Living Memory
The artist Christian Boltanski said that we actually die twice, the first time at the moment of death and then, when someone no longer recognises us in photographs. How important it is to take care of memory, personal and historical, recent memory and living memory, to reconcile with it, accept it and learn. Unlike events […]
Beuys should be revisited
Most of the great references of art from the second half of the 20th century are usually read from a contemporary perspective, emphasizing those aspects that are considered most relevant at each moment. Artists as versatile as Cindy Sherman can be analyzed from a photographic, cinematographic or appropriationist point of view, among others. At the […]
Artistic thinking + scientific thinking to change the world
Taking artists on a boat to a remote island in the South Pacific so they can work with marine biologists, environmental specialists, filmmakers and activists, in the middle of nowhere and with unexpected materials around them. This is the project developed by TBA21 Academy, a part of Francesca Thyssen-Bornemisza’s TBA21 Foundation, which adds to artistic […]
The right to protest and change things
We live in turbulent times, to paraphrase the title of the exhibition with which the IVAM in Valencia commemorates its thirty years of existence. Ambiguous and unjust times, which follow a logic more appropriate to a dystopian novel than to the supportive and sustainable world in which we would like to live. As in the […]
Trans
Cloud Atlas is a wonderful film by the Wachowski sisters in which stories and characters unfold, mix and meet again across time, races and genders (sexual and film). The concept of trans is a notion that goes far beyond gender and has to do with the flow and transit between identities, formats, politics, languages or […]
About Falsestuff and other hybrids
References, debts, homages, quotes, copies, plagiarism, remixes, cut-and-paste… Culture is always the result of mixtures, rewritings, contaminations and updates. Ideas appear and reappear again and again over time. Contexts and circumstances change and, with them, readings and interpretations. All of this is what Falsestuff is about, the play, written, directed and performed (among others) by […]
Sobre Falsestuff i altres híbrids
Referències, deutes, homenatges, cites, còpies, plagis, remixes, cut-and-paste… La cultura sempre és fruit de barreges i reescriptures, contaminacions i actualitzacions. Les idees apareixen i tornen a aparèixer un i un altre cop en el temps. Canvien els contextos i les circumstàncies i, amb elles, les lectures i interpretacions. De tot això va Falsestuff, l’obra teatral […]
Vulnerability and resistance
I remember that in the 1990s there were works that explored the body and exposed it in all its vulnerability. I remember sculptures and installations that were displayed in all their fragility, such as the light bulbs or the piles of sweets by Félix González-Torres, who shared empathy and loss with the spectators. One century […]
On multiple narratives and memory repositories
The hegemonic, Eurocentric and patriarchal vision of the world has long been dismantled. The art history we studied in the 20th century has been called into question, precisely because it excludes the multiple narratives that were simultaneously generated from non-Western cultures and geographies. We live in a world that is still hierarchical, but in which, […]
ARCO’18
Article in A*DESK Every time I visit ARCO (or any other art fair) I can’t help but think about the difficult role of galleries at a time when artists, institutions, critics, curators and even collectors have long since redefined their roles. In a recent conversation, a German gallerist recalled how, in the 1990s, institutions and […]