Exhibitions
Instruments of the soul where contemporary art and spirituality create a dialogue in Vic
A collaborative project that connects religious communities, artists and the city through listening, co-creation and cultural coexistence.
Vic is home to a unique project that intertwines contemporary art, spirituality and urban coexistence based on dialogue and mutual listening. Instruments of the soul was born as a process of encounter with various religious confessions present in the city, with the desire to get closer to their protagonists, rituals, symbols and ways of understanding the transcendent in relation to everyday life. This first fieldwork has allowed us to identify points of contact between diverse communities, without diluting their differences or singularities.
The project advances by incorporating contemporary artists into this initial dialogue. Through conversations, encounters and shared work processes, artists and communities have co-created new "instruments of the soul": symbolic pieces and devices that interpret, translate and question current ways of living spirituality, while relating tradition and contemporaneity.
The core of the project is the exhibition that will be presented at the Museu de l'Art de la Pell (MAP) from January 23 to April 26. The exhibition acts as the backbone of the initiative and, at the same time, as the starting point for a more extensive program that extends throughout the city. This openness to cultural facilities, entities and creative collectives responds to the desire to naturally integrate the participating communities and the derived activities into the cultural life of Vic.
The exhibition brings together five works of contemporary art created specifically for the occasion, the result of the dialogue between the MEV, the artists Valentina Alvarado Matos, Fito Conesa, Laia Solé, Mariona Moncunill and Pep Vidal, and various religious communities in Vic. The project, curated by Glòria Picazo, conceives contemporary art as a space for mediation, encounter and shared reflection.
The artistic proposals, arising from processes of active listening and collaborative work, explore elements common to multiple spiritual traditions, such as sound, light, rituals, sacred books or spaces of worship. Through these elements, the works reflect on the contemporary meaning of the "instruments of the soul" and activate questions about the religious diversity, coexistence and cultural plurality that shape today's Vic. Various spiritual traditions of the city participate in this project, such as Islam, the Catholic Church, the Seventh-day Adventist Church, the Bethel Church, Sikhism, as well as practitioners of shamanism, animism and Buddhism.
Beyond the exhibition, Instruments of the Soul unfolds as a proposal with a strong social dimension, of research and experimentation, where the process is as relevant as the final result. It is in the shared path —in listening, dialogue and co-creation— that the bonds, questions and learnings that give meaning to the project are built.
This journey is captured in the associated documentary, produced by La Kaseta, a production company specializing in social documentaries, and co-produced with CaixaForum+, the audiovisual platform of the La Caixa Foundation, which is the main partner. The film portrays the process from the first contacts with the religious confessions of Vic to the materialization of the works, emphasizing the human relationships that are established between artists, curators and communities. The documentary thus becomes a living testimony to a project that connects ancestral spiritualities with contemporary ways of experiencing the spiritual, placing dialogue and the city at the center of cultural reflection.
