Exhibitions
Inhabiting the Co_llapse
Irene Pe
Curated by Mercè Alsina
TERRASSA
Arxiu Tobella
Placeta de Saragossa, 2
From November 6 to 22, 2025
Hours
Tuesday to Saturday from 6.30 pm to 8.30 pm
Inhabiting the Co_llapse proposes pause as a form of resistance against the systemic violence inflicted on chronically ill bodies. With this project, artist Irene Pe brings visibility to lives historically silenced, presenting a body of work that understands illness not as passivity, but as a state of persistent and potentially disruptive struggle.
Blending documentary archives, personal imagery, and elements of speculative imagination, the project constructs a sick survival imaginary inhabited by slowed-down bodies resisting ableism and the neoliberal pace. It juxtaposes photographs from the Arxiu Tobella —depicting scenes of labor struggle and hospitalization— with intimate records of the artist’s own bodily flares and crises. In the tension between fragility and transformation, a radical insistence on existing outside the framework of hyper-productivity emerges.
Irene Pe
Irene Pe (Terrassa, 1975), holds a Fine Arts degree from the University of Illinois, and develops a multidisciplinary artistic practice that weaves together textile techniques, drawing, photography, sound, storytelling, and poetry. Her work revolves around themes such as gender, mental health, bodily fragility, pain, feminism, and ecology.
She has exhibited her work in both national and international venues, including the MCA Chicago, Hyde Park Art Center, National Archives of Malta, ACVic, CACiS, CDMT in Terrassa, and Fabra i Coats, among others. Her latest project, a PAINFUL BODY in a WOUNDED WORLD, explores the experience of chronic pain in an ecologically damaged environment. It was awarded the Terrassa CREA Grant 2024 and presented at La Taller, Bilbao.
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.
