One of the most ambitious and complex projects of the many that Pere Formiguera (1952-2013) undertook was Cronos, a monumental series in which he portrayed 32 people around him naked, including his own mother, every month for ten years. A portrait of the passage of time that goes unnoticed before our eyes, but that leaves its marks on the skin and bodies and mutates expressions with the experiences lived. Among those who came monthly to be photographed in the Sant Cugat studio that he only left in August for vacation, was his brother Santi Formiguera, who in the seventies also posed for him masked under the appearance of a one-eyed, toothed monster with a bowler hat in a image that now illustrates the poster for the exhibition The Creative Drive, with which the MNAC celebrates and publicizes the donation of the photographer's rich and diverse collection by the family.
“Pere was a beloved person, he was a beloved brother, he was a beloved uncle, perhaps if he had been a hated brother or uncle we would not be here today. When a loved person dies we try to keep them living through memories, photographs... but with the passage of time that memory fades until it almost disappears. In the case of artists, it is more difficult for this to happen, because they leave a physical work and the physical work is what allows the person's memory to be perpetuated," argues Santi Formiguera to explain the reasons that led the family to deposit in the 2016 in the museum an archive with more than 4,000 photographs on paper, more than 1,000 slides and 3,900 contact sheets, in addition to a good part of its large library.
Over time, that deposit, which has been subjected to intense cleaning, restoration, inventory and digitization work “to make it available to everyone,” in the words of the museum director, Pepe Serra, has become a “ “very generous” donation by the brothers Xavier, Anna and Santi Formiguera. The latter confesses that, of course, practical issues have also weighed in the decision. “Photography is a fragile work that needs conservation conditions, temperature, humidity, that are not within the reach of a family.” The option to sell was at some point on the table. “But the country is what it is, and luckily there was an agreement in the end, because it would have been a bad sale and the work would have been dispersed,” adds Santi.
And, in order to safeguard the work of a photographer who was always interested in the topic of memory and the stopping of time, there is no better place than the MNAC. Because it is a “Catalan, public and prestigious” institution. Pere Formiguera was also a historian, collector and exhibition curator. In 1976 he founded the Alabern group together with Manuel Esclusa, Joan Fontcuberta and Rafael Navarro; He created with David Balsells and Marta Gili the photography department of the Fundació Miró and was an advisor to the MNAC.
“This is an extraordinary donation,” says Serra, not only because of what it enriches and the new possibilities it opens up, but also because “donations can generate empathy, a contagion effect in other people. Leaving the work in a public institution is projecting it to the world.”
