Exhibitions
About Rest
Natalia Lazaro Prevost
Curated by Mercè Alsina
BARCELONA
Arxiu d’Etnografia i Folklore de Catalunya
Institució Milà i Fontanals – Carrer Egipcíaques, 15
From November 6, 2025, to January 11, 2026
Hours
Free access (outdoor space).
About Rest invites us to rethink the city–countryside dichotomy in response to the widespread sense of personal and collective exhaustion that surrounds us. In search of a possible new architecture of rest, artist Natalia Lazaro Prevost has conducted research at the Archive of Ethnography and Folklore of Catalonia.
The result is a photographic dialogue in which the artist reuses and intervenes in early 20th-century images taken in cereal fields in Catalonia. These images prominently feature garberas — traditional structures made from bundles of straw tied by hand. Today considered part of Catalonia’s ethnographic heritage, these constructions reflect a way of life and a relationship with the land rooted in reuse, manual labor, and alignment with natural rhythms. At the same time, they evoke notions of rest, shared labor, environmental stewardship, and a quiet resistance to the pace of modern life.
Natalia Lazaro Prevost
Natalia Lazaro Prevost is a visual researcher whose artistic projects explore movement and the relationship between objects and the space they inhabit. Her work focuses on recovering social contexts from the past in order to reflect on the roles of women and the environment today.
She holds a degree in Journalism from Barcelona and Santiago de Chile, and specialized in artistic photography at the London University of the Arts. She has lived and worked in Chile, Malaysia, Madrid, and London. She currently resides in Barcelona, where she works in conceptualization, curating, and artistic creation in collaboration with art centers, institutions, and festivals.
Her projects have been presented in exhibitions and publications by institutions such as MACBA, La Panera, Fundació Joan Brossa, La Casa Elizalde, Sala d’Art Jove, Centre d’Arts Santa Mònica, London College of Communication, UNHCR Malaysia, El País, ARA, and The Guardian.
Panoràmic File
Panoràmic File is a section of the festival curated by Mercè Alsina, which invites artists to develop new projects based on various photographic archives. This year, they were asked to work in response to the edition’s theme: Break. A new visual order, which reflects on the first quarter of the 21st century and the profound geopolitical, technological, and governance shifts that have taken place.
The term break refers both to the idea of rupture and to that of pause —a necessary pause to process these changes and question whether this is truly the future we had envisioned, doing so through the image.
In this edition, seven artists delve into different archives to explore the concept of pause in devices where this temporal suspension is, in some way, inherent.
The projects featured in Panoràmic File 2025 are:
- 3 Tesel·lacions, Erick Beltrán. Arxiu Històric de la Ciutat de Barcelona.
- Tot el que pot passar: La inactivitat com a motor de l’inaudit, Laura Aranda Lavado. Roca Umbert Fàbrica de les Arts, Granollers (amb la col·laboració de l’Arxiu Municipal de Granollers).
- Pausa, Camping o Campament, Dani Montlleó. Arxiu Fotogràfic de Barcelona.
- Habitar el co_lapse, Irene Pe. Arxiu Tobella.
- Capsa 23, Aleix Plademunt. Arxiu Fotogràfic del Consorci de les Drassanes Reials del Museu Marítim de Barcelona.
- Hold on, Laia Solé. Arxiu Fotogràfic del Centre Excursionista de Catalunya.
- Sobre el descans, Natalia Lazaro Prevost. Arxiu d’Etnografia i Folklore de Catalunya.
Mercè Alsina
Mercè Alsina (Barcelona, 1966) holds a PhD cum laude in Art History. She is an independent curator and journalist. Her research has addressed issues such as the impact of globality on artistic productions and their circulation; questions of identity and historical representation; speculative materialism and the nature of objects; the video essay as a practice of resistance; critical photography and the representation of violence; and the relationship between writing and art, among others.
Since 2020, she has been part of the curatorial team of the Panoràmic Festival. She is the author of the essay Massacre (2025). In 2024, she received the ACCA Award for Best Contemporary Art Exhibition Programme in Catalonia, granted by the Catalan Association of Art Critics, for the programming of the cycle santcorneliarts(2) in Cardedeu, which she has directed together with the artist Enric Maurí since 2017.
