry of the unfinished, undocumented or simply unmade to review key episodes in the recent past.