Javier Areán

Javier Areán, Mexico City, 1969

Period of residence: May – June 2013

Javier Areán (Mexico City, 1969) is a Mexican visual artist who has proposed, along the coastal coastline in Catalonia, a tri-national project about his grandfather’s exile, who was a Spanish republican pilot during the Civil War.

The artist, who has exhibited his work in galleries and art fairs in New York, London and Paris, will take a walking tour from 18th to 30th May, over 300 kilometers between France and Spain, with a small group of collaborators. An initiatory journey from Argeles-sur-mer (beach at Pyrenees-Orientales, where the French concentration camp was located) to Barcelona, to claim 74 years later the memory of the defeated soldiers who fled their country to escape from fascism in 1939 first months.

Ephemeral pieces of sand on the beach of Argeles, a performance about resistance and pain, paintings and videos on the move, everything will be the result of this journey between imaginary and historical. In the course of this explorative journey into the heart of Mexican’s identity, marking the indelible imprint of his past come alive this odyssey. Each stage will be an opportunity to launch a notice to concentration camp survivors, in order to contribute with their testimony.

Sponsored by the Fundación/
 Colección
 Jumex de México,
 el
 Conaculta
 (Ministerio
 de
 Cultura
 en
 México) and private initiative, Javier Areán will develop this project at the Center for Artistic Production Hangar.org, in Barcelona.

javier.arean(at)gmail.com