One of Miralda’s sustained undertakings is his collection/archive of food-related objects and documents that he has gathered over more than four decades. Although established in 2007 with longtime collaborator Montse Guillén as the FoodCultura Museum, since the 1980s this collection/archive has functioned as a discursive structure that both feeds and is fed by Miralda’s multifaceted practice. Going beyond a mere collection of objects or an archive, the FoodCultura Manifesto describes it as “a market and a stomach, a library and a mouth, a center of exchange and a brain, a laboratory and a language (…) an organic archive where the links between aesthetics, food and culture are rewritten (…) a dense web of events, performative actions and artistic proposals, a great ritual that invokes autochthonous memories, cultural experiences and human identities  (…) a network of international and cumulative collaboration, a sensitive parliament, an agora of flavors, a public square where miscegenation processes are debated and manifested.”

Miralda packs and unpacks his living, organic archive across multiple operations: performative actions, participatory projects, field work, research, and the rethinking of cultural processes, from identity formation to transculturation through an anthropology of food and the artifacts related to it. In itself, as the manifesto states, FoodCultura is a language that gives form to many of Miralda’s cultural/culinary explorations, and it is its interaction with Miralda’s personal archive that informs the representation of the works in the exhibition space. Fittingly, his first solo gallery show in New York since his 1991 exhibition at the Holly Solomon Gallery features two recent multiples made by Miralda that function as an index of his production from the 1960s to date, and more specifically provide a context, in the form of an encapsulated archive, to the series of drawings and collages presented in the adjacent galleries.

At the center of both multiples is the figure of Marianne, the icon who embodies the ideals of “freedom, equality, and fraternity” that guided the French Revolution and the subsequent foundation of the French Republic. The Marianne Caganera is rendered here as a caganer (small, defecating figurines placed in nativity scenes in Catalonia) in two versions, “métisse/mulatta” and “blanche/white”, emblematic of Miralda’s explorations in cultural hybridity. Both boxes, Marianne M and Marianne B, contain objects, ephemera, and publications that span five decades of the artist’s production.

Both Marianne and her American counterpart, the Statue of Liberty, occupy an important place in Miralda’s visual and conceptual repertoire, as the iconographies of freedom, liberation, and, to some extent, those of war and peace, are central to Miralda’s production. Read more.