Art as ritual

Born in Mallorca (1986), Isabel Servera lives in Barcelona. The artist has exhibited in both national and international galleries: Palau de Casavells in Girona, Alzueta Gallery and Can Framis Museum–Vila Casas Foundation in Barcelona, Es Baluard Museum in Mallorca, as well as in France, the Netherlands, and Finland. With the support of the Úniques Foundation, which aims to promote the work of women artists living in the Catalan-speaking territories, Servera is this season’s guest artist at the Palau de la Música Catalana.

Her artistic practice centres on painting and manual processes involving repetition, accumulation, and routine. One example is Llatrar, a project that took place at the Cool Days Festival in Artà (Mallorca), in the artist’s family home, where several family members gathered to engage in weaving and working with palm fronds—establishing an intergenerational dialogue with the family’s legacy. Servera brings this heritage of working with various materials into her art. The final result of some of her pieces resembles a tapestry, in which warp and weft are interwoven and become the image and composition themselves. Through these works, fragility, traditions, craftsmanship, art, memory, forgetting, death, life, time… all become entwined, woven together.

This process aligns perfectly with the season’s theme: rituals. The act of weaving is an ancestral rite, as seen in the story of Penelope in Homer’s Odyssey or the symbolism of Ariadne’s thread. The act of weaving itself is a ritual. And this daily, artisanal ritual takes place both alone and in community, becoming a cultural practice.