Fragile Constructions Sculptural project
Joan Priego’s sculptural practice revolves around a deliberate and fragmentary process of construction in which materiality and process become central concepts to explore the forging of individual and collective identity, as well as the symbolic construction of the city.
Born in Barcelona in 1969, Priego works primarily with reclaimed wood from demolished buildings and felled urban trees. He carves, polychromes and assembles it into figures of corporeal yet vulnerable presence: truncated torsos, hybrid bodies and human fragments that function as metaphors for a fractured postmodern subjectivity.
The project is structured around three intertwined axes: the construction of identity (individual and collective), sculptural construction as process (carving, materiality, assembly and transformation), and the construction of the city as a permanently unfinished palimpsest. Influenced by Nietzsche and Freud, Priego conceives the contemporary subject as a multiplicity of fragments and masks. Each sculpture emerges from the meticulous selection of reclaimed woods — where scars, nails and time-worn veins remain visible beneath the artist’s intervention.
This material gesture runs parallel to the symbolic construction of the self: an identity recomposed from ruins, negotiating memory, belonging and resistance in a context saturated by consumerism, tourism and gentrification.
The city, like the reclaimed wood, is continuously built and unbuilt; its inherited materials are transformed into new forms while preserving traces of the past. Priego’s work does not illustrate Barcelona — it interrogates it from within, offering a sensitive cartography of how collective narratives are built and dismantled.
