Once and again and again

Curated by Adriana Monroy Galindo.

Una volta i una altra i una altra is an exhibition project that transforms used olive oil —collected during the summer on the Costa Brava— into soap pieces, using the materiality of waste as a device to reflect on territory, memory, and the imaginaries of tourism.

The proposal begins with an operational gesture —the collection and reuse of transformed olive oil— to put tension on the relationships between summer leisure, local economy, and the material traces these processes leave behind. Summer, understood as a temporal architecture that alters social and productive rhythms, simultaneously expands and exhausts spaces: the accumulation of bodies, services, and consumption redefines rural and coastal landscapes in repeated cycles. In this context, olive oil —a foundational image of Mediterranean identity— degrades at its moment of maximum use, becoming a liminal substance: neither fully useful nor entirely discarded. It is this threshold, this transitional state, that the work engages with.

The dual nature of used oil —both working material and waste— enters into dialogue with the notion of pharmakon: something that can act as both remedy and poison. In the context of contemporary tourism, the oil functions literally as fuel —materializing work, sustaining the seasonal economy, and keeping essential services running in rural territories— while also condensing the environmental, social, and emotional impact underlying this seasonal dependence. The result is an installation that makes visible the tensions between rhythm and wear, permanence and precariousness, memory and forgetting, transforming an everyday substance into a material for critical reflection. Supported by OSIC, the project demonstrates art’s capacity to turn waste into a space for critical reflection on the relationship between tourism, territory, and memory.