Albert Forns Canal

Writer in Residence
Period of Stay: 
October 2018 – February 2019
2018/19
Institution: 
Independent Artist, Barcelona, Spain
Project Title: 
The 13 Notebook Project
Project Abstract: 

In 2015, in a second-hand Barcelona book market, I found 13 life-changing (at least for me) notebooks, written by a nameless citizen who spent 13 years jotting down details of his work, private life and daily routine. This set me off on a quest of investigating the material of the diaries and to explore diary writing as a genre. Why do we write diaries? What forms do diaries take? All of this I have combined with fragments of my own personal diaries which I have been writing since I turned 20. This was the gist of my project until autumn 2017, when the Catalan independence referendum completely changed my personal diary, filling it with accounts of demonstrations and, hitherto unknown (for me) political activism. Now, I talk about mornings cutting off motorways, afternoons of website activism, and nights of "guerrilla raids" sticking up freedom-for-political-prisioners posters in the streets of Barcelona.