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Patricia Gómez and María Jesús González win the Macba Foundation Prize with an exhibition about the memory of the lockdown
The Espejo del mundo project recovers the silenced stories of people interned in the Bétera psychiatric hospital and the Old Prison of Cáceres. Dora García, Patricia Esquivias, and the Alegría & Piñero collective are the three finalists of this second edition of the award.
The Valencian artists Patricia Gómez and María Jesús González (1978) have been awarded the Fundació Macba Prize, endowed with 50,000 euros, for the exhibition Espejo del mundo, presented at the Helga de Alvear Museum in Cáceres. The project delves into the memory of internment spaces and recovers the experiences of people who lived in the psychiatric hospital of Bétera, in Valencia, and in the Old Prison of Cáceres, two places marked by stories of confinement and silences.
The two artists received the recognition with emotion and described themselves as "overwhelmed" by an award that values what they consider their 'largest and most complete' work, a research that gathers many people and many memories. Their artistic practice has focused for years on recovering the memory of abandoned or closed spaces, among which are also former immigrant detention centers. Through intervention in these settings, Gómez and González rescue the material and human traces of stories that have remained outside official narratives.
In the case of the Bétera psychiatric hospital, the artists have devoted seven years of work with the intention of "looking beyond the psychiatric hospital wall," now turned into a ghost space. During the 1970s, this center hosted patients from the so-called Jesús asylum. The research has made it possible to recover testimonies and stories that had remained hidden, especially through the mirrors that still hang in the facilities. This element, loaded with significance, gives the exhibition its title and becomes a metaphor for the gaze toward a past that still demands recognition.
This second edition of the Fundació Macba Prize also recognized three finalists with an endowment of 10,000 euros each: Dora García, for A hole in the real, presented at the Kin Museum in Sweden; Patricia Esquivias, for Al puro ver se ve, at the Museum of Decorative Arts in Madrid, and the collective Alegría & Piñero, for De ida y vuelta, at the Centre of Contemporary Creation of Andalusia (C3A).
With this initiative, the Fundació Macba aims to recognize and give visibility to the career and production of contemporary artists in the visual arts in the Spanish sphere, while strengthening support for creation through financial recognition. In this call, the total endowment has been 80,000 euros.
The jury for this edition has been composed of Valentín Roma, director of Macba; Manuel Segade, director of the Reina Sofia Museum; Manuel J. Borja-Villel, former director of both institutions and professor at New York University; art critic Ángela Molina, and José Roca, director of the 37th Ljubljana Biennial.
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