Can Mamella (Breastfeeding House)

Fabra i Coats: Contemporary Art Centre of Barcelona launches a programme to create spaces for dialogue and learning around artistic practice and its languages, bringing together all the art universities of Barcelona for the first time. Understanding learning as the articulation of doing, experimenting and thinking, and with an emphasis on exchange and discussion, the programme offers a series of conferences and two workshops with internationally renowned artists and theorists.

Fabra i Coats was a huge textile factory, founded in 1837 and closed in 2005, in the neighbourhood of Sant Andreu, and a pioneer in offering social services to its workers, which, in turn, benefitted the company in the form of productivity. This is the case of the so-called “casa-cuna” (cradle house), with a capacity for 120 babies, where food and nappies were provided for free and where the workers could go to breastfeed for half an hour, twice during their workday. Between this casa-cuna, the fact that 80 percent of employees were women and that the factory provided for the whole neighbourhood (in the mid-1960s there were around 4000 women on the workforce, mainly from Sant Andreu), it was said that Fabra i Coats was like a huge breast that never stopped flowing. This is why when the factory was running it had a nickname, “Can Mamella” (Breastfeeder House).

With this in mind, the Art Centre opens a space for intergenerational exchange, where the discursive lines and practices of the artists who are part of the year’s programme can be shared and explored. Coinciding with David Bestué’s exhibition curated by Marta Sesé, the Centre’s director, Joana Hurtado, has invited them to design and run this summer school together, which will be based on two conceptual pillars: On the one hand, to address an affective history of the city, which responds to a critical look and a reading against the grain of history; and on the other hand, to propose a material thought traversed by questions linked to time: can an object bring together different fragments of time to give us back a concrete image or idea?

In 2020, we inaugurated the new exhibition programme talking about unofficial narratives and situated memory. Our intention was to question the authorship, the originality of the work and the supposed neutrality of the exhibition space. This time we use it as “vibrant matter”, as Jane Bennett would say, to vindicate material agency and its capacity to create and transform imageries.  

Programme
Thursday July 6 (4–8pm); Friday July 7 (10am–2pm)
Workshop with Gian Maria Tosatti

Friday July 7
5pm The Milk of the Factories, presentation and conference by Joana Hurtado Matheu
6pm City of Sand, conference by David Bestué
7pm Sharing and open discussion of the workshop with Gian Maria Tosatti and participants 

Thursday and Friday July 13–14 (10am–2pm)
Workshop with Rabih Mroué

Friday July 14
5pm BARCELONA 1979–2023, conference by Manolo Laguillo
6pm A Kilo of Sand, conference by Rocío Robles
7pm Higo Mental #28 Barchinona superilla (Ricardo Pérez Hita and Marta Sesé)

Free access. Designed for all audiences who are interested in contemporary art and thinking. The workshops will be in English and the conferences in Catalan or Spanish, with no translation.

For the workshops, please register indicating your motivation and attaching a brief CV with links. For the conferences, the childcare service can be booked for children aged four and above from 5–7pm.

Registrations and bookings, activitats-centredart [​at​] bcn.cat / More information here.

With the collaboration of the Faculty of Fine Arts at Universitat de Barcelona; Degree in Arts and Design at Escola Massana (UAB); BAU College of Arts and Design of Barcelona; and EINA -University School of Design and Art (UAB).