Allegations, appropriations and civil disobedience
Link to the article published in A*DESK In 1970, Hannah Arendt gave a lecture titled “Civil disobedience”, that she defined as “what arises when a significant group of citizens becomes convinced that the normal channels for change no longer function, or that the Government persists in modes of action, that the legality or constitutionality of […]
Islands of freedom
Link to the article in A*DESK Sir Ken Robinson said in a famous TEDTalks presentation that creativity ought to have a central role in the education of children, that it is fundamental to stimulate creativity and imagination, to discover and promote the features that make us different and unique. While, in these parts, we seem […]
Knockdown prices
Link to the article in A*DESK What does it mean to be the citizen of a country in a globalised world? What is it worth? What are the implications? In 1998 Matthieu Laurette began a piece, that is still in progress, titled The Citizenship Project, in which he began to investigate the conditions required to […]
Repositories and auto-archiving
Link to the article in A*DESK Having learnt the lesson about the importance of the archive, with role models like Archive fever by Derrida or the Atlas Mnemosyne by Aby Warburg we are now seeing the need to revise, rethink and why not, rewrite it. In these days two on-going exhibitions in Barcelona and an […]
Las estructuras del arte. Una entrevista con Mario García Torres
Link to the article in A*DESK Mario García Torres works with very specific elements (hidden stories, rumours or un-clarified details) from the history of art, film, other artists, events from the past, etc. These investigations transform into stories that can take the form of diaporamas, videos, books, curated exhibitions or postcards, to mention just a […]
Software social. An interview with Antoni Abad
Link to the article in A*DESK Antoni Abad is a paradigmatic example of an artist who, trained in fine art, starts off as a sculptor and progressively dematerialises his work until he develops projects that call for the artistic institution, as the initiating and driving force, but that are developed in the terrain of the […]
From Pollock to performance
Link to the article in A*DESK The erosion of certain curatorial practices, that has occurred over the last few years across the international stage, along with the paucity within the local arena of studies into art, that propose methodological analyses instead of merely enumerating tendencies and chronologies, means the need is greater than ever for […]
The future of art. In a world of cuts and cultural industries
Art does not save lives, but it improves them. This assertion can be more or less shared depending on the historical, social and economic moment. In recent years, all roadmaps have pointed in the direction of greater professionalization in this sector, which implies greater efficiency and standardization. Good proof of this has been the proliferation […]
Mastery is revealed in limitation. On Manifesta 9 in Genk (co-author Andreas M. Kaufmann)
Article published in A*DESK, 2012 Conscious of how vast and vague Biennials and other international exhibitions and events can be, Manifesta 9 focuses on a very specific subject that is currently highly significant. The curator of Manifesta 9, Cuauhtémoc Medina couldn´t be clearer and more precise in the text he wrote for the catalogue: “For […]
Metadocumenta. A constructive review on dOCUMENTA (13)
Link to the article in A*DESK Documenta has become the contemporary art event, par excellence. Proclaimed as the thing that marks the pace for art of the moment, it is hardly surprising that it provokes expectations and deceptions in equal measure. If Documenta is a referent, it is logical that the artistic director of the […]
