Exhibition opening: September 8, 6:00 p.m.

Address: 66P Stajnia, 13b Romana Dmowskiego Street, 50-203 Wrocław

Los Pesados (“The Heavy Ones”) is an exhibition whose primary material is the brick — a building element, but also a tool of protest and a symbol of collective resistance. The project takes as its starting points, among others, the 2019 demonstrations in Hong Kong, where small brick structures were used to create improvised street barricades, and the barricades built by protesters in Khartoum. In both cases, an ordinary material was transformed into political architecture and into a site where revolution could take place.

Another recurring motif is the shoe as a symbol of rebellion — from the Zapatistas and the wordplay connected with the Spanish word zapato, to the wooden sabots used by workers to stop machinery during the Industrial Revolution. In Manuela Morales Délano’s sculptures, heavy bricks are combined with high heels, creating fragile, unsettling figures that balance between strength, violence, corporeality and movement. They are accompanied by small walls, architectural arrangements and a series titled The Heavy People — human-like objects made from used clothing filled with bricks, which become the “dancers” within the exhibition.

The project will be developed directly within the space of 66P Stajnia. The artist will primarily use bricks bearing traces of previous use, while the arrangement of the installation will evolve throughout the process of creating the exhibition. Los Pesados connects the history of protest with the experience of the festival as a space of community, freedom and solidarity — a place where music, dance and collective movement can become forms of resistance and ways of imagining alternative forms of being together.