2026 VESTIGES OF SUMMER

The Vestigis d’estiu 2026 (Vestiges of Summer 2026) cycle brings together the projects of Carles Congost and Jordi Mitjà around a shared field of tension: summer understood as a setting for memory, fiction, socialisation and symbolic decline. Far from a nostalgic or merely evocative reading, the cycle approaches summer imaginaries as a constellation of cultural forms—visual, bodily, gastronomic and affective—through which to reconsider the relationships between territory, identity and collective imaginaries.

The cycle presents projects by Carles Congost and Jordi Mitjà, combining research, performativity and moving image.

Carles Congost’s film project, Un dit de gel (Portrait of the Artist at Twilight in El Port de la Selva), uses a poetic and fragmented visual language to address questions related to identity, youthful imaginaries and forms of summer socialisation in El Port de la Selva. The project draws on the song of the same title, created by Congost in 2017, transforming its emotional references into filmic scenes in which small groups of young people interact in significant locations along the coast. The film offers an in-depth exploration of the experience of place while reflecting on transformation, fragility and the passage of time. Carles Congost’s film is an ARBAR project co-produced with Bòlit, Centre d’Art Contemporani.

Jordi Mitjà’s culinary performance project, With or Without Pyjamas, takes as its starting point a reinterpretation of the cuisine served in family-run coastal restaurants during the 1970s and 1980s: functional, inexpensive and inherited forms of cooking that today constitute an often-overlooked heritage. Mitjà turns this cuisine into an operative metaphor for thinking about culture and its margins. His “recovery cuisine” reclaims flavours and practices that have been relegated to the background, transforming them into forms of material culture capable of activating new readings of both the past and the territory.

Dates and times

Presentation of the film project: 18 July / Time: 7 pm
Dinner-performance: 18 July / Time: 9 pm
Music session by Carles Congost (The Congosound DJ Selector): 18 July / Time: 10.30 pm

Venue: ARBAR Centre

Dates of the intervention: 18 July–29 August
Opening hours: Thursday to Saturday, 6–9 pm
Venue: ARBAR Centre

Credits
Photography: courtesy of the artists
Texts: the artists
Co-production: Bòlit, Centre d’Art Contemporani de Girona

Advance registration is required before 14 July at: info@arbar.cat

With the support of the Government of Catalonia – Department of Culture, the Girona Provincial Council, El Port de la Selva Town Council, Bòlit, Centre d’Art Contemporani de Girona, and the Institut d’Estudis Empordanesos, and with the collaboration of the Associació de Veïns de Sant Marçal de la Vall de Santa Creu and the Museu de l’Empordà.