16 exhibitions in Barcelona
What We See Is What We Know
Golden Spike
It all Leads to the Same Place
Nacer en el vacío
Lividity
PIN-ANIMA
Cloud Head
Rewilding Memories
Coddiwomple
Liminal
Share, Tag or Dye Again
Diario de un viaje
The climate and ecological crisis is the central issue of our time. Our collective response to it will define the ability of future generations to live and thrive on this planet. How should photographers respond to this crisis? The landscapes that we delight in and often make images of are being altered by our wastefulness and our over-consumption. I invite visitors to this exhibition to consider their relationship with both materials and landscapes.
The cameras and images I make evoke the landscape in which they are created, using materials that are to hand. Often these are waste materials brought ashore by Atlantic storms on the west coast of Scotland. Central to this work is a consideration for what happens to materials when the objects that they create are no longer needed.
My images are neither of the object, nor the landscape, but instead address the way in which one becomes the other. Materials are combined as they are in the landscape around us. What is natural and what is human-made is not easily unpicked.
International Experimentation
Residency
Collective processes
SʘLARES LANDSCAPES ɸ 41ºN
As the climate disaster rages on, our focus still lies above ground. Lividity comes at a time the ocean needs to be given greater visibility. The work uses archives in collaboration with technology and hybrid techniques to reimagine an ocean floor that is already dead. The work uses experimental practices to investigate the reality of what is happening to our liquid ecosystems alongside speculation as to the future of these spaces. Lividity uses process led photography to create a new environment from this fragmented study of deceased endangered and fictional ocean bodies. The work examines how processes can lead thoughts and ideas to be realised through images. It is not only about how we make images but what those choices come to represent and how we can use this to highlight change.
The word “Coddiwomple” is an informal verb that means “to travel in a purposeful manner towards a vague destination”. This site-specific photographic work embodies this term as I make weekly prints of original silver gelatin chemigrams, lumens, and cyanolumens. I aim to be playful -- I choose to respond to my immediate environment and emotions at the time, to put unpolished whims on display, and work at regular intervals to break past habits of creating mental roadblocks which result in artistic stagnation. This work is the embodiment of a journey and a practice, with a future unwritten.
International Residence of Experimentation EXP-IEFC - Collective process
The residence seeks to generate a small horizontal community of collaborative learning, where each one, every day, teaches in a theoretical-practical workshop, an experimental technique and their way of working to their fellow residents, emphasizing the mixture of techniques, in the message and collaborative work. The participants in this first edition are, in alphabetical order: Ana Mundim (Brazil), Dany Vigil (El Salvador - Czech Republic), Ezequiel Lovrovich (Argentina), Gonzalo Rostán (Uruguay), Gul Cevikoglu (United States - Turkey), Lexy Liangzi Xiao (Norway - China), Lucía Calabrino (Argentina), Scarlet Galicia García (Mexico) and Stephen Takacs (United States). A community where embroidery, large-format instant photography, family archives, sewing, cyanotypes, chromoskedasic painting, slide projection, virtual reality, images created with earth, and photochoreography can coexist and discuss.
As we have ten days to work, we did not want to make an exhibition of completed works or finished projects, we understand that this is a starting point for learning, research and collaboration. That is why what you are seeing here is a work-in-progress exhibition, taking Paul Valéry and his First Lecture from 1937 as a reference, in which he proposed the term poïétique to refer to “the study, not of the finished work, but of its production” and conditions of realization”.
Ausstellungseröffnung Manifest
This manifesto does not try to define, put up barriers or create a new dogma.This manifesto wants to express in words what a series of people think about an artistic form that makes us be who we are. Today the arts exist in isolation, from which they can be rescued only through the conscious, cooperative effort of all craftsmen. Architects, painters, photographers and sculptors must recognize anew the composite character of a building both as an entity and in its separate parts.
The old schools of art were unable to produce this unity; how could they, since art cannot be taught. They must be merged once more with the workshop. Experimenting is experience, it is life and it is gesture, it is non conformity. Architects, sculptors, painters, photographers, we all must return to the crafts! There is no essential difference between the artist and the craftsman. The artist is an exalted craftsman. In rare moments of inspiration, transcending the consciousness of his will, the grace of heaven may cause his work to blossom into art. But proficiency in a craft is essential to every artist. This is not just chance and luck, there is also a lot of conscious work because revolutionary experimentation is born by practicing, working, and exercising the technique and also the creativity.
We don’t talk about an aesthetic or a technique or an artistic trend, we talk about an attitude. Together let us desire, conceive, and create the new structure of the future, which will embrace architecture and sculpture and painting and experimental photography in one unity. The experimental is a shared future to the extent that it’s not selfishness, it is a shared construction. Experimental photography is a common language for all of us who believe that photography makes sense in its peripheries.
Walter Gropius, “Bauhaus Manifesto and Program” (1919)
& Experimental, “An experimental photography MANIFESTO” (2020)
Curators @arantxa.art and @astridjacomme
In the Anthropocene, called the new geological age, man rises above everything, takes control of the environment, exploits raw materials, while maintaining the appearance of freedom, continuing modern-day slavery. Golden Spike based on the narrative of the "post-Anthropocene" aims to point out, in addition to the fact of climate change and global environmental damage, a capitalist, colonialist attitude that has been repeated countless times throughout our history but is also taking place in our present. The work thus presents a post-human way of seeing, where it represents the aesthetics of post-colonial collapse through the critique of the gaze that has become a machine. In this way the critique of the writing of history and science is formulated, we delve into the deep layers in search of an explanation, while superficial problems have long exceeded the horizon of our solution possibilities.
PIN-ANIMA is a show of my experiments with multi-lens cameras inspired by the experiences of 19th-century pioneers of chronophotography: E. Muybridge and E. Marey. It is also a show of the cameras themselves as objects and flipbooks created on the basis of a series of photographs. Such cameras have many interesting possibilities. These primitive devices that I use for photography can create images that turn into short film sequences. A pinhole camera with one lens creates an ordinary timelapse, but thanks to the use of solarigraphy, this animation can show unusual passages of time. It is not only an animation in time, but thanks to the appropriate construction of the device, it is also a journey in space. I am currently looking for a new path, experimenting with camera sizes, animation speeds and direct positive techniques.
Liminal wants to prove that nothing is fixed. Everything is destined to be destroyed or disappear. Each image tells this reality, this truth. Using a chemical photographic process that allows the gelatin to be lifted off, moved and recomposed on the paper, I try to interpret the dramatic metamorphosis of a world in images. Pure faces decompose, bodies are eaten away and sucked up by nature, young silhouettes disappear, translucent and fragile. Through touches of light, however, the image reveals a glimmer of hope and optimism. But I don’t deny that there is a certain provocation in my approach... that of blurring lines... of creating uncertainty, doubt, confusion, discomfort. Even if my series are often different, in the way they are rendered or in their experimental approach, that red thread of doubt is always present. So ultimately, maybe my work delivers that universal message that we are never sure of anything... that the truth belongs to nobody. In any case, there is the desire to provoke philosophical reflection. Or – why not – to create a philosophical sensation, a little bit of existential vertigo.
It all leads to the same place explores the idea of the body in its multiple manifestations of identity and materiality. This exhibition delves into the concept of ‘oneness’ using ideas and materials that lead back to the site of the human body. The works exhibited took inspiration from different formats of contemporary image-making interfaces that are increasingly defining our everyday experiences. The exhibition is composed of three series: the Tetris, This poem is about me and (Un)affectionate objects of belonging. The Tetris series the photographs take the shape and form of Tetris blocks, thereby exploring notions of identity and self-image. I was prompted by the coexistence of multiple virtual personalities, the idea of who I am and who I present to the world, among other things. This poem is about me is an expression of how the self-became a sacred space for me during the coronavirus pandemic. “The fragility of one’s mental space and the burden of overwhelming thoughts are some of the ideas explored in this work, using materials like stones, hair strands, rose petals and photographs of an eye”. (Un)affectionate objects of belonging translate the idea of paradox using found/feminine objects while also pushing the boundaries of how the medium of photography is perceived. It is interesting to see how three different mediums dealing with similar concepts/ideas come together without invading each other's individuality while adding multiple dimensions to it. After all, it all leads to the same place.
At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, I began a series using Self-Portrait as a tool to investigate my mental state. I was diagnosed with PTSD and started recording my days on Polaroids through Emulsion Lifts. I had the impetus to transform the image with my own hands. If I don't like an idea, why don't I like it? And if I deconstruct it whole, what does it become? The result has been therapeutic. Hybrid Photography is a revolution as it appears at a personal, intimate moment of usually pain and discomfort and naturally evolves into a healing place. Through alchemy, I can create a map of my mind since the colours, textures, stains, the decay of an image, each element and support to which I transfer the work to reflect a little about how I find myself at the moment. My creations are photographs that are constantly being born and dying, physically changing themselves. The focus of my work is to continue using the body and mind as tools, bridges of inspiration to interpret and translate into images the crossing of the fields of Psychology and Photography. Deconstruction to Reconstruction.
Share, Tag or Dye Again is a program-context for coagulating the dialogue between Romanian and international artists, other cultural agents and the general public, through a hybrid online and offline structure, involving both professional and non-professional audiences. Amateur, along with the general public. Do you sometimes feel that the time you spend on social media promoting your work is much longer than the time you spend on your actual work, and yet your work is still not seen? We question the role of social networks in our daily lives, using cyanotype, a photographic technique that is almost two centuries old. We put together a big batch of contributions that will come together to culminate in an installation.
These walls try to contain a process of collective creation, between the white cube and the wall, but there is no possible representation or adaptation. There is a limit, it overflow. To play with (against) photography, you have to step on it, you have to desacralize it. It is a ruin, it is a decaying object, it is a fiction. The students from all over the world of the Ágora project mentorship course, school of experimentation, have spent several months making proposals for this specific space. It is impossible. As we play against the apparatus, the photographic system of which we are now aware, Jouer contre des expositions speaks of the need to question the exhibition system. That is what we have tried.
Family archives and oral histories - from their gaps and wounds - become memories that can be healed through an experimental, affective and ancestral photographic process, which integrates life-death-life cycles.
Nacer en el Vácio is a research-experimentation-healing work, in which I carried out a process of memory reconstruction, inquiring about the archives and oral stories of the family. This personal process began in 2019 with the discovery of a wound caused by the tragic death of my uncle Carlos.
My mother scheduled the caesarean section of my birth to coincide with the day my uncle died. My parents had held onto the pain and wanted it to live on through me. Thus, this family secret was revealed little by little.
The plastic and audiovisual work is charged with an urgency to heal the roots, for this reason, I experimented with layers that the work gradually revealed to me. The organic and fluid memory merges between photographs and performative actions. I transferred the portraits to the stones; I painted the body of my son and mine as in the ancestral rituals; I carried out the burial and unearthing of my uncle Carlos through his passport photo; and I wrote with roots a fragment of my grandfather's poem. I try to return to the origin to promote a transformation towards life and acceptance.
This encounter with memories made me reflect on the meaning of family, life and death at a collective level. A structure in which the living and the dead are linked to transit love and pain.
Memories evolve, transmute, and reimagine. Photography, thanks to its incarnation in different materialities, is capable of translating them from various symbolic and sensory spheres.
Based on this premise, the artist presents us with two exercises centered around her family's memory. Firstly, "Tautology of the Horizon" showcases a collection of 8 photographic pieces derived from the same source material but manifested in different mediums. While the repetition of the identical image signifies the recurring and nostalgic act of recalling a specific place, the diverse artistic approaches convey various sensations that shape this memory over time, constructing the overall puzzle of remembrance.
Secondly, through "Paloma y Cristóbal," the number of post-it notes, their fragility, and their symbolism as reminders serve as a reminder of the countless times the author encountered an image in her daily life. This work explores how such encounters inhabit and persist in her memory, despite not having experienced the depicted moment firsthand, highlighting the vulnerability of memories as time passes.
As a result, "Rewilding Memories" represents specific personal memories of the artist, fostering a sensory and organic dialogue with photography. Through this, it invites us to connect with our own experiences of remembering.
My name is David. Diario de un viaje is the chronicle of the journey, a vital path that begins the moment we decide to start a family. A path in which, since the children arrived, life as a couple has been completely devastated and erased from the map as if a meteorite had fallen on a territory invaded and recolonized by them. In this context, of constant and increasing intensity, parenting, with the pandemic involved, has sometimes been an earthquake, where the friction between siblings and between us has put us on the brink of the abyss on several occasions. These emotional upheavals, while pushing us over the edge, have made us find ways to transcend them and find the harmony and peace we need to continue being a family. In the end, it wasn't about changing things, it was about changing ourselves, be it your partner or a child. And there, nature arose, the earth as relief, as an escape valve where internal tensions can be loosened and find the necessary silence for everything to rest. And in that calm is when I see how each of my children is taking part in this life, following their own path. It is then when I vibrate inside. Something is reborn in me and it's just wonderful, just looking at them.
I am Jordi Bofill Cunillera @PhotoSensitiveExperiences specialist photographer and passionate about solarigraphy. In this photosensitive experience in a physical installation format “PAISAJES SʘLARES ɸ 41ºN”, I show 6 alternative and experimental photography projects where I mix art and science looking for its aesthetics. With the special collaboration of international artists such as Yoshihito Suzuki @dragoncaballo and Me Lata @melataelcorazon. Some of the landscapes are interactive, being able to manipulate them, even create and modify them. If you have a Polaroid or thermal instant camera, bring it or we will lend you one, to participate in one of them. Each landscape of this solar journey consists of:
The sun: as the protagonist, the luminous star closest to our planet and the maximum generator of light, without which photography would not exist.
Solarigraphs: hybrid pinhole astrophotographs between extreme exposure analogue capture and subsequent digital treatment. Respectful with the environment without chemicals in the development or in the positive. Where magically the traces of the apparent path of the sun become visible day after day, an image invisible to the human eye, which is not capable of capturing or retaining on its own. A painterly-looking analogue time-lapse of an ethereal world of dreamscapes.
LataCams: photography cameras, analogue, pinhole and special rechargeable for long exposures outdoors. Designed and built by me by hand for every occasion, reusing disused everyday materials and objects. They are the protagonists of this cocktail of photographic techniques and calm creation process, for me as important or more than the unpredictable final results.
