The savage mind

Xesca Salvà & Marc Villanueva Mir




A gigantic Petri dish. Hands, microbes. And time. There are the only ingredients needed to produce the colony of microbes that we see grow in this work.

Our relationship with microbes is enduring and intimate. We may not be aware of it, but every day we feed, carry and share our body with millions of bacteria and fungi that can not be seen with the naked eye. Curiously enough, we found out that the exchange of microbes is part of many religious rituals. Therefore, The savage mind is a ritual for the nurture and growth of the microbes that are sticked to our skin. This ritual lasts for several days, and starts as a spawning ceremony, a chill gathering whereby audience and artists meet in the open space in order to cook the microbes’ food while talking about microbes, holy ghosts and scrap. For three or four days, the Petri dish turns into an installation that makes the slow growth both visible and hearable. Eventuallly, we gather again around the Petri dish to play a concert with percussion and live electronics, while looking at the landscapes within. The geographies that microbes have generated confront us with an unknown image of our body and of the place we may have in the universe.

Concept Xesca Salvà & Marc Villanueva Mir
Music Gerard Valverde Ros and Miquel Vich Vila
Percussion Miquel Vich Vila
Live electronics Gerard Valverde Ros
Participant Lamin Salameh
Construction of the petri dish Jorba Miró - Estudi Taller d’Escenografia
Scientific advisory Montse Bayés
Photography Maria Espada i Marc Villanueva Mir
With special thanks to Alba Vega Mulet, Rosa Casado and Mike Brookes

Produced for Festival ZIP at Teatre Nacional de Catalunya, supported by Departament de Cultura de la Generalitat de Catalunya





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Previous dates

Barcelona | Festival Zip TNC
15.06.22 17h
16.-18.06.22 16h-20h
19.06.22 12:30h