Elena Garrigolas at the Contemporary Art Museum of Girona: Maladaptive Daydreaming, curated by Bernat Daviu with the contribution of Mar Bosch

In August 2020, at the height of summer, a three-year-old girl riding an inflatable unicorn accidentally disappeared from a beach on a Greek island, carried away by sea currents. A ferry eventually spotted her adrift offshore, clinging tightly to the float, and she was rescued safe and sound. But what if the girl had chosen to escape? Who has not, at some point, wished to divert the course of the story they were meant to live?

 

This cycle, curated by Bernat Daviu (Fonteta, 1985), unfolds across three exhibitions conceived as chapters of a collective novel. The works bring together narratives and characters who inhabit the margins: figures that challenge imposed limits, question dominant imaginaries, and assert themselves within de-idealized or dystopian contexts. Fiction becomes a tool for generating escapist and metaphorical narratives that are at once critical of reality, articulating a discourse on identity, resistance, and memory.

 

Maladaptive Daydreaming, at Bòlit Centre d’Art Contemporani – Sant Nicolau, presents an installation by Elena Garrigolas (Girona, 1998) that combines painting, drawing, and animation to explore bodies that exceed the limits of normative humanity. Drawing from a lived experience marked by emotional repression and the denial of the body, the artist constructs a visual universe of surrealism, satire, and excess, populated by anthropomorphic and grotesque figures. These works address bodily restraint, guilt, beauty ideals, and the mother–child relationship from a feminist perspective.

 

Within the exhibition, excessive daydreaming emerges as an ambivalent strategy of escapism and survival, poised between refuge and alienation. A text written for the occasion by the writer Mar Bosch (Girona, 1981) delves into this phenomenon through a protagonist from Garrigolas’ work who fantasizes about another way of being, torn between a body confined to purity and the temptation of desire.

 

The three exhibitions in the cycle — A Children’s Game, at Bòlit Rambla; Right Here in Another Place, at Bòlit Pou Rodó; and Maladaptive Daydreaming, at Bòlit Sant Nicolau — share the most subversive spirit of the marginalia. The term “marginalia” — from the Latin meaning “at the margins” — originally referred to a diverse repertoire of written and primarily iconic elements placed in the margins of Western books during the Middle Ages. Beyond serving a clarifying function, they offered the copyist a playful or satirical escape, a way to break from the rigidity of the main text and momentarily evade the monotony of the task.

 

Twenty minutes is the time the girl on the unicorn spent missing — or perhaps escaping — at sea. It is also, according to various studies, the average amount of time a visitor spends at an exhibition. The cycle 20 Minutes at the Margin proposes an immersion into dissonant narratives that open up spaces for questioning, displacement, and possibility.