SSSSS. Marc Vives

Marc Vives Muñoz (Barcelona, ​​1978) sings and swims between the scenic and the visual. Graduated in Fine Arts in 2001 from the University of Barcelona, ​​he has been a doctoral candidate in Humanities since 2020 at the University of Castilla-La Mancha. He works with the materiality of the voice in its sculptural potential with the aim of infiltrating architecture, landscapes and other bodies, and reformulating an established order. He has shown his work at Rogaland Kunstsenter (Stavanger, 2016), Redcat (LA, 2016), etHALL (Barcelona, ​​2018) and MACBA (Barcelona, ​​2021), and has participated in performances at the Antic Teatre (Barcelona, ​​2020), CCEMX (Mexico, 2020), Festival Grec (Barcelona, ​​2020), La Casa Encendida (Madrid, 2021), MUSAC (León, 2023), Collegium (Arévalo, 2023) or MAC PANAMA (2023). He collaborates with other artists and from 2002 to 2012 he was part of the duo Bestué-Vives, which was in the 2009 Venice Biennale.

His scope of involvement goes beyond artistic practice and he is dedicated to pedagogy, curating and management, seeking to collectively transform the contextual model. He has recently curated the cycle «Secuencia» with Fernando Gandasegui, created the Escola de Veu with Laia Estruch and has been part of the curatorial team at La Capella. He has also been behind GRAF.cat since 2013. In 2025 he won the Biennial Art Award of the Tarragona Provincial Council (BADt) with the work 'SSSSS' (acronym for Sand, Sea, Sun, Sex, Sangria), where Vives swims along the Costa Brava, a coastline that is usually associated with holidays and leisure, to create a disorienting and fragmentary experience of a more or less familiar coastal landscape, of both wild beauty and artificial monsters.

Filming with a camera attached to his head, Vives acts as a medium who tries to feel and communicate the territory through the active immersion of his body and the expulsion of sounds and voices. Resisting both a passive perception of the place and a fixed point of view, the artist produces a multimodal experience of aquatic coexistence, of apprehension rather than appropriation. The video is practically an unmediated record of the performance in the water. The editing is done using artificial intelligence (programmed with Python) for human speech recognition, so that it discriminates the moments in which there is a voice from those in which there is not, and organizes them according to pre-established presets. The process itself thus constitutes the research, and it could be said that, while swimming and singing, he is consciously editing the final result.

Opening: 

Friday, January 16, 2026

6 p.m. 

• Performance by the artist in the room of the Sarcòfag d'Hipòlit in the Roman Praetorian Tower of Tarragona (entrance from Plaça del Rei).
  
• 7 p.m. Opening ceremony of the exhibition at the Museu d'Art Modern de la Diputació de Tarragona, Santa Anna Street, 8.