La Padrina and the belongings of domesticity | Xevi Bayona

The Fundació Mies van der Rohe presents the artistic intervention by Xevi Bayona with Bayona Studio at the Mies van der Rohe Pavilion: “The Padrina and the belongings of domesticity”. In a provocative act which raises many questions, the artist generates a radical change of context by moving the furniture of a conventional house in Olot to the ceiling of the Pavilion.

Josefina Camó Valls, la Pepi, was Xevi Bayona’s aunt and godmother (padrina). She lived in Olot since she was a child, when her father moved there to paint saints. She was an embroiderer by profession and a single woman all her life. She was born in 1927, approximately when the Pavilion was being designed. 96 years later, with her death, the witness of the space she inhabited and the way she made it domestic remains, laying her soul in all of her objects to keep a piece of her world.

As if it were one of the Italo Calvino’s invisible cities, where the inhabited space becomes symbolic reflection of life and memory, meeting with the same line of this summer’s Pantalla Pavelló, Bayona undertakes a temporary move of this domesticity, which keep the belongings of the Padrina, to inhabit the vertical symmetry of the Pavilion, opposed to the distinctive empty and bare space. By comparison and, above all, by contrast, it invites reflection on space as a metaphor for life and also for death: the world above and the world below, the sky and the earth, the white floor and the travertine ceiling, the water as a porch and the carpet clouds*.

As an opening, on Wednesday, July 30 at 7 p.m., we invite you to a conversation between the author and Anna and Eugeni Bach, who in 2017 intervened in the Pavilion with “Mies Missing Materiality”. Book here your ticket

* If you take a photo, turn it upside down and share it! #padrina180

Xevi Bayona (Olot, 1982), founder of Bayona Studio, is an architect and artist from Olot. He studied Fine Arts in Olot, trained as an architect at ETSAB (Technical School of Architecture of Barcelona) with his final project—a Library-Playroom in Espinho, Portugal—and also studied at FAUP (Faculty of Architecture at the University of Porto). He holds a postgraduate degree in Landscape Design from ETSAB and a Master’s degree in Theory and Practice of Architectural Design from ETSAB, with the thesis “The Girona of the Streets – Scale.”

From the very beginning, he has been the Artistic Director of Lluèrnia, the Festival of Fire and Light in Olot. Since 2008, he has been a professor at the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Girona. Since 2018, he has taught in the international master’s program in ephemeral architecture at Elisava. He has given lectures, led workshops, and carried out ephemeral installations in various European cities. He has won several awards, including three FAD awards, with numerous finalist and selected projects. He has received architectural awards and honorable mentions from the Girona region, and was awarded the 2025 European AHI Architectural Heritage Intervention Award and the 2024 international City Scape Award for the renovation of el Firal in Olot, a project developed with Jaume Bach, Anna Bach, Eugeni Bach, Alba Colomer, and Lluís Pauné.

He won the Changing Tracks competition, a European project for three installations in Catalonia, England, and Ireland. Since 2017, he has collaborated and developed projects jointly with Àlex Posada, MID Studio.

He has completed civil works such as the restoration of the Pont de l’Estat in Tortosa over the Ebre River, the rehabilitation of the sports area of Sant Jaume de Llierca, and the Firal of Olot, as well as architectural works such as Casa dels tres murs, Casa Montsacopa, or the Equilibri restaurant. He has created ephemeral interventions such as The Three Kings’ Warehouse at Fabra i Coats, Farbalà at Caixaforum Barcelona, Habitare or Homeless Home, Vermell in Sweden, or Niu de foc at Lluèrnia. He is also curator, alongside Ana Amado and Jaume Prat, of the exhibition “De Puertas a Fuera” at the Casa de la Arquitectura. In 2024, he created the Christmas installation in Plaça Sant Jaume in Barcelona.

Bayona Studio is a workshop for architecture, art, and landscape located at the foot of a volcano in Olot, in the Garrotxa region.

They develop projects to explore emotions through a working method based on experimentation, research, and investigation. They create prototypes and tests that bridge architecture, urbanism, art, landscape, ephemeral installations, and light.

They design atmospheres and landscapes on various physical scales, but especially temporal scales that shape the essence of each project. Their work searches for beauty through a respectful and insightful understanding of the social, anthropological, physical, and cultural environment—to ask questions about the world we inhabit.

More videos of the intervention