Back Yard (fragment), 1996

As part of the Invisible Circles cycle in the Espai 13, the Joan Miro Foundation is presenting the installation Sic transit by the Catalan artist Anna Marin, a reflection on the multicultumi society and the problems of immigration.

If the aim of Invisible Circles is to describe the environment from different viewpoints, Anna Marin's proposal is an installation that deals with the forced move from one environment to another. Exodus and emigration - and consequent immigration - are the themes underlying Sic transit

Although Anna Mann has not personally experienced such circumstances, her career has often revolved round exodus and flight and the suffering caused by losing one's roots. She takes as her starting point an idea expressed by Juan Goytisolo in an article published in El Pais in 1993. The writer urged that we should not allow the Mediterranean to become the new Iron Curtain of the European Union. He was concerned that very often only a line on the map separates the rich from the poor, the free from the persecuted, people who are suffering from those who are lucky enough to live in a privileged environment.

Using this idea, Anna Mann has created a sea of steel from thousands of hairpins - a poetic, evocative sea that is also a highly dangerous element. It is a sea that attracts, but also makes us realise the hardships and penury of those who have had to cross it, impelled by famine, poverty, war or persecution. But the exhibition also has a more personal reading and induces us to meditate on the transits that are constantly occurring around us.

Anna Mann was born in Figueres in 1965. She studied Fine Art in Barcelona, where she now lives. Previous exhibitions have included Closely separated at Can Xerracan in Montornes del Valles (Barcelona), and Telling differences at the Artesa' de Gm' cia, Barcelona.