In 2010, Mitjà undertook a residency at MIS (Museu da Imagem e do Som) in São Paulo, Brazil. This is the source of the reference to the cannibal present in the exhibition’s title: Oswald de Andrade’s decolonial theory that advocates swallowing and digesting European cultural influences from Brazilian territory. Global contemporary identity has become subsumed by the cannibal structure, and the hyper-appropriation manifested in the visual and aural textures that surround us. In Brazil, Mitjà produced the work Traduções do Original (2010), where he dedicated himself to imitating sonic textures using the rubbish he found on the streets of São Paulo, and the ephemeral and collective hubbub and commotion that defines it. Capturing and recreating the invisible textures that surround us contains the seed and signature of the artist’s cannibal practice: of chewing the chewed, of appropriating the reappropriated, archiving chaos within other chaos. In this sense, Mitjà’s practice takes the form of a great ouroboros; a material serpent that constantly digests its own body and excrement, an act parallel to planetary circularity within which we live, even though contemporary life strives to distance itself from this terrestrial essence.
For TACA, we show a series of never-before-seen works, produced with a newspaper archive that Mitjà has been compiling from the nineties until today. This temporally non-linear work demonstrates a decades-long fixation on the debris and hidden maintenance of industrial production processes. Objects and images, byproducts of the great serpent-like system of consuming and burying rubbish, are the core of the source archive. Like a feverish collector, Mitjà gathers newspaper clippings from around the world following criteria known only to the author himself. The papers, stack incidents of global importance or everyday oddities, and are transformed into photo-bricolage with white and colored paints to create assemblages and compositions on the informative compositions. Alongside this series, works on textile are presented that come from large newspaper presses; the same ones that will have printed some of the copies that form part of the series and for which large quantities of rags are produced to clean the machinery of the ink residues that remain stuck in the guts of production. In the 2000s, Mitjà obtained a large quantity of dirty cloth, stained with newspaper ink and destined for the incinerator. He dried them in the sun and washed them in a laborious process before sewing them into new collages, reappropriating the abstract mechanical gestures of ink on rag. These works of different scales show the production of material destined for the single-use waste industry and maintenance that the reader never sees.
Finally, three abstract sculptures are presented made from a burned compost bin, the flames that consumed it, left a crumbling body in advanced decomposition like the organic food for which it was built. Its jagged edges resemble an abstracted jawbone, with feeble attempts at silent slogans. The burned container is conceptually tied to political acts and events represented on the front pages of newspapers, but in this case, the form comes from an everyday accident and the coincidence of finding these remains of an organic process of manure recycling that has just closed the journey of the cannibal serpent.
Mitjà’s work is a process of carbon digestion where the industrial processes that sustain contemporary urban and rural life confront a planetary gaze. Debris is recombined and reprocessed through a personal gaze and the human-scale view of the great digestive system that surrounds us. Winding through the rural roads of the Alt Empordà, we smell the fields, the pine forests and the pork industry that extends across the territory for reasons of economic profit and that poisons the groundwater reserves with which we end up irrigating, a circular system in which we never really get rid of waste, we only distract ourselves from its growing abundance.
Jordi Mitjà graduated from the Olot School of Art, in the painting department (1989-1994), studied scenography at the Institut del Teatre in Barcelona (1994-1996), and participated in various workshops at QUAM (Quinzena d’art de Montesquiu) (1992-2002). He has organised exhibition cycles at PEAC, Plataforma Empordanesa d’Art Contemporani (1996-1997), the experimental electronic music label Mínim (1998-2000), the electronic music festival Electrolladó (2000-2007), and the editorial project specializing in artist books, CRANI. His recent productions include solo exhibitions at Fabra i Coats Centre d’Art Contemporani (Barcelona), Bombon Projects (Barcelona), Fundació Suñol (Barcelona), Fundació Joan Miró (Barcelona), Fondazione Zimei (Pescara), Museu da Imagem e do Som (São Paulo), Museu de l’Empordà (Figueres), and Bòlit Centre d’Art Contemporani (Girona). He has participated in group exhibitions at EACC (Castelló de la Plana), CGAC (Santiago de Compostela), MACBA (Barcelona), ARTIUM (Vitoria-Gasteiz), Casa del Lago (Mexico City), Galeria Umberto di Marino (Naples), CA2M (Madrid), Harto_Espacio (Montevideo), Ex-Teresa Arte Actual (Mexico City), Galeria Cadaqués (Cadaqués), MARCO (Vigo), and Centre d’Art La Panera (Lleida), among others. Recently, he published his first poetry collection “Fins i tot els renecs” (2022) and the publication documenting a dinner/performance for ARBAR: “Si tu ne manges pas, tu vas pas mourir” (2024). He lives and works in Lladó.
Àngels Miralda is a writer and independent curator. Her recent exhibitions include the Contemporary Biennial TEA (Tenerife), Something Else III & IV (Cairo Off-Biennale); MAAC (Guayaquil); Garage Art Space (Nicosia); Radius CCA (Delft), PAKT Foundation (Amsterdam), Indebt (Amsterdam), Tallinn Art Hall (Estonia), MGLC – International Centre for Graphic Arts (Ljubljana), Galerija Miroslav Kraljevic (Zagreb Municipal Gallery), the Museum of Contemporary Art of Chile (Santiago), Museum of Angra do Heroísmo (Terceira – Azores), and the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art (Riga) among many others. Miralda wrote for Artforum from 2019 to 2023 and served as Editor-in-Chief at Collecteurs from 2021 to 2025. She has published texts in monographs and catalogues edited by Phaidon Press, TBA21, and Cukrarna among others. She lives and works in Amsterdam.
