Activity

The European Forum for Advanced Practices is a platform for artists, theorists, philosophers, educators, performers, curators, urban planners, anthropologists and other cultural agents, who come together to devise a series of perceptions, analysis and propositions for the mutant field of research generated by art practices, humanities and social sciences. The self-run structure is made up by people who have worked with complex models of research, constituting an educational field of new emerging practices which responds to a need to recognise an advance that is already taking place.

Advanced Practices evince the fact that knowledge is not to be found solely in one single place or in one group of people, but rather that it is a more collaborative, granular and multiple question which has to do with the capacity to articulate problematics, to invent languages for said articulation and to come up with new forms of access. In the face of the need for global epistemologies and planetary knowledge, given the obstacles to the movement of people and access to their rights, given the global financial war and the collapse of the structures of the welfare society, this forum wishes to throw light on displacements in paradigms, to reformulate the urgencies that call for responses from multiple perspectives, to invent methodologies and to set in motion new relations between fields of knowledge.

Through various formats — dialogues, performances, performative lectures, choreographies — and with the participation of over fifty agents from more than thirty countries, supported by funding from the European program COST, this forum is the first public presentation in the world of a collective movement to transform academia and to recognise the contributions of research models coming from contemporary cultural practices.

THURSDAY 10 OCTOBER

6:00 pm. Welcome: Manuel Segade, Director of CA2M Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo

6:15 pm. Presentation: Irit Rogoff, Professor of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London
Rogoff is one of the initiators of the transdisciplinary field of Visual Cultural and founder of the department at Goldsmiths. Her initiatives to establish this new field are led by a belief that we must work beyond bodies of inherited disciplinary knowledge and find motivation for knowledge production in the current conditions we are living in. Rogoff works between academic teaching, theoretical writing, curatorial projects and organizing public study.

6:45 pm. Lecture: Maria Hlavajova, artistic director of BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht
Hlavajova is the founder and artistic director of BAK since 2000, where she develops emblematic projects of social and political transformation. Between 2008 and 2016 she was a researcher and artistic director of FORMER WEST, which she initiated and developed as an internationally collaborative research, education, publication, and exhibition project, culminating with the publication of Former West: Art and the Contemporary After 1989, co-edited with Simon Sheikh (BAK & MIT Press, 2017). Previously, she was a faculty member at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY (1998 – 2002), and director of the Soros Center for Contemporary Arts in Bratislava (1994 – 1999).

8:15 pm. Conversation: Andrea Phillips & Jesús Carrillo
Dr Andrea Phillips is BALTIC Professor and Director of the BxNU Research Institute, Northumbria University and BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art. Phillips lectures and writes about the economic and social construction of public value within the contemporary art system, the manipulation of forms of participation and the potential of forms of political, architectural and social reorganization within artistic and curatorial culture. Her forthcoming book Contemporary Art and the Production of Inequality will bring together discussions on the politics of public administration and management with recent analyses of arts institutions, alongside debates on value (public and private) informed by research into the political functions of the art market and personal experience of organizing and governing contemporary arts institutions, arts education institutions, and working directly with artists.

Jesús Carrillo, an art historian, critic and cultural manager, investigates the crossroads between contemporary art, politics and cultural institutions. Particularly noteworthy among his publications to date are the texts for the Desacuerdos project (2005-2014). He has recently published Space Invaders, on the alliances between artists, activists and communities in the fight for the urban space in Lavapiés. He is a lecturer in Art History at Universidad Autónoma de Madrid.

9:15 pm. Conversation: Sibylle Peters & Victoria Pérez Royo
Sibylle Peters is a researcher, artist and theatre director based in Hamburg where she creates and develops participative artistic research projects. She is a Doctor in Literature and Media Theory, with her area of study focused on the academic lecture as performance. In 2001 she co-founded FUNDUS THEATER / Theatre of Research in Hamburg. Her recent practice has led her to issues on the transgenerational condition of live art, performing citizenship, heterotopic research, hydrarchy and radical navigation, the art of being plural, areas of interspecies equality, creative destruction, the improbability drive and paralogistics.

Victoria Pérez Royo is a lecturer in Aesthetics and Theory of Art at the University of Zaragoza, co-director of the Master in Stage Practice and Visual Culture (UCLM, Museo Reina Sofía 2010-2019), researcher at ARTEA and guest lecturer in various international practice-based research programmes. Her three latest books are Componer el plural. Cuerpo, escena, política (2016) with Diego Agulló, Dirty Room (2017) with Juan Domínguez and Time Has Fallen Asleep in the Afternoon Sunshine (2019) with Mette Edvardsen.

10:00 pm. Performing lecture: El Drama de una realidad Sur, by Javiera de la Fuente
This proposal is an exploration of the avant-garde ritual theatre in Andalusia in the 1960s and 70s, a time which saw the beginning of a new path in theatre that continues today. The recovery of a figure from flamenco like the gypsy woman Fernanda Romero, in a place where she was nevertheless free and creative, rebellious and powerful, brings to the table the aesthetic and symbolic need for ceremony and the sacred used as dramatic and political instruments for the theatre, inherent to flamenco and the dancer Fernanda Romero. One could argue that this theatre experience made a whole collective aware of the need to gain access to a more authentic state of the individual and the collective, as a cathartic state of freedom.

A flamenco dancer and freelance researcher into undefinable theatre formats, Javiera de la Fuente cuts across various traditional and contemporary languages. Some of her works have given rise to hybrids like the theatre lecture. She works collaboratively with Pedro G. Romero in Máquinas de vivir since 2014 (Secession/Vienna, Stuttgart, MACBA) and also independently (Tabakalera, Bauhaus Desseu, Bergen Assembly, 2019)

FRIDAY 11 OCTOBER

6:00 pm. Presentation: Video conversation between Brian Massumi and Florian Schneider
Florian Schneider is a filmmaker, writer, and curator. His work investigates the border crossings between mainstream and independent media, art and activism, theory and open source technology, documentary practices and new forms of curating. Among his projects are Dictionary of War (2006 — 2010), kein mensch ist ilegal (nadie es ilegal) within the framework of the Hybrid Workspace at Documenta X (1997) and imaginary property, a research project which operates at the intersections of an ongoing propertization of images and the seemingly imaginary character of property in the age of digital production and networked distribution. Since 2014 he is Head of the Trondheim Academy of Fine Art at the Faculty of Architecture and Fine Art in the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). Since 2019 he is the chair of the COST action “European Forum for Advanced Practices”, funded by the Horizon 2020 Framework Programme of the European Union.
Brian Massumi is a Canadian political philosopher and social theorist. His research spans the fields of art, architecture, cultural studies and political theory. He received his PhD in French Literature from Yale University in 1987 and made a name for himself thanks to his translations into English of recent works in French philosophy (The Postmodern Condition, Lyotard (with Geoffrey Bennington), Noise: The Political Economy of Music, Jacques Attali and A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Deleuze and Guattari. His theories were instrumental in the affective shift in the early 2000s

6:45 pm. Lecture: El texto como Notación (experimento de escritura). Jon Mikel Euba
Jon Mikel Euba’s work is grounded in drawing as method and sculpture as program, resolved in different media. Since the late-nineties he has developed a practice guided by the need to generate personal systems of production through the development of “economic technique”. This mission, which is also a form of resistance, calls for an immersion in processes that involve other people and in which the artist operates as a kind of mediator or filter. From 2006 onwards he has been creating a series of performative-based works whose end result is condensed in a number of performances which include a didactic approach for the various participants with whom he collaborates.

In 2017 he published Writing Out Loud, a compilation of the transcriptions of eight classes he gave at DAI (Dutch Art Institute) in Arnhem, translated simultaneously from Spanish to English during the symposium Action Unites, Words Divide (On Praxis, An Unstated Theory). These texts form part of a wider project focused on writing, which Euba has been working on over the last ten years, whose goal is to define a praxis which will lead to technical theory. In this project he experiments with different strategies of distancing from writing, with the purpose of freeing himself from any subjugation to form by means of a performative approach. With his writings, Euba, from his position as an artist, proposes producing and communicating a methodology firmly situated in art practice. To this end, he starts out from a consideration of the text as Notation, as “activateable” material or a score for an action, which is later developed through the act of reading aloud in front of other people.

El texto como Notación (experimento de escritura). The longing for form generates the majority of writer’s blocks. Technically, defining writing as Notation enables one to concentrate on content without apparently taking form into account. Writing while just thinking of the effect that each sentence could provoke when translated simultaneously opens the possibility for future events that could happen in the mise en scène of the live text, affecting the very creation of the contents. The projection towards the future gives rise to form in the present.

8:15 pm. Conversation: Andrew Patrizio & Fernando García-Dory
Andrew Patrizio is Professor of Scottish Visual Culture at the School of History of Art, Edinburgh College of Art (University of Edinburgh), where he has worked since 1997. Between 1997 and 2011, he was Director of Research at Edinburgh College of Art. Before his academic career, he was a curator at the Museums of Glasgow and the Hayward Gallery in London. He teaches and writes on art after 1945, especially on Scottish issues and the environment. His latest book, The Ecological Eye: assembling an ecocritical art history (2019) was published by Manchester University Press and explores the method of art history, green politics, theories of new materialism and environmental justice. Coinciding with the launch of the book, he presented this work at a conference called Picture Ecology. Art and Ecocriticism in Planetary Perspective at Princeton University.

Fernando García-Dory’s work engages specifically with the relationship between culture and nature now, as manifested in multiple contexts, from landscape and the rural, to desires and expectations concerned with identity, crisis, utopia and the potential for social change. He studied Fine Arts and Rural Sociology, and is now preparing his PhD on Agroecology. Interested in the harmonic complexity of biological forms and processes, his work addresses connections and cooperation, from microorganisms to social systems, and from traditional art languages such as drawing to collaborative agroecological projects, actions, and cooperatives. His work has been shown in Tensta Konsthall (Stockholm), Reina Sofia Museum (Madrid), SFMOMA (San Francisco). He participated in Athens, Lisbon, Gwangju and Jeju Biennales and in Documenta 13. He is fellow of Council of Forms (Paris) and board member of the World Alliance of Nomadic Pastoralists. Since 2009 he develops INLAND, a collaborative platform and para-institution.

9:00 pm. Conversation: Inês Moreira & Ethel Baraona
Inês Moreira is a curator, editor and freelance researcher in the expanded field of architecture. She is developing postdoctoral research at NOVA/FCSH since 2016 into post-industrial cities in the Baltic and the south of Europe. She is a guest lecturer in Contemporary Culture in the School of Fine Art at Porto University and editor of Jornal Arquitectos (2015 — 2019), together with Paula Melâneo. Her curatorial work implements strategies of the production of knowledge, dissemination and spatial montage, assembling artistic, academic and institutional collaborations with core fields of production.

Ethel Baraona Pohl is an editor, critic and curator. Co-founder, with César Reyes, of dpr-barcelona, a platform for research and independent publishing in Barcelona, editor of Quaderns d’arquitectura i urbanisme from 2011 to 2016 and a member of the editorial board of the journal Volume. Her works can be found in books and architecture journals such as Open Source Architecture (Thames and Hudson, 2015), The Form of Form (Lars Muller, 2016), Together! The New Architecture of the Collective (Ruby Press, 2017), Architecture is All Over (Columbia Books of Architecture, 2017), Inéditos 2017 (La Casa Encendida, 2017) or Harvard Design Magazine, among others. Since 2016, dpr-barcelona is a member of Future Architecture, the first pan-European platform of museums, festivals and institutions dedicated to promoting architecture.

Since ten years ago the Autoplacer/Sindicalistas collective has been promoting self-published music and independent music processes. Over the last year it has carried out various activities to celebrate its tenth anniversary, which reaches its climax at CA2M Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo with the Autoplacer Festival 2019 10th Anniversary. An event not to be missed which will once again transform the museum’s exhibition halls into concert halls. Twelve hours of non-stop live music featuring ten groups and five DJ collectives who have taken part in some of the previous nine annual events, and who will be returning to meet up again with the museum, with Móstoles and with the public.

PROGRAMME

• Doors open: 12:00
• Doppeltgänger: 13:00 · Ground floor
• Alberto Acinas: 14:00 · Ground floor
• Valle Eléctrico: 14:00 · Dance floor
• Caliza: 15:00 · Ground floor
• Caballito: 16:00 · Dance floor
• Ojo Último: 17:00 · First floor
• Alarido Mongólico: 18:00 · First floor
• Abismal: 18:00 · Dance floor
• Salfumán: 18:50 · First floor
• John Grvy: 19:45 · First floor
• A_mal_gam_a: 20:00 · Dance floor
• Lorena Álvarez: 20:40 · First floor
• Juanita y Los Feos: 21:30 · First floor
• Femur: 22:00 · Dance floor
• VVV: 22:30 · First floor
• Closing time: 24:00

CONCERTS

Alarido Mongólico. Formed in 2009 this group from Galicia is back again with a purpose: to take to another level a career already dotted with viral hits and collaborations with artists like the designer David Delfín or the film director Marçal Forés.

Alberto Acinas. A stalwart of the Spanish underground scene and a standard-bearer of reinterpreted folklore from the north of Spain from a contemporary optic close to punk, Alberto Acinas is presenting his latest album, Puntiagudo, released this September, live.

Caliza. Since being short-listed for the Autoplacer competition in 2014, Caliza has recorded two albums, Medianoche/Mediodía and Mar de cristal, and performed live alongside such disparate groups as Molly Nilsson, Cate Le Bon and Ataque de Caspa.

Doppeltgänger. Duo dedicated to the cold wave, the no-wave and minimalist and instrumental synth-punk.

John Grvy. Retrofuturist crooner on the busy crossroads between R&B, electronica, neo-soul and African roots. This eclecticism is readily evinced in G R I S, his latest mixtape, with stellar collaborations from Javiera Mena, Yung Beef and Brisa Fenoy.

Juanita y Los Feos. After ten years on the go Juanita y Los Feos bid farewell to music in summer 2015 after a tour of USA and Mexico. The band, key players in Spanish new wave punk, have risen from their grave to spend one more night partying.

Lorena Álvarez. Since she won the first edition of the Autoplacer competition back in 2010, until the recent release of her fourth album, Lorena’s career has overstepped the boundaries of traditional music thanks to her boundless creative imagination.

Ojo Último. Electronic bases mixed with elements of philosophy, psychology, politics, science and mythology to unfold a psychedelic universe and open up a door to a fascinating, crazy and incredibly addictive cosmos.

Salfumán. Sandra Rapulp’s handcrafted electronic pop is back with its signature sound, oscillating between synth-pop and ambient, strongly influenced by disco, R&B and 80s sounds. Impossible to pigeonhole in a single bit.

VVV. The winners of the Autoplacer competition in 2017 are back again with their euphoric and pessimist sound, caught between synth-pop and happy hardcore, to present us with their second album.

DANCE FLOOR

Abismal. Slvj (Salvaje) is a music producer, experienced MC and DJ from Madrid, who set up the Abismal project in 2010 with the intention of fusing experimental music with the visual and performing arts.

a_mal_gam_a. Made up by Diskoan and Josephine’s Soundscapes, the group works constantly with creators and music promotors far removed from ruling canons.

Caballito. Caballito is the name under which the DJs and producers Bigote and Grita operate, pioneers in Spain of the new tropical wave. It’s also the name of their label which promotes eclecticism based on good vibes and itchy feet.

Femur. Aitor Arch, a key DJ in Madrid’s underground electronic scene, set up Femur in 2011, as a party night and a record label focused on vintage electronic sounds.

Valle Eléctrico. Valle Eléctrico started off as a platform promoting the synthesizer with an epicentre in synth-pop. His DJ set alternates new urban movements with futurist combinations of glitch-hop, dancehall, alternative R&B and uncompromising pop.

GUEST PROJECTS

Amigo Blas

Bombas para Desayunar

Buitre Ediciones

Discos El Tesoro

Editorial Supremacía. Editorial de fanzines y edits baratos con una especial predilección por la basura.

Estudio Clank

Joliet Joyas

La Integral

Lauredal

MEMENTO

turismo vérité

Wofusa

With the support of:

More information: www.autoplacer.com

SATURDAY 24 FEBRUARY. 10:00 - 14:00 & 15:00 - 19:00

SUNDAY 25 FEBRUARY. 10:00 - 14:00

Sweet Fever is a choreographic proposal by the artist Pere Faura, based on the iconic movie Saturday Night Fever. It will be a choral piece in loop in which prolonged repetition shifts between faithful execution, modification, deformation and complete disfiguration while, at the same time, it will strike up a dialogue with other theatrical elements like video, music and lighting, which re-signify this iconic choreography.

Potential participants are invited to enrol in this workshop, which will be run by Faura himself. The end result will form part of the Sweet Fever experience, the piece that will bring the third edition of the “El cine rev[b]elado” season to a close on Sunday 25 February.

Aimed at all those interested in dance, the body and performance. The group of collaborators will include between 15 and 20 people. Don’t forget to bring sports shoes.

Curated by escuelita with David Bestué

With the participation of: Manuel Asín, Ángel Bados, David Bestué, Rubén Grilo, María Langarita and Víctor Navarro, Mario Montalbetti, Julia Morandeira, Lucia C. Pino, Manuel Segade, and others to be confirmed.

What does worlding the world mean? Worlding, in short, refers to practices that interlace materiality and semiotics, in which the subject and ground are fused in a continuous weft. It is a noun turned into a verb, to underscore that it is an active (ontological) process; that, rather than a mental figure, it is a relentless form of embodied production. In addition it is also a proposal based on our gesture of basely translating the English neologism ‘worlding’ into Spanish as ‘mundanizar’, thus invoking the gestures of a familiar, modest, mundane form of doing. An invitation to imagine possible forms of addressing the world familiarly.

As opposed to the uncontrolled dematerialisation of the digital image and its violent consequences explored in the previous edition, the working space of this year’s Image Symposium is the rematerialisation of visual thinking: today, the urgency is the adscription to practices that make a world. Practices that promiscuously explore the spectrum of disciplines and redefine the visual in its overflows, understanding that every encounter implies connection and intersection, and therefore, paying special attention to its forms of articulating the world. Donna Haraway summed it up as follows in her Staying with the Trouble: “It matters what matters we use to think other matters; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what descriptions describe descriptions, what ties tie ties. It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories.”

Bearing this in mind, this symposium wishes to inspire new ways of naming that are also ways of doing: ways of worlding the world that are already happening and for which we could reconstruct a selective tradition that outlines them in a genealogy situated in the contemporary space of cultural production in Spain. Today the conventional visual image is exceeded, not by its sign, as happened in the eighties, but by the disappearance of the image in various forms of baroque embodied excess. This semiotic and textual excess has led in recent decades to an excess of form (as palpable, for instance, in the deconstructive architectural movement) which, at once, has led to writers, artists and architects shifting their interest to aspects that re-connect with the details and the material proper to each way of doing: the poet Mario Montalbetti defines poetry as a context of resistance against the visual, the sculptor Lucía C. Pino defends the wide range of (physical, symbolic, political, narrative, speculative and other) connotations housed in the specific use of materials, and architects like Langarita and Navarro work with temporal notions when they distinguish between Bust and Pelt.

Following these positions, these three days will be a space for encounter and intersection between various forms of production that counteract the overwhelming virtuality and reproduction of images today. Instead, they propose thinking about their articulations in presence, in their forms of being and making worlds, and so give them back a specifically worldly language, flesh and place.

The IMAGE SYMPOSIUM is a programme dedicated to collective reflection on the theory and practice of visual cultures which is celebrating its first 25 years in 2018. It takes place over three days within the framework of a forum of debate, comprising a symposium and an open call for projects. The three thematically defined and interconnected days include a visit to the urban residues management plant in Valdemingómez.

LECTURES

THURSDAY 18 OCTOBER 17:00 - 20:30. Seeing / Saying World. It is generally accepted that our perception of reality is shaped by language and how it is used and produced. Investigating the potential of creating signifieds and articulating their signifiers —their concretion, phase-lags, knots— therefore involves forms of making worlds. The first day of the symposium examines the relationships woven by language—and more specifically the language of poetry—with visuality and contemporary art, with the purpose of exploring the ways in which the notions and strategies applied by linguists and poets can be implemented within the field of art.

17:00 Introduction to XXV Image Symposium by Julia Morandeira and Manuel Segade

17: 30 David Bestué. Give Meaning. In this lecture I wish to look at the relationships between matter and language through my own works and through references to the work of poets, linguists, artists and architects. The point of departure is the need of each era to construct meaning and the difficulty today of working with the symbolic, which has lost value to the utilitarian. During this process, language has become too pragmatic and instrumental and the word has lost ambiguity. This situation excited my interest in working with the idea of matter, over and above form. Matter is always in motion: when History moves on, when the original use of an object is no longer known, the matter remains, like an anchor to the present. I like this quality because it represents a triumph of the concrete and specific over the abstract in a time like the present, in which there is an increasing investment in virtuality and a growing degradation of the concept of reality.

David Bestué is an artist and curator of the XXV Image Symposium. As an artist he has exhibited his work in Realismo, at La Capella (Barcelona, 2014), La España Moderna in García Galería (Madrid, 2015) and ROSI AMOR, at Museo Reina Sofía (Madrid, 2017), among others. He has penned a book on Enric Miralles (Enric Miralles a izquierda y derecha, 2010) and on the recent history of architecture and engineering in Spain (Formalismo Puro, 2011 and Historia de la fuerza, 2017).

18:30 Mario Montalbetti. The Limit of the Poem. What I wish to consider in this lecture is the radical gap between saying and seeing. For reasons I will explain during my lecture, I will confine my scope to the poem. The main idea is the following: the limit of the poem is not the unsayable, because, after all, the unsayable is part of the sayable. We are always saying what cannot be said, as if the unsayable were a parasite which is too small to be seen through the lens of language —but which “is there” nonetheless. Nor is silence a limit because silence is also an invention of what we say; silence always follows a having-said. The thesis then is that the limit of the poem, the limit of the sayable, it not the unsayable but the visible in an absolute sense. And that is possible if we accept the radical blindness of the poem.

Mario Montalbetti is Professor of Linguistics at Pontificia Universidad Católica del Peru. His poetry has been complied in Lejos de mí decirles (Aldus, Mexico 2013). His recent publications include an essay on Blanca Varela, El más crudo invierno (FCE, Lima 2016) and the collection of poems Notas para un seminario sobre Foucault (FCE, Lima 2018).

19:30 Debate moderated by Manuel Asín. Manuel Asín is the coordinator of the film department at Círculo de Bellas Artes de Madrid and is a programmer for MNCARS, CCCB, SEFF, etc. He has published articles in Trafic, Concreta and Caimán, and he sits on the editorial board of this last-named journal. He has co-authored Desde Shakespeare (Calambur, 2017) with José Antonio Escrig and he ran the Intermedio publishers from 2010 to 2015. He also lectures at EQZE (Tabakalera, San Sebastián) and the Master LAV (Madrid).

FRIDAY 19 OCTOBER 12:00 - 14:00 & 17:00 - 20:30. Neo-baroque, neobarroso, neobarroso. The second day of the Image Symposium focuses on excess —material, formal, textual and in meaning— from a historical perspective, through a visit to the municipal waste management centre and two specific case studies. The first is the concept of Neo-Baroque, championed in art practice and art history during the nineties by authors like Severo Sarduy, José Luis Brea and Néstor Perlongher, among others. The second is the Deconstructivism architecture movement, derived largely from the impact of the work of the philosopher Jacques Derrida in the eighties, which gave rise to a purely formalist and spectacular style. Both cases demonstrate how positions underpinned by philosophical and political approaches—the result of epochal complexity—end up igniting texts, works and constructions.

12:00 Visit to the Valdemingómez Technology Park. The Las Dehesas waste treatment centre at the Valdemingómez technology park, designed by the Ábalos y Herreros architects studio between 1996 and 2000, is the place where urban waste from Madrid is sorted and processed. The visit wishes to question how we can compost an art practice and a future from the destruction and management of the abundance of waste material produced in the present.

The visit will last two hours, from 12:00 to 14:00. As the plant is not accessible by public transport, a bus will be available for participants who have signed up beforehand, which will leave CA2M at 11:15.

17:00 Critical session with Lucía Jalón. Learning to navigate the underground, playing with darkness. Trial and error towards a new architectural image.

18:00 Manuel Segade. After the Empty Ceremony, After so much Death. In the eighties, the geopolitical South introduced a thinking that defended the Neo-baroque as an exuberance of the sign speaking of itself, as a modality of excess that threatened conventional symbolic orders. Thinkers like Néstor Perlongher (Argentina) or Severo Sarduy (Cuba) and artists like Pepe Espaliú (Spain), wrote in a race against time while the AIDS crisis advanced all around them. If contemporary art is a selective tradition, the present must be inscribed in a genealogical guideline for which there are words that have not been handed down to us: an eminently baroque work of mourning with which to understand art practices as an unstoppable epidemic, as a space of proliferation of signs in bodies, and vice versa.

Manuel Segade is the director of CA2M and curator of the XXV Image Symposium. His doctoral research focused on a revision of theatricality and allegorical linguistic structures in 1980s sculpture through the work of Juan Muñoz. Since 1998 he has been working with fragments of a cultural history of late-nineteenth century aesthetic practices, centred on the production of somatic and sexualised subjectivity (Narciso fin de siglo, Melusina, 2008). His latest projects explore gestural approaches to curating and other forms of discursive distribution.

19:00 Session to be confirmed

20:00 Debate moderated by David Bestué and Julia Morandeira

SATURDAY 20 OCTOBER 11:00 - 14.30. Making Object. Addressed from art practice and from a speculative yearning, the third and final day of the Image Symposium poses questions on how the image makes worlds through art. For some time now many artists have been working with a mundane and colloquial practice, counteracting spectacularisation through an affective, subjective and critical making. Here we will propose a rethinking of the object and the making of the object, a conversation on and from sculpture, understood as presence more than as image and which introduces discursive tools associated with linguistics and matter.

11:00 Critical session with Delas

12:00 Ángel Bados in conversation with Lucía C. Pino and Rubén Grilo. Ángel Bados, (let me do it) …… Perhaps it might be enough to distinguish the phenomenal quality of the countenances of the digital, which, after all, sustain our gaze, from those other images that, while affecting us corporally, manage to connect us symbolically with what refuses to be said. But it is not easy.

Even knowing the fascinating power of some countenances, and even if art production that was not matter-based were unthinkable, because the very active edification of our representations depends on it, our everyday work shows us that matter is more silent and opaque, and outside of meaning. And that it undermines structure. This means that the closure of meaning becomes highly improbable, unless we admit that, alongside an effort at saying the right thing, there is a parallel yearning for gratification. And it would be precisely there, in the intersection of the course of signification with the flow of desire—which “is without object”–where, perhaps, what is beyond meaning can knot itself as an effect of creation and of poetry.

Ángel Bados has had recent solo exhibitions at Galería Moisés Pérez de Albéniz, Madrid, in 2013, and at Carreras Múgica, Bilbao, in 2017. He is currently exhibiting work in the group show El Otro soy yo, at Koldo Mitxelena in San Sebastián. In 2017 he took part in the symposium Pensar en arte. Lo educativo como síntoma, held at the Azkuna centre in Bilbao. In June 2018 he took part in L’occasione with the slogan “Hecho con las manos”.

Lucía C. Pino, an assemblage is not a fissureless whole

1. an assemblage is not a fissureless whole
2. an assemblage is not just the sum of its parts
3. assemblages cannot be updated
4. assemblages fluctuate around attractors
5. assemblages are not firmly grounded on attractors
6. an assemblage can be a sculpture
7. the specific cryptic of the sculpture is the rehearsal of an enigma
8. an enigma can contain desire, desire is an assemblage
9. an assemblage can be a relationship
10. a sculpture can be an assemblage that can be prosthesis, which can be a moment of suspension which is an enigma.

One of my aspirations is to evince how, as humans, we are witnessing, among other phenomena, a loss of communicational or relational sensibility with otherhood as a result of textual and formal linguistic excess (and also in terms of artificial construction, including programming languages, images and big data). What I wish to invoke here with sculpture is to underscore that the relationship between matter, economy, politics, desire and critical theory is not a metaphor, analogy or exemplification. This praxis helps me to study and rehearse possible scenarios. I intuit which direction to take, one that passes through fields of learning which are often remote from me.

For me sculpture is an activity that can be understood as the place of a specific negotiation between many variables that arise in a geometric locus.

Lucía C. Pino has exhibited her work at, among others, CCCC in Valencia; at Espai 13 Fundació Miró, ASM, Ana Mas Projects, Et-hall, Galería dels Angels, MACBA and Casa Asia in Barcelona; Filmoteca Regional de Murcia Francisco Rabal; Pragda Big Screen Project, New York; Larraskito, Bilbao; Galeria Aulenti Triennale, Milan; and D/ART/ Sydney.

Rubén Grilo, Untitled. A talk on epic-free sculpture, Makitart, recybernetic, Dearest GearBest, strong poetry, representational solitude, pre-communication, prerange, RTFMtwice-ism, pretrance, infraoriginality, neo-exclusivity, infrartisan, indoor theory, algorithmic liberalism, refractory proletariat, anarcho-cynicism, environmental violence, software-driven realism, recycled violence, soft recognition, managerial figuration, managerial realism, horizontal class, low-fiction, filtrism, pseudoacceptance, commonism, prop-philosophy, anarcho-artisan, de-intentioned display, personal-tainment, studiocore, competitive poetry, critical gentrification, visual-lepsy, infrasubjects, allegorical standardisation, autoecology, networked nature, algorithmic leisure, radical gimmick, functional alienation, climatic postmodernism, cynical mechanism, mechanic cynicism, high originality, time-based conceptualism, Top-Part Art (TPA), beige art, handmade-core, downloadable wars, climatic alienation, conceptual unicity, conceptualism, democratic standardisation, infraexclusivity, sensory authorship, expressive labour, anticreativity, multicultural industrialism, narrative standardisation, LAB TURN, free reality, sustainable-core, multi-ecology, poor Pop Art, alter-simulacra, emotional unity, paradoxical-tainment, parafiguration, pseudomaterialism, weak unity, silent politics, merge-core, corporate poetry, antimechanisms, drone empowerment, para-authorship, expressive unicity, etc.

Rubén Grilo studied at University of Barcelona and at Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam. He has exhibited at Fundació Joan Miró (Barcelona), Nogueras Blanchard (Madrid), Hildesheim Kunstverein, V4ULT (Berlin), Union Pacific (London), CIRCA Projects (Newcastle upon Tyne), 1646 (The Hague), Supplement (London), Wilfried Lentz (Rotterdam) and MARCO (Vigo), among others.

13.30 Debate moderated by Julia Morandeira
Julia Morandeira is a researcher and curator of XXV Image Symposium. She co-directs La Escuelita at CA2M together with Manuel Segade and is a mediator in the ConComitentes project funded by Fundación Daniel y Nina Carasso in Spain. Her practice revolves around long-term curatorial projects such as Canibalia; Be careful with each other, so we can be dangerous together; Nothing is true, everything is alive; and Estudios de la Noche.

Las JORNADAS DE ESTUDIO LA IMAGEN es un programa dedicado a la reflexión colectiva en torno a la teoría y la práctica de las culturas visuales. Se desarrolla durante tres días en una estructura de foro de debate, compuesta por un seminario, talleres y una convocatoria pública de proyectos. Esta edición se estructura a través de tres jornadas (Ver / decir mundo; Neobarroco, neobarroso, neoborroso; Hacer objeto) definidas temáticamente e interconectadas entre sí. En continuidad con la propuesta, los comisarios han diseñado un dispositivo a partir de obras de la colección del CA2M y elementos expositivos del centro, buscando que encarne y resuene con los debates que aloje. También, han editado una publicación online que recoge textos claves en relación a las cuestiones que el simposio aborda, con el fin de amplificarlas.

6:00 pm Screening of the film Las tres eras de la imagen
7:00 pm Presentation and conversation

3_Eras, the only text by José Luis Brea that had not been published until now, consists of a script which came about from the film version of the book Las tres eras de la imagen. The film by María Virginia Jaua and José Luis Brea includes sound and visual images, and the participation of the author and some philosophers like Jean-Luc Nancy and Jacques Rancière. It is an essayistic work in two senses: firstly, an essay of thought, written and spoken ideas; secondly, an essay on the form that these same elements take on the screen. This book and this film, to which the Spanish theorist dedicated the final years of his life, are also a tribute to his memory almost a decade after his passing.

The ideas and reflections that José Luis Brea developed are still valid today, and some of his ideas are surprisingly visionary. The result is a singular text within the theoretical output on visuality in Spanish, inviting us to adopt an emancipatory stance implicit in the act of the historical undertaking to recover what has remained latent as an unfulfilled promise; not because it is utopian or untimely, but because it is always on the verge of announcing its arrival, marking the yearned-for moment of a new starting point...

The project for this book came about thanks to the joint work of Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo from Móstoles and the Chilean publishers Metales Pesados. This conjunction of interests vouches for the importance that José Luis Brea’s work had and indeed continues to have for Spanish readers and the positive critical reception his books and thinking have enjoyed.

CA2M is carrying out a project to support the publication of previously unpublished theory and artist books in Madrid, and to this end it is collaborating with different publishing houses.

ENROLMENT COMPLETED

Moderated by Eva Garrido and Marta van Tartwijk

We avoid touching, fluids and drops of saliva. We cover our mouth, our nose and hands. Our reading group over the last few years has explored the oddities of the body and queer bodies. Now that reality is like science fiction, we will turn our attention to the aliens, vampires and bearded women which we have met along the way.

Last year, Birds Fuck in the Air endeavoured to address and think about the different textures of desire and its strange manifestations. Given the unforeseen imposition of the prohibition of touching, a distance was established that nonetheless could perhaps increase the idea of eroticism. And how lovers start to write to each other. We write a lot. Even distances become elastic and we can feel something touching us, that words and tongues walk all over us.

The task of writing, like desire, is perhaps always an unfinished task. One writes to continue writing. The stroller, by definition, is not going anywhere in particular, but is driven by the mere desire to walk. Going nowhere in order to maybe eventually arrive somewhere.

Among our desires as a group, this year we wish to recover one, to read a single book. Perhaps it is the right moment to think together about distances and the potential of strolling. This motor action of putting one step forward and then the other, to take our bodies to different places, opens up a horizon of possibilities and readings to discover the world through the body and the body through the world.

Imparted by: Marta van Tartwijk.

There is a desert
immense
at the back of our
retinas
we see nothing
nothing
unless it is
his disguise
the distant confused whisper
in an unknown language

It has happened to us all. That feeling, though short-lived, is very beautiful: you are with your friends and you play a song that you love, you read an excerpt from one of your favourite books, or you want to share a photograph that has meant something to you for many years. You feel that desire to share the delight of an obsession, to share its magnetism.

This project arose from exploring an obsession that morphed over time and that many people throughout history have experienced. We are referring to invisibility. Where does it come from? How can we become invisible, manage to vanish – dissolve – to not be seen or detected?

This will be the starting point from which, together, we will explore different notions that, precisely, do not fit purely within the physical realm. Voice, a whisper, breath. Their rhythms. Magic and escapism. Leaping into the unknown. Camouflaging ourselves in the night. Accepting the risk of listening to our intuitions. Other ways of being close, although these – apparently – are invisible.

Project developed by the artist Raquel G. Ibañez

Manuel Polo and Jesús Macías are the stars of Todo lo contrario. These ninety-somethings are what you could call film buffs, although unknowingly, because they would never think in those terms, but they use scenes from films to show us what they are thinking or they flesh out ordinary memories with movie memories. They lived during that time and in that world when cinema, the only art form that has been genuinely popular, had an all-pervasive presence; you worked, ate, slept, went to the cinema, just one more thing in the everyday flow of life. This programme came about from a meeting between them and a voluntary film buff, someone who started out at the end of that time and of that world.

Following many conversations and films that the involuntary and voluntary film buffs mentioned and noted, respectively, it was whittled down to six. Manolo’s and Jesús’s tastes are filtered through another taste. Six examples of the talent accumulated in Hollywood during the golden age of the big studios. Six seminal movies, six true works of art and sources of aesthetic (and ethical) pleasure. Six ethical and (aesthetic) hypotheses whose characters mutate, with the torment and pain and excitement of change; they find out who they are and discover their inner desires through chance meetings, reunions, disagreements. And Manolo and Jesús, who saw them, perhaps get to discover something about themselves and about others through them, recognising themselves in them. And perhaps we will too.

The titles already give us a clue to the (dramatic) weight that falls on women, dealing with their adventures and their freedom. After Captains Courageous we could ask ourselves “How can you grow up without losing your childhood?” and answer, thanks to It Happened One Night and The Awful Truth, “by letting fantasies of love lead to companionship, seriousness to improvisation, humour and fun”. But you can still hear a voice saying: “Yes, ok, but… What happens if we are women light years away from the standard, or if certain relationships place us in danger?” That’s where the queen, the pirate and the voyager have something to say.

Passing on this experience, at once intimate and shared, digging up those dead who are still very much alive in the minds of non-experts, helps to understand the overwhelming influence and presence of cinema, when it offered an opportunity for sentient learning every day, a gift for the eyes everyday for everyone. Every week, Jesús, a hairdresser since he was practically a boy, would go through the programme and choose the movies he was going to see, without bothering to take into account how near or how far away the cinema was from his home-hairdresser’s: “Whether it was in Tetuán or Vallecas, it didn’t matter, I went anyway. All cinemas were for me”.

CALL CLOSED

Artistas en residencia is a programme organised jointly by La Casa Encendida, CA2M Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo and, from 2020, MACBA, whose goal is to support creation and experimentation focused on performative work with the body. The programme is conceived to dovetail with the regular programme of LCE, CA2M and MACBA, and for this reason the projects chosen are those that best fit in with the art centres’ lines of research and experimentation. Artists in Residence also provides an opportunity to strike up a dialogue between creators and other agents associated with the art centres and their respective programmes.

This year the call received a total of 381 projects. We would like to thank all applicants for their interest in the call and for sending us their projects. The artists selected for the Artists in Residence 2020 programme are:

- PABLO ARAYA QUIROS: VENENO (trash)atlán(tica)

- CLARA BEST: Musuq Kawsay Tusuy Pacha / El nuevo tiempo de vivir bailando

- LUZ BROTO: Duplicar órdenes

- JACOBO CAYETANO GARCÍA FOUZ: LAS COSAS

- CLARA GARCÍA FRAILE: El Tiempo de la Revolución

- DAMIÁN MONTESDEOCA Y AMAIA BONO: La repetición

- SOFÍA MONTENEGRO: Relámpago: Agitar con Fuerza

- AMARANTA VELARDE: Estancias Acústicas

- INICIATIVA SEXUAL FEMENINA: La mártir Felicitas

Due to the large number of projects we received, we are not able to reply to all applicants who presented projects to the call, but we wish to thank each and every one for their participation.

The 8-week residency is divided between two of the three sites: La Casa Encendida, CA2M and MACBA. The times and work spaces shall be agreed in function of the needs of the project and the availability of space at the respective art centres.

For more information, write to actividades.ca2m@madrid.org, lacasaencendida@montemadrid.es, programespublics@macba.cat with the subject Artists in Residence 2020.

With the support of

At the beginning of 2020 we will be opening the exhibition Absurd Humour: A Constellation of Folly in Spain and, similarly to other occasions, we have invited an artist to prepare what we call a Positioned Visit. This time Alba Rihe has created an audio-guide that will take us on a trip through the exhibition, with what could be considered a soundtrack which is a kind of pastiche, a chimera of voices, a word whispered in your ear that caresses the eardrum and which we hope will make us break out in hysterical laughter in the exhibition hall.

The audio-guides are available free of charge at the museum reception desk during the course of the exhibition. You can also listen the audio on Soundcloud or download in your devices here: