Kintos

Every year, many villages in Catalonia, the Valencian Country and beyond celebrate the festa dels quintos: a ritual that marks the passage from youth to adulthood.

Kintos takes as its starting point the festa dels quintos, a celebration that in many villages of Catalonia, the Valencian Country and beyond marks the passage from youth to adulthood. Drawing on this custom, the proposal approaches the forms of power, belonging, violence and representation that run through rural communities.

As visitors make their way through the room, they encounter moving images, sounds, texts and actions that intervene in the codes of the festival and move them out of their usual context. The gestures repeated year after year appear fragmented, altered and reconfigured, making visible the tensions of any collective ritual: between cohesion and exclusion, celebration and norm, memory and change.

Far from a nostalgic gaze, the exhibition presents tradition as a living space, shaped by conflicts, contradictions and possibilities of transformation. It includes references to explicit and symbolic violence, as well as images of nudity and archive material showing violence towards animals; that material comes from an archive, and no animal suffered on purpose for the project. The Espai A is an exhibition space of the Fundació Joan Brossa – Centre de les Arts Lliures.