"The trip, Habibi" – Fundación NMAC, Vejer de la Frontera, Cádiz Province, Spain

Pilar Albarracín was born in Sevilla, Spain on September 27, 1968. In 1993, she earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Seville. After earning her degree, Pilar moved to Ireland and steadily worked there for some time. When her work started becoming "more serious," she moved back to her home town to pursue an artistic career based on the social condition of the Andalusian identity. Pilar strived to create work based on the role of women, religious myths, and popular traditions.

"The trip. Habibi" is one of the artist’s most relevant works. It invites spectators to immerse themselves, in almost funfair fashion, in a hypothetical voyage of North African immigrants over European motorways. A beaten-up Mercedes, laden with packages and crammed with objects, reproduces the bumps in the road and the atmosphere of smells and sound inside. In the province of Cádiz, near the Strait of Gibraltar, one usually finds this type of cars, filled with luggage and objects that cross the territory from north to south on their way to the Africa during the holiday seasons. The car becomes a symbol of recognition and social position, a mark of success coming from Europe.

The Fundación NMAC (the Montenmedio Arte Contemporáneo) is a unique space in Spain which explores the space shared by contemporary art and nature. The objective of the NMAC Foundation is to invite international artists to carry out specific artistic projects that are in tune with the landscape. NMAC is a cultural reference in southern Europe also for its educational and cultural programming.