The Unavowable Community is not so much an exhibition project as a reflexive body of work developed around the idea of community, a brave and rigorous exercise which takes the communal as a starting point for exploring some keys to understanding the direction of the contemporary world.

The proposal, presented in the Catalan pavilion at the last Venice Biennale, seeks to situate research within the nucleus of contemporary artistic practices while approaching the notion of identity beyond territorial and national boundaries.

Many current artistic proposals address the question of community, with frequent, often poorly backed, calls for joint artistic creation or shared production. However, attention must be drawn to the dissolution of authorship in a production and transmission of knowledge which is directed and set in motion by the community itself, by an audience no longer understood as an unreflecting mass of visitors but as a public that is both producer and user, without overlooking the essential need to stand back and work out solid thought bases that delve deep into the heart of the processes. This is why it is pertinent, and absolutely crucial, to open up a (collective) reflection on the concept itself and on its related phenomena.

Bòlit therefore undertakes responsibility to expand a project which, in the words of its curator, poses vital questions for approaching the communal through art, and vice versa. Immersion in the proposals set out by The Unavowable Community will undoubtedly enable us to nourish the cultural and social capital to which we belong, as conscious members of the community.

Rosa Pera

Director

Bòlit. Girona Contemporary Art Centre

In the last twenty years there have appeared, cyclically and gradually, different examples of artistic proposals presented under the heading of the communal, operating from this place of tension where art and community attempt to link up with each other. It is not a simple matter to draw a map enabling us to locate these practices, as many of them are episodic and invisible. Nor is it easy to measure their importance, to distinguish what part is project and what part is populism. In any case, we can say that with the advent of the communal a different area of work has opened up for art, a field of social action-also a commercial network, an audience-the exploration of which forces its practitioners to find different methodologies of negotiation, to assume other tensions and dynamics, to construct untranslatable forms of representation.

Conceived to form part of the first Catalonia pavilion at the 53rd Venice Art Biennale and now presented at Bòlit. Girona Contemporary Art Centre with a different museographic arrangement, this project-which takes its name from Maurice Blanchot's book of the same title and from his interpretation of communism as ‘something that creates a community'-constitutes, therefore, an investigation of the complex relationships established between art and community. To this end, three projects have been selected ( Sitesize,  Technologies To The People and  Archivo F.X.) which, in spite of operating from different perspectives, share the same strategies of a cross-cutting approach, antagonism, supplantation and interference, forcing them to place themselves in an ambivalent territory situated between both the institution of art and the models of cultural productivity. The intrinsic diffuse character of these three ‘communities' and their non-exemplifying nature mean they are located beyond certain decision-making monopolies, reusing pre-existing methods of action, taking advantage of (or reorienting) communication nodes, feeding off consolidated structures, configuring new archives and, in short, placing these amidst the tension of that ‘general intellect' Marx spoke of: that social brain which is at the same time a productive force and a principle of citizen organisation.

"The Unavowable Community" articulates itself around the following three lines of work: a) an expanded exhibition at diverse museographic spaces of the city, offering a monographic presentation of each of the participating collectives' proposals; b) a book constituting a kind of polyphony of essays using texts by Maurice Blanchot, Giorgio Agamben, Jean-Luc Nancy, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Lars Iyer, Peter Pál Pelbart and Marina Garcés that share questions related to the communal, to which three visual insertions have been added, one by each participant in the exhibition-Sitesize, Technolo-gies To The People and Archivo F.X.; c) a website, www.lacomunidadinconfesable.org, operating as a vast archival collection around the notion of the communal from the perspective of philosophy, anthropology, the social sciences and art, among other disciplines; d) a series of dialogues developed in collaboration with the University of Girona, exploring some of the main issues affecting the three artistic practices included in this project.

Valentín Roma

Curator