On the Border - Barcelona Producció 2017

03.08.2017 · Last update: 29.12.2025 · Translation: Claude (Anthropic) · Topics: walking, borders, memory, exile, girona

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As I announced a couple of months ago, my project «On the Border» was selected for Barcelona Producció 2017 at La Capella, in the off-site category¹. Over these last four years, I have worked the landscape as a setting and as a border, but always from the comfort and distance of the studio. It was then the need for a direct experience, to put myself on the line and confront the real without filters, that pushed me to write «On the Border».
The project involves walking the entire Spanish–French border of the province of Girona and making a small oil piece for each of the 198 mugas² that mark the boundary. It will not be a visual documentation of the mugas (their photographic cataloguing has, moreover, already been done), but rather an emotional recording of the surroundings, according to the geographic and environmental conditions that may arise. For this reason, the extreme connection with the surroundings and with the present moment that plein air painting allows is a fundamental element for the project to acquire a strong experiential value. In this sense, the pieces are not the aim of the journey: the experience itself is the aim — the experience of making and being border, the introspection of a long walk in nature, the journey and its difficulties.
To paint pieces as if they were markers and to walk joining points along the border, as if balancing on that invisible line that divides in two what is one, is to make the invisible visible, thus unfolding a new scenario of memory.

So, together with the invaluable and essential support of Amaranta (a friend and guide who will accompany me along the route — without her I’d still be here twiddling my thumbs), we have spent the last two months producing this crossing: 300 km, 22 days, 198 paintings (the more I write it, the crazier it seems). Day 0 will be 17 August; arrival, 9 September. The idea is to publish material day by day on social media and on my blog. Before I leave, I will publish information and a schedule here: marconoris.com/on-the-border.

I also have a long list of thank-yous (Amaranta, Clara and Nau Côclea, Cayetano and Mojones de los Pirineos, Joana and Rubio, Patricio, Josep and Montserrat, Alexandra, Alex, Kike, Marc, Xavier, Roberto, Ana, Natalia, Paula, Miquel, Pere, Miquel and Jordi from the Museu Memorial de l’Exili - MuME, Ferran Latorre, Zuriñe, Jordi and the Club Excursionista de Gràcia, La Capella and its people, Hangar.org and its people, Piramidón, Centre d’Art Contemporani and its people, etc… I’m surely forgetting someone 😨), but I’ll come back to that.

Anyway, more information in the future here.

More information:

On the Border
All the mugas of the Spanish–French border: https://goo.gl/GGJB9W
Catalogue of the mugas along the Catalan stretch: Mojones de los Pirineos en la frontera hispanofrancesa (Girona)
All the mugas: The bordermarkers of the Pyrenees
Muga - Etymology

Materials

#enFrontera

The result of the project will be exhibited at the MuME between 14 October and 28 January 2018. ⤶
Muga is a word of Basque origin used in the Pyrenean dialect instead of mojón (or hito, in Spanish) and fita (in Catalan). Muga means border, although its original meaning was “limit”. ⤶

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On the Border - Barcelona Producció 2017

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