There is a conscious archival fondness in the exhibitions of the cececebé, with a notorious documentary overload and marathons of footnotes, which is even more stressful if one dedicates the exhibition of the year to a writer, and I won't even mention when this author in question is a lady who -when I studied literature- was seen as a rather cheesy prose writer, a producer of sweetened metaphors about flowers (see the insulting considerations dedicated to her by a man otherwise as sharp as Ramon Barnils), but who now contemporary times consider not only our best novelist of all time, but also the writer who, after several years of being buried, has become the stylistic mommy of most authors, male authors, and non-binary authors in the country. Rodoreda can be a forest of extremely high complexity, of course, but now it is also necessary to read her from this fever.
If you allow me the sin of acting like a coffee-shop sociologist, the first thing that surprises about Rodoreda, un bosc is the number of young people who (surfing among the traditional spectators of museum affairs; namely, the old-timers) populate the halls of this temple of socialism (formerly enlightened) frantically searching for any clue that brings them even closer to their heroine. We are a country of extremes and, as I said before, we move at great speed from contempt to idolatry (as far as Rodoreda is concerned, the writer Etna Miró makes fun of this very well in her acclaimed debut novel, Amèlia de les Camèlies); for this reason, the danger of archiving Mercè is that we can end up relating her even to Duchamp's bidet. This is not the case of this forest, where there are very natural transfers such as the classic Dona-arbre, with Fina Miralles buried in the field, or the sleepy Ophelia of our great documentalist Bego Antón.
In her book-reading about La mort i la primavera (Fam als ulls, ciment a la boca), curator Neus Penalba acts as a Yankee exegete -always in favor- and relates the enthronement of this masterpiece on sedition to the events of 2017: "it is significant, even strange, that Rodoreda's unfinished novel about a town obsessed with the repression of desire awakens from its posthumous dream the same year that the collective desire of a majority of the Catalan people is retaliated against." Significant it is, of course, as one does not need to touch it too much to see how ---in the aforementioned book--- Rodoreda describes the concentration camp that is Catalonia after the uncivil war and, in parallel, how she warns of the danger of ending up with one's soul cemented in the cascade of totalitarian power. That all this continues to pulsate in this time of disenchantment and that it produces trempera in our young people makes me enjoy it immensely.
For all this that I tell you, this forest of Rodoredian connections that Penalba has imagined in the CCCB particularly interests me in relation to the "Metamorphosis" space, as it perfectly translates the sensation of exile and radical transformation that the inhabitant of the tribe must weave to survive immersed in the tedium of the barbarism still present; there are fantastic analogies such as Cuixart's faun, an elephant man with a brain beautifully deformed by the future, the unsettling faceless faces of Esther Ferrer, Tàpies' males with sunken chests and soft hands, and Rodoreda's own alien painting. To avoid going overboard with easy analogies to the present, Martí Sales has had the grace to fish for artists who maintain a healthy distance from the author; I have been particularly interested in the deconstructive mural that Oriol Vilapuig has birthed and the poetic-sound reflection conceived with the guarantee of Cabosanroque.
Upon finishing this wonderful marathon, half ecstatic with fatigue, the sculptural collection of covers with Rodoreda's work translated into other languages just finishes off your spirit, reminding you of the inexorable flaw of being Catalan: indeed, that giant of letters, like most of our heroes... she was left without her Nobel Prize and her status as a patum came to her too late (fortunately for her, who never wanted to be an object of folklore). Be that as it may, the surfeit of provisions from this forest will be useful to bring down the fever that has reified the author until turning her into a brand -you can review the books of her students, female students and non-binary students of today, just to appreciate her better- and thus bring her closer to her original subversive spirit. I waited a while to visit the CCCB, because I like to go late in life and avoid queues. Now I will have to go back, because the archive is worth seeing, but it will be even better to review it.