Actions on Béjar: Memory, Participation, and the Visual Poetics of Place
In the Spanish town of Béjar, once a thriving textile hub, participatory art and photography converge to explore memory, absence, and collective imagination. Acciones sobre Béjar transforms public spaces and personal narratives into visual and poetic archives, revealing the town’s past, present, and potential futures through dialogue, gesture, and community.
Artist Antonio Hoya Words Juan Carlos Verona 
Béjar, a small town in the province of Salamanca, Spain, offers a unique lens through which to explore the tensions between memory, absence, and collective imagination. Once a thriving center of textile industry and tourism, Béjar today confronts the challenges of depopulation, aging, and the erosion of its productive fabric: of 138 businesses advertised in the 1972 issue of Ferias y Fiestas, only 16 remain active. Acciones sobre Béjar emerges from this historical context, not as a nostalgic gesture, but as a project of dialogue, between past and present, absence and presence, photography and lived experience.
The initiative unfolds through three participatory actions, Béjar al brasero, Béjar exquisito, and Béjar ausente. Each engaging local inhabitants and ex-residents in co-creating the visual and symbolic life of the town. These interventions emphasize that a place is more than its physical geography: it is a web of relationships, gestures, and shared narratives. Photography plays a central role here, capturing not only the material reality of Béjar but also the ephemeral qualities of dialogue, intimacy, and memory that emerge in participatory action.
On December 28, 2024, Béjar al brasero transformed the plaza of Gómez Rodulfo, popularly known as the Solano, into a temporary locus of warmth and encounter. Four traditional mesas camillas, with glowing coal braziers and a circle of chairs, invited the community to share conversation, memories, and visions for the future. The installation extended the domestic intimacy of the home into the public realm, using warmth, gesture, and proximity as vectors of relational art. Photographs from the event do more than record the scene: they document the subtle choreography of interaction, the tilt of a head, the pause before speaking, the gaze that bridges strangers, rendering visible the affective infrastructure of community.
Béjar exquisito, held on January 18, 2025, in the library of the Casino Obrero, translated these oral exchanges into a literary and visual practice. Using the cadavre exquis technique, participants co-authored texts that intertwined nostalgia, critique, and collective aspiration. Here, photography captures the act of making itself: the gestures of hands writing, eyes reading aloud, bodies leaning into dialogue. Images and words together create a layered archive in which memory becomes material, and the act of creation embodies a collective reappropriation of place.
On March 23, 2025, Béjar ausente extended the project beyond the town, hosting a literary gathering at the Fabra i Coats creation centre in Barcelona. Twenty-four participants, many of them Béjar natives living outside the town, explored Ruperto Fraile’s 1984 memoir Recuerdos de una vida, reflecting on migration, belonging, and the shaping of memory over time. Photography in this context emphasises absence as much as presence: portraits of attentive listeners, hands turning pages, and the interplay of light and shadow across the room articulate the tension between distance, longing, and imaginative return. These images render tangible the intangible currents of memory, nostalgia, and desire for reconnection.
“Images and words together create a layered archive in which memory becomes material, and the act of creation embodies a collective reappropriation of place.”
Across these actions, Acciones sobre Béjar demonstrates that art need not reside solely in objects. Following relational aesthetics, it unfolds as experience, dialogue, and visual practice. Photography is not a neutral witness but an agent that mediates, frames, and amplifies the affective and symbolic dimensions of the town. The visual archive of the project, photographs, gestures, textual artefacts, constitutes a living repository, offering entry points to understand Béjar’s past, interrogate its present, and imagine potential futures.
In Béjar, even the recovery of traditional elements such as the Barco de Ávila reineta apple trees becomes emblematic: symbols of rootedness, patience, and regenerative capacity. Photography captures these gestures of care and continuity, framing them not as static monuments but as agents of possibility. The project reveals how community, dialogue, and visual storytelling converge to construct a town that is at once remembered, experienced, and imagined.
Ultimately, Acciones sobre Béjar positions the town as a living actor rather than a backdrop, foregrounding participatory art and photography as tools for civic reflection and reactivation. Through relational practice, the project transforms absence into presence, nostalgia into possibility, and silence into shared narrative. Béjar emerges not only as a site of historical loss but as a laboratory of collective imagination, where image, word, and gesture intersect to reclaim place, identity, and hope in the heart of Spain’s “emptying” rural landscape.
Images from the exhibition “Novena a Béjar” from the project Actions on Béjar in Béjar.
Ph. Carlos Manso
Ph. Carlos Manso
Ph. Carlos Manso
Ph. Vidal García
Ph. Vidal García
Ph. Vidal García
About Antonio
Antonio Hoya is a student of the Bachelor’s Degree in Art and Design at the Escola Massana, Centre d’Art i Disseny, from which he will graduate in June 2025. His training in this environment has been essential for his artistic development, providing the context and momentum needed to carry out several self-managed projects.
In June 2024, he organised an installation-based exhibition at the Arús Public Library (Barcelona), a project that stemmed from his interest in experimenting with exhibition practices outside the formal circles of the art industry. Simultaneously, he participated in a collective curatorial exercise organised by the Association of Galleries in collaboration with the University of Barcelona (UB), BAU, Escola Massana, and Manifesta 15.
During the first semester of the 2024-25 academic year, he undertook a residency in the Fine Arts program at the WDKA (Willem de Kooning Academy) in Rotterdam, expanding his training in an international environment and exploring new perspectives within his artistic practice.
He is currently engaged in an artist residency at the Fabra i Coats Creation Factory, where he is developing his Final Degree Project (TFG), exploring new approaches to his practice and consolidating his artistic research.
To see more of his work follow him on Instagram
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