Activity

The U21 team is a group made up of young people from 16 to 21 years of age who are interested in culture, art and community life. We focus on utopian practices of art that promote experimental forms of organisation, dissident attitudes and collective creative processes. Our way of working is to continuously evolve: right now it seems almost miraculous to be able to meet at a museum to spend time together but we feel that this is very important. This year, we aim to bring back museums, meetings, artists and group meet-and-greets, travelling to the future, becoming nomads and mountaineers, doing magic and adapting to the circumstances like true chameleons.

In this first stage of the year, called Start of the End of the World: Youth, we begin a collective research laboratory with the artist Paz Rojo, in which we radically experiment with speculation and the future.

Currently the U21 team is made up of: Diego Alonso, Alicia Arévalo Gallego, Cristina Bermúdez Garrido, Paula Díaz Cano, Miriam Domínguez García, Sandra Esteban López, Nadia Ettahri, Claudia Fernández Concepción, Marina Lillo García, Irene Lloret Miguel, Elisa Lozano Triviño, Fabiana Marques Abatemarco, Richard Moreno Campechano, Marina Olympia Rodríguez Ibáñez, Rosario O'Kelly, Hugo P, Daniel Perera García, Iris Perpiñá Fabra, Rubén Reyes Carrasco, Tamara Serrano Cabello and Marina Viñarás Germano.

The new team members will be: Marina Díaz, Adrián David Ferrer Cinta, Carolina Vizcaíno Serrano, Chris Alzamora Martínez, Claudia Mangas Gómez- Álvarez, Eleana Mayra Fernández Barcellona, Esly Reyes Germán, Valentina Herrera Otálvaro, Brallan Josué Ramos López, José Javier Hernández Escudero, Ana Rodríguez and Clara Isabel de Pedro Lizarazu.

What happens when you grow up with a genderless neutral language and then arrive in a country in which everything is gendered? How can we speak of identity when a language has already determined what is masculine and feminine?

This is what the young Iranian artist Sorour Darabi was faced with when s/he arrived in Montpellier to study dance. Her/his mother language, Farsi, has no masculine or feminine forms. French, on the other hand, constantly forced him/her to distinguish between male and female, even in her/his search for his/her own language of movement. Accepting a word thus became a physical test.

Darabi rebelled against this violent form of authority. Farci.e (2016) is an androgynous solo show that flirts with the boundaries of gender, language and sexuality.

Los Teatros del Canal and CA2M are working together in a programme conceived to mark out a shared working space: the body understood as in permanent construction and, accordingly, in permanent conflict. For Sorour Darabi (Shiraz, Iran), the transition of his own body triggers a radical confrontation with the social body: transgender identity uncovers the power of language over bodies, but also the power of the body to threaten the conventions of language.

Sorour Darabi is a self-taught Iranian artist who lives and works in Paris. After working in the underground network in Iran, s/he went on to study at the Centre Chorégraphique National (CCN) in Montpellier, France.

With the support of:

Co-produces

FLIC is an arts and literature festival for the whole family which is celebrating its 9th year in Barcelona, Vic and Móstoles. With its distinct marriage of art and literature, FLIC showcases a number of playful ideas that invite us to take part in unusual literary experiences, to join creative workshops, to move to the rhythm of rhymes and urban dance, to dance reading, to read dancing … and everything accompanied by a pile of books.

We will meet Emily Hughes, the author of the poster for this ninth edition of the festival and the award-winning illustration album Wild, who will lead a family workshop. We can also see La Tomasa, a show by the Brodas Bros hip-hop crew, who will reinterpret the repertoire of oral tradition with Lorcian reminiscences, dancing to the tune of Tutting, Waving, Liquid Dance, Locking, Body Percussion and Popping. Comic lovers can join the workshop by José Ja Ja Ja, an artist specialized in narrative drawings, comics and books. And La Diurna de Pere Faura invites us to dance a book in family: What would happen if we use the tools of dance to write, to describe or read the object contained in the story?

FLIC is a collaboration with Subdirección General del Libro.

More information: flicfestival.com

This activity is continuing online among all participants.

We are going to build a fort in the middle of the hall in the Children’s Home in Móstoles. For the floor we will use mattresses, for the ceiling we will hang sheets with clothes pegs and we will build walls with piles of pillows so that nobody can see what we are doing inside.

Once a month, different artists will be invited inside this space to that they can share their practices with us. The programme for The Fort will include dance, sound and projections and it will have its own set of rules: the only things allowed inside are what we like and what we don’t like have to be left outside.

FREE ENROLMENT

We invite you to bid farewell to 2019 with this exciting audiovisual event based on sound improvisation and projected images. Everything is brought together in an unreal Dada-like retrofuturist atmosphere combined with live experimentation by the multi-instrumentalist Severine Beata and the visual artist Beatriz Sánchez.

Together with Severine and Beatriz we will transform aluminium foil into thunder, pinecones into fire and tin cans into beats. Bring with you whatever you can find at home that we can use collectively to create a soundscape to accompany a series of visual games that arise from all kinds of gadgets: photos, objects, dolls, textures, engines...

Severine Beata is a multi-instrumentalist who experiments with the western concert flute, saxophone, synthesizer, drum machines, vocals... She is currently based in Andalusia, where she combines her work as a teacher with concerts and sound research.

Beatriz Sánchez is a drawing artist, performer, audiovisual creator and digital activist who works on many different levels, analysing the impact that heteronormative discourses and the information society have on us.

With the title The Films of…, we will get together to view the work of artists who use audiovisuals to speak about the here and now. There is no common theme as such between the different sessions, rather what unites them is a shared urgency to understand our surrounding world and its everyday effects on us inasmuch as inhabitants of techno-capitalism. In this proposal, there is also an intention to break away from the idea of a retrospective as the ultimate recognition of an artist’s long-standing career. The age of the artists is not important, nor the years that they have been working, nor the number of films they have made. What really interests us is that they share their working processes with us, their first and last films, their doubts and working methods.

3 FEBRUARY 17:30

The films of Jorge Suárez-Quiñones and Guillermo Pozo
With Jorge Suárez-Quiñones and Guillermo Pozo in attendance

Yohei. 63’. 2015.
Amijima. 54’ 55’’. 2016.
Gimcheoul. 97’. 2018.

Since 2014, the year they started their artistic and sentimental relationship, Jorge and Guillermo have been searching for themselves in images and in sounds. Their films are crossed journeys, their own and other people’s diaries full of repeated paragraphs and blank sheets. Guillermo’s body, always in front of the camera, is more of a container than a character, sometimes it is just a gesture, other times it is possessed by Jorge and then we have no idea who or what is speaking to us. Both of them, and also what they create, like to caress plants, wet their hands and invoke ghosts. The three feature-length films they have made to date (and this is the first time that all three can be seen together in one session), invite us to feel the form, to break the causality proper to narrative film and to find them/ourselves in the physicity of light and in phonemes.

10 FEBRUARY 18:30

The films of Mar Reykjavik
With Mar Reykjavik in attendance

My body the rules. 13’. 2017.
El Verí. 35’. 2018.
WAAITT. 15’. 2018.

The image as possibility, the pixel made flesh, stone and tree trunk. Poison. The films of Mar Reykjavik speak to us of what is not seen, of the in-between, and the power to generate new meanings by annihilating the image. She says that “poison does not kill but contemplates death in things in order to give them new meanings”. Accordingly, bodies become metallic supports and stands, and the stones emotional anchors. In her work there is a certain obsession with embodying the digital, like a desire to condense times, places and materials in search of the total image. A representation that is imitable for everybody; people, objects, animals and everything that breathes between one and the other. Sometimes her films are screened, but nearly always they move and perform themselves. This time three of them will coexist in the same space and it will be our bodies that move to view them on a path at times guided, at times suspended.

17 FEBRUARY 18:30

The films of Laura Huertas-Millán
With Laura Huertas-Millán in attendance

Laberinto. 21’. 2018.
Jenny 303. 6’. 2018.
Aequador. 19’. 2012.
Journey to a land otherwise known.23’. 2011.

Film, in uppercase, has often addressed landscape throughout the course of History, subjecting it to a romantic view and the ideology of the person recording it. Very often, almost always, the subject behind the camera is a cis, white, heterosexual and middle class man. In other words, the representation of our surroundings and of the other-place, of those spatially and culturally distant landscapes, belongs to power. It is in this framework that Laura Huertas-Millán’s films offer us some salvation. They discover for us a whole multitude of fissures in this hegemonic representational system. These cracks are material and conceptual, even temporal. Ruins and virtual architecture are some of the tools that Huertas-Millán uses to perforate History, breaking it and opening room for other systematically erased stories.

24 FEBRUARY 18:30

The films of Mario Pfeifer
With Mario Pfeifer in attendance

Untitled [“Two Guys”]. 8’. 2008.
Again. 41’ 39’’. 2018.

There is ten years between Mario Pfeifer’s first and last films. Both of them speak to us of power and representation in contemporary Europe, although the social and political turbulences that have taken place during the last decade are enough to make Pfeifer’s language necessarily more explicit, for his images to give names and surnames to the xenophobia and violence systematically exercised by the West on its frontiers, in the mass media and in refugee camps. From the political implication of their gestures, agency and reproduction, to the re-enactment and mise en scène based on real events, Pfeifer’s works analyse migratory movements and the refugee crisis in Germany with aesthetic and narrative precision, uncovering the media technologies and the necropolitics of the victors.

ENROLMENT FORM

DIDDCC invites postgraduate, master and doctorate students in Art History, Fine Arts, Humanities, Communication and Library Sciences to take part.

Since Ramón Llull and his thinking machine, Lasswitz, Borges, Carroll, Zweig, among others, have built an imaginary of the total library, an inhuman library able to embrace the whole world and memory. But, given its mere existence, every library (like any collection) also evokes its shadow: another greater library with those documents not included, or those that are lost in the apparent order.

DIDDCC is a space for study that researches into the CA2M and ARCO collections. The first course of DIDDCC focused specifically on the collection and its forms of exhibition, while the second course centred on its diffusion and communication, proposing critical strategies to investigate the ways in which collections are published. In this latest course, we wish to take a look at the archive and the library, those ramifications of the collection that provide support for its study through documents and publications. These not only create a framework for investigation, but also comprise an independent body of collection able to embrace other nuances, formats and situations in present-day creation. Under this premise, we will work with the holdings of the library, as well as how to rethink its uses and the space in which it is housed, questioning the mechanisms for its classification, visibility and display, as well as the specific problems affecting the public library specialised in contemporary art.

Underlying the creation of any public collection is not only an educational mission, but also a desire to represent a world in a specific place, to embrace and to put order on it. Representational logics are being questioned in contemporaneity, establishing a critical epistemological relationship with institutions of learning, their collections and their ways of narrating themselves. However, far from a place of clarity, the library has, in the shared imaginary, been the stage setting of mystery par excellence, somewhere between the labyrinth and the riddle. It is this questioning capacity that we wish to explore, asking ourselves what a bibliographic collection could and should be. To this end, we will step out of the museum and enter into spaces for which it might be possible to invent a new definition of the library. We will delve into large, private and strange collections in order to think about what is hiding beneath the very act of collecting. We will intervene in and construct spaces in the company of artists who have opened up room to imagine the library as physical form and a form of ordering. Together librarians / publishers / archivists will think about what is involved in the continuous rubbing shoulders of book covers, those skins that cover bodies of pages coexisting in the same place.

Participants will have access to collections of the library as well as visits to other public and private libraries, and will also take part in encounters with artists and other contemporary art agents who will provide the course with structure.