This intervention is part of the Geysers program at the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, curated by Montse Badia.
Cristina Lucas’ work explores the power mechanisms that determine our lives. Currently, her interest is focused on the fracture between society and nature and the urgent issues arising from climate change. Based on the observation that the elements and minerals present on our planet are also present in our body, the artist begins to investigate and work artistically with these elements (zinc, magnesium, iron, etc.). In her research at the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, she follows the trail of one of them, cobalt, an element with which pigments are created (the well-known cobalt blue), also present in our body as a component of vitamin B12 and, finally, a key mineral in the electrical and technological industries. In the museum, the artist finds a work that perfectly synthesizes this point of intersection based on cobalt: Mural for IBM (1978) made by Joan Miró and Joan Gardy Artigas, with colors that include cobalt blue.
March 16, 2023 (12pm)
Performative lecture 16/3/2023
This intervention is part of the program Geysers at the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya curated by Montse Badia
Ro Caminal, an artist who explores the world of representation and works in the space of intersection between the visual arts and anthropology, begins her research in room 48 “Orientalisms” of the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, where she focuses on a work in concrete: In the presence of the Lord (1891) by Francesc Masriera. The work allows her to start a process of questioning representation and the look as colonial devices. Starting from the reference of the thinker Edward Said, who understood Orientalism as a form of binary thinking that produces a knowledge that opposes the West/East, Ro Caminal presents an alternative poster, which complements and revises the original, while putting the emphasis on some aspects that allow the work to be reinterpreted based on critical keys
Location: Room 48 “Orientalisms”
Geysers at the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya is a curatorial project that brings together four artistic proposals resulting from a research process at this museum. Ro Caminal presents the results of her research in November 2022, Cristina Lucas in March 2023 and Raquel Friera and Núria Güell in January and February of 2024.
The uncertainties of the present entail the need to rethink deeply. Rethinking the systems and established premises. Museums are not alien to these urgencies and are beginning to reflect on their role in society. This was made clear by ICOM when updating the definition of a museum*. Contemporary artists can play a key role in this rethinking. They can contribute to museums changing the traditional colonialist view for a more anthropological one, rereading historical discourses and contextualising their collections
In this contextual and vital framework, the programme Geysers at the museum was born. Geysers respond to a natural and strange phenomenon. They are thermal springs that result from the contact between the surface water and the heated rocks of the underground magma. On entering into contact, this heated water returns to the surface through porous rocks and can appear in different ways: in the form of steam, spectacular fountain geysers or cone geysers with more stable jets, among others.
We are moving this image, evocative of natural and organic processes, to the Museum, so that the work that contemporary artists do at the museum become the geysers. The artists research the museum, based on their own cultural and personal background, reacting to the contents, paying attention to the stories told by the Museum, its discourse, its collections, what is seen and what is not seen. And based on this, cross-cutting itineraries, unexpected and non-predictive shapes and formats appear.
During the 2022-24 period, four artists have been invited to research within the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya and to define a proposal within the museum’s public programmes department.
In this edition of 2022, under the title Teen R-evolution: between meme and drama, we present a series of artistic and cultural proposals that revolve around adolescence as a time of transition, change, construction of identity, personality and position in relation to the world, and that highlight the conflict that we live day by day and that digitalization only exacerbates.
With Teen R-evolution we want to insist on the need to empathize and to put ourselves back in the shoes of our adolescent self. That transition between childhood and adulthood, that stage so irrational and intense, at the same time vulnerable and malleable, where the first disappointments are lived, the first sexual experiences, in short, a time of experimentation and metamorphosis. This is a period we have all gone through that is so complex and uncertain, in which it is easy for us to place ourselves and empathize, perhaps more than putting ourselves in the shoes of a person from another cultural reality, race or gender. In other words, it is about adolescence as a universal and global paradigm.
The need to understand the world in order to define a point of reference is related to adolescence, but also to all of us, especially today. Therefore, it is about paralleling the complexity and uncertainty of the moment we live in with that of adolescence.
A*LIVE_Masters of Implosion is a project by A*DESK with the collaboration of Fito Conesa & Mery Cuesta and the complicity and support of Hangar.org centre/producció/recerca/arts.visuals.
This is the eighth edition of A*LIVE, the public program of A*DESK that consists of unfolded debate on contemporary subjects with a streaming television format. This second pandemic year, continuing with the format online opened last year, we have created an expanded and performative digital format with Fito Conesa and Mery Cuesta as masters of ceremony and catalysts for a series of artist audiovisual collaborations that revolve around the notion of implosion.
Thus, for this occasion, we have invited artists whose art gyrate around the idea of “implosion”, “implode” taken from different angles and perspectives. Participant artists —in order or implosion— are: Hito Steyerl with her piece How not to be seen (2013); Nuria Güell with La banalidad del bien (2021); Andreas M. Kaufmann with Much too much (2004); Tabita Rezaire with Premium Connect (2017); Eli Cortiñas with Walls have feelings (2019); Eloy Fernández Porta with Las aventuras de Genitalia y Normativa (2021); Robert Lippok with his sound piece From universe to universe (2021) produced for the occasion accompanied by Siddaharth Gautam Singh visuals.
