Link to the article in A*DESK

At the moment the French Institute in Barcelona is presenting El perímetre intern (The internal perimeter), a group exhibition curated by Andrea Rodríguez Novoa and Veronica Valentini. The dozen or so works, by Spanish and French artists, presented in El perímetro interno propose a reflection on the notion of limits (geographical, historical, political, economic, social, cultural, personal…), their ambiguities and their imprecisions.

Narrating stories, highlighting examples, indicating points of confluence or carrying out small displacements are just a few of the examples employed by these artists to explore this notion. Oriol Vilanova takes a vitrine from the French Institute and deprives it of its function, simply exhibiting it open. Through the image of a wax cylinder, Dominique Hurth proposes a series of non-linear narratives. “Let hope predominate without being too visionary” is the message that Anna Moreno wrote on the placards that she showed in the world demonstration of 15 October 2011 in Barcelona and Vienna. A disturbing and undecipherable anonymous letter is the proposal by Audrey Cottin that focuses on the limits of authorship. A photograph accompanied by a Quahog shell are the elements that Aymeric Ebrard uses as a way of trying to identify what constitutes forming part of a community. Fran Meana presents an installation, with a slightly unstable equilibrium, where he compares images (and one ends up finding many common features) related to North-American Land Art and workers revolts in the dockyards of the northern Spain. Ariadna Parreu enters into the world of desires and utopias, using scientific, geometric and telekinesic references. Pauline Bastard reveals the mechanisms used to produce a romantic sunset. Ryan Rivadeneyra relates, visually and literally, his unsuccessful search for Tartessus, the mythical lost city. In their film, Pythagore et les monstres, Louise Hervé and Chloé Maillet transform the philosopher Pythagoras into the protagonist of a film with numerous traits of a B series film. Through references to a story by Lewis Carroll, Irene de Andrés constructs a perfect map, of which all that is left is the frame. The complex history of Europe now transformed into a huge tourist theme park is reflected in an installation, by Lúa Coderch, in which an electric fan artificially blows up a bag from a souvenir shop.

The internal perimeter shares approaches and concerns with another project recently presented in la Capella that we commented on a few weeks ago: La condició narrativa, curated by Alexandra Laudo. Both propose a reflection related to a specific theme and one that is relevant at the moment (one focuses on the image and the narrative condition, while the other explores the notion of limits and their imprecisions) and in this process of reflection they also evidence other things: a certain generational approximation of the artists (born in the decade of the eighties) who work with a huge diversity of materials, though often in low-tech formats; that they investigate, indicate and present facts or events from the present and the past that make it possible to reflect on the present; that they explain histories or construct situations and reveal mechanisms.

And as we’re talking about generational themes, it’s worth remembering that during the seventies, in a Barcelona still devoid of contemporary art institutions (let’s not forget that the first, the Fundació Joan Miró, was inaugurated in 1975), some of the most risky artistic proposals took place in the foreign institutes in the city. The Institut Français, the Istituto Italiano di Cultura, the Goethe-Institut and the Institute of North American Studies were just a few of the places where the works by conceptual artists were presented, as well as the encounters, discussions and seminars that reflected on the new role of art and artists.

I’m not sure if history is repeating itself, but it’s curious that just when the artistic institutions in Barcelona seem to have lost their way, some of the most interesting proposals are arising out of independent initiatives, in foreign cultural institutes, artists’ studios and non-profit spaces. And the reasons for this are not to be found solely in the cuts or the increase in VAT.

Link to the article in A*DESK

What functions ought an art fair to fulfil in the 21st century? Are the galleries redefining themselves at the same speed as other art agents? And the institutions? Are art fairs and galleries becoming one of the few remaining platforms where independent/multidependent curators can work?

This is a time when art, culture and the economic system that we know, of the world, are being redefined. Each and every one of us has to reconsider who we are. A few days ago I read the book Funky Business that had some very graphic details: “Inevitably, new roles demand new skills. Thirty years ago, we had to learn one new skill per year. Now, it is one new skill per day. Tomorrow, it may be one new skill per hour. Skills like networking – in 1960 an average manager had to learn 25 names throughout his or her entire career; today we must learn 25 new names every single month. Tomorrow, it may be 25 new names per week (and half of those are likely to be names from different languages)”.

This is our present. And it is the present of ARCO. ARCO was born in 1982. It was the start of the eighties and the beginning of the mental and cultural opening of Spain. Several generations of artists, critics, curators, gallerists and collectors have grown up with ARCO. Internet has not always existed (though it’s hard for the very young to imagine it) and we’ve not always had access to what happened on the other side of the world. It was at ARCO where I saw, for the first time, an amazing installation by Thomas Hirschhorn (at Chantal Croussel’s stand) and it was at ARCO where one could listen to Harald Szeemann participating in a round table discussion. Over these years, ARCO has fulfilled an important social and educational role.

But it’s also true that it has had difficulty re-defining itself amidst the proliferation of all the other types of fairs (that are more exotic, more emergent, more powerful and more sexy) all across the world. In the meantime, the frontiers between fairs and biennials are increasingly blurred (on one occasion we even talked about ferienales).

We don’t know if the team directing ARCO 2013 has asked itself these questions. Quite probably, but we also know how hard it must be to try to adapt to new requirements when dependent on limited or fairly inflexible structures. It must be something like what happened in the car industry. It’s clear that the future lies in electric cars, but meanwhile, who dares to dismantle the car industry, as we know it today?

So what stands out about ARCO 2013? There is the sensation that there have been sales and purchases. Despite the 21 % VAT. And, lets not forget, selling is one of the main objectives of a fair. ARCO is still a meeting place and a good reason to travel to Madrid. As happens every year ARCO is the media moment par excellence for contemporary art. For better or for worse. It appears in the media, but in a fairly banal way. No problem with banality, as long as it can coexist with a broader range of approaches.

Subjects announced with much fanfare such as the QR codes with which to obtain more information about the artists or online sales end up being barely relevant. That the catalogue has a widely distributed online version is however significant.

There haven’t been any memorable stands, but there is a very balanced level of quality and rigour that is worth highlighting in those of ProjecteSD, Ellen de Bruijne, ADN, Àngels Barcelona, Nogueras Blanchard, Maisterravalbuena, Chantal Croussel and Esther Schipper, to mention just a few.

One aspect that distinguishes ARCO from other fairs is the emphasis on curatorial proposals. Here it’s particularly worth highlighting the section Opening, curated by Manuel Segade and Veronica Roberts, that works in two directions: making it possible for young galleries to enter the fair, while bringing a breath of fresh air to the fair, new ways of seeing and doing. As an example: the work of Sander Breure and Witte van Hulzen presented by the Dutch gallery tegenboschvanvreden. Three actors play the role of gallerists, in a fictitious gallery called Ansgar Lund. All the internal dynamics and tics of an art fair, as well as a few distortions, are reflected. And one detail that is important, the performance doesn’t end with the professional visiting days, it lasts until the end of the fair.

We are experiencing a boom in performance. Many museums and institutions are incorporating this type of manifestation into their programmes or creating specialised departments. This is the case of Moma or Tate or, closer to home, the Miró Foundation, the Tàpies Foundation or Fabra i Coats, to name just a few. But why this resurgence of performance? Why are museums and institutions now incorporating it intensively into their programmes? What is the difference between the current ones and those of the 60s and 70s?

This reminds me that in 2000, when I was taking a course at the Appel Foundation in Amsterdam, I had the opportunity to access the comprehensive video archive that the centre kept. Together with my classmates we spent hours and hours watching the works of Vito Acconci, Chris Burden or Ulay & Marina Abramovic, among others. In the same year, we attended a performance by Abramovic in Amsterdam in which, while maintaining the same bodily control and mastery as three decades earlier, she presented a notable difference: the temporal aspect. If in the 70s, her performances lasted for hours, in 2000 they did not exceed 45 minutes, and had a narrative structure of increasing intensity. This probably had to do both with the evolution of the artist’s own discourse, and with the fact that the proliferation of audiovisual material has been changing our way of perceiving things.

One of the most notable differences between the performance practices of the 60s and 70s and those of today is contextual. If in the former it was linked to a critique of the static object and a questioning of the institution and the market, today it responds to the fact that artistic work is usually carried out with different media, is interdisciplinary, collaborative, and the participation of the spectator is essential. To this we must add the relevant role of “experience” in a present in which everything is accessible at any time.

Another significant aspect is the relationship between these practices and their documentation. If in past decades videos and photographs were nothing more than a documentary record that only years later had value in the market, current artists relate to their documentation in very different ways: either by “objectifying” it (Matthew Barney), considering it a documentation material and not producing limited editions (Xavier Le Roy) or denying any form of registration (Tino Sehgal).

In reality, the practice of performance has never ceased to be present, among other reasons, because the “performative” is, in one way or another, an intrinsic aspect of contemporary art. From Christian Jankowski to Dora García or Joan Morey, through Martin Creed, Francis Alÿs or Roman Ondák, we always find either an artist who directs a staging, who carries out a process, who gives instructions to others, or who proposes an action that must be carried out by the spectator.

[Article published in Bonart, 2013]

Link to the article in A*DESK

A Royal Affair (2012) is a film that confirms the excellent health of Danish cinema, and also the concentration of talent per square metre in such a small country. It is not a cult film, nor is the director, though the name Lars von Trier appears as executive producer. Fairly classical in style, A Royal Affair centres on a drama that forms part of Danish history, situated in the second half of the 18th Century, starring a triangle formed of the king Christian VII, known for his emotionally unstable personality, his wife, Caroline Mathilde and Johann Struensee, the king’s personal doctor. The film focuses on the relationships between the three characters: the trust and dependency between Christian and Struensee and the complicity between Caroline Mathilde and Struensee, the first based on intellectual complicity and shared ideals and, later, on sentimental ties.

One of the great achievements of the film is the way that these characters and the plot are ensnared within a more transcendent conflict, the shift from a still medieval society to the opening up of the Enlightenment (it’s curious how the term seems less open in its denomination Illustración in Spanish, than in other languages: Lumières, Illuminismo, Aufklärung …). A Royal Affair shows to perfection the stagnation of certain social classes and their fierce struggle to maintain structures that are demonstrably out of date, founded on exploitation, ignorance, superstition and tyranny. Struensee, Caroline Mathilde and a small group of nobles, with the more or less conscious complicity of Christian VII, try to change the model of society (and manage to do so, briefly), following ideas of the thinkers of the Enlightenment. Amongst other measures they managed to abolish censorship, slavery, and to dissolve a corrupt and moribund State Council.

Even though the film’s trailer highlights some of the more sentimental and almost epic features of the story, one of the virtues of A Royal Affair is its classicism and the wealth of nuances that means the clothing and wigs of the time fall to a second plane, making it easy to transpose some of the questions it raises to the present day. In fact, every day we witness this struggle between models, between these two possible routes: on the one hand, a more egalitarian, democratic and open society and on the other, a desire to control and manipulate, to limit knowledge and instigate certain types of censorship, reducing workers’ and social rights and, now, it seems nothing is untouchable, not even humans.

In the field of branding, “baseline” is the advertising phrase that accompanies the brand in all the media supports used to promote it. Nike’s “Just do it”, Nokia’s “Connecting people”, the “Move your mind” of Saab or Apple’s “Think Different”. In colloquial terms, branding professionals refer to the “baseline” as “vaseline”, that is to say, the lubricant that helps the message “enter”.

In the context of culture, humour, parody and satire can have this “vaseline” effect, enabling authors to criticise facts, situations or questionable systems relentlessly. There are times when in which reality is so tough, disconcerting, unreasonable and unjust, that it seems as if it is only through parodied representations that one can agitate perceptions and consciences. One of these moments was in the convulsive thirties, that gave rise to the political photo-montages of John Heartfield (born Helmut Herzfeld): Adolf Der Übermensch: Schluckt Gold und redet Blech (Adolf, Superman: swallows gold and spouts junk), in which with the help of X rays one sees Hitler’s innards, a pile of golden coins; Goering: Der Henker des Dritten Reichs (Goering, Executioner of the Third Reich) appears caricatured as a butcher or Hurrah, die Butter is alle! (Hurray! The butter is all gone), in which a family sitting around a table have nothing more to eat than bits of metal, in reference to the unfortunate phrase pronounced by Göring during a period of food scarcity, in which he affirmed that iron had always made the nation strong, while butter and lard only made people fat. It wasn´t by chance, that Hurrah, die Butter is Alle! was paid homage to, at an equally critical time, by punk, appearing on the cover of “Mittageisen” by Siouxsie and the Banshees.

The heirs to the photomontages of Heartfield or Jacob Kjeldgaard (who with the pseudonym Marinus realised critical photo-collages for the French newspaper Marianne) are now to be found in the written press, in satirical magazines like El Jueves, Karma Dice, Chralie Hebdo, or, the recently appeared, Mongòlia“a satirical magazine without any message” that is defined itself in a manifesto//declaration, that makes its message quite clear and which includes in each issue the section “Reality News”, with investigative articles (of the serious kind) in which reality exceeds any kind of parody.

In February 2006, Polònia was born on TV3, the regional Catalan television, a programme of political satire, the very name of which used ironically the denomination “polacos”, a derogatory and colloquial term used to refer to Catalans. The current political scene has become such a parody of itself that the programme’s scriptwriters each week find it harder to surpass it. The portrait that Polònia makes of Catalan, Spanish and International society is as precise as it is relentless: Mas style, Obama and Bin Laden at the prow of a boat emulating the mythical scene from the film Titanic, before, oops, Bin Laden falls overboard or the Spanish Minister of Education, Culture and Sport, or Jose Ignacio Wert caricatured as a decrepit and perverse science fiction character, amongst others, configure a universe of caricatures of real people and situations, that function as a distorting mirror on a reality that is already fairly deformed.

But, what about art? Satire, irony or cutting mockery, are some of art’s recourses to criticise or denounce a certain reality. Honoré Daumier made cartoons about the things that he didn´t like, about the society that had to live in. William Hogarth elaborated “modern moral subjects” that were parodies of what he wanted to place in evidence. More recent examples are Dan Perjovschi, who makes drawings that take history as a continuum of events, or David Shrigley, whose drawings allude to allude to the darker aspects of everyday existence. To make his works more accessible, Shrigley has no problem in using any type of channel or format. He is capable of making installations, photographs, sculptures, drawings, books, record covers, posters, tattoos, objects such as salt and pepper pots, interventions in shop windows and public spaces or even bookmarks.

But if we had to look for the equivalent of the Polòniastyle in contemporary art it could be Maurizio Cattelan, capable of combining sculpture and performance and ridiculing whoever necessary, often transgressive, in relation to the spectator. His little Hitler reduced to kneeling or Pope Juan Pablo II struck by a meteorite are good examples of this and have become recurring images used to illustrate articles in the general press that periodically lances an “original” question, “Is this art?”. So what is the difference? How effective is the strategy? Polònia is television and Cattelan an artist who, though he can work in the public space, is always framed within the art system. Polònia doesn´t have to justify what it does as humour, television or political criticism, while Cattelan often has to justify what he does as art. The critical aspects are discussed afterwards and the humour, the “Vaseline” of humour, can end up being complicated for the complexity and sophistication that, ultimately, form part of the DNA of the art world.

Link to the article in A*DESK

La condición narrativa (The narrative condition) is the suggestive title that the curator Alexandra Laudo (founder and director of the platform Heroínas de la Cultura (Cultural heroines) –an equally great title -) has bestowed on the exhibition that she is presenting in La Capella and that was the winning project in the curator’s category of BCNProducció’12.

Thinking about “La condición narrativa” triggers a whole series of references and notions that are hard to avoid mentioning here. It recalls, and Alexandra herself mentions it, Roland Barthes, who defined it as something intrinsic to the human being, given that we communicate our experience of the world through language. But she also refers to The discourse of history (or Information sur les sciences sociales, in the original version) in which Barthes proposes to deconstruct the traditional types of discourse, underlining the blurring of the frontiers between the fictional and the historical story, to restore to the latter its basically narrative condition.

The narrative condition is also reminiscent of certain narrative models, particularly those stemming from film, characterised by their zeal for liberty, as can be seen in the cases of Chris Marker and Jean-Luc Godard.

Let’s also not forget The Otolith Group, made up of the anthropologist Anjalika Sagar and the author Kodwo Eshum, whose projects aimed to create a perception of facts through texts and images related to the media of communication… Marker and Godard also went there…

And finally let us think of Francis Alÿs, whose proposals can be revisited not just through videos, photographs, drawings or publications but also through stories: a man travels through the streets of Mexico City pushing a block of ice until it completely melts away; in Peru, 500 volunteers manage to move a sand dune a few centimetres using just shovels; a man walks through the streets of Mexico, with a pistol in his hand, until he is finally intercepted by the police…

No doubt all of these references (and others) won’t seem so far fetched to Alexandra Laudo. Her aim is to analyse in what way, in our current world, saturated with images and completely mediated, this narrative condition, intrinsic to the human being, is becoming increasingly visual. Through this modified relationship between text and image, Laudo aims to analyse the mechanisms used in its construction, how it is placed in circulation and how it is consumed. And she does so with the help of eight artists, who exhibit their works in la Capella, but who also (and it couldn´t be any other way) include a series of parallel actions that have to do with the circulation/infiltration of these images in other quite separate circuits (postcards, emails and advertising spaces in printed and online media). .

The eight artists participating in La condición narrativa have in common the use of a language that like their references is hybrid, moving between the visual arts, film, literature and performance. They also share being part of the same generation, born between the end of the seventies and beginning of the eighties, growing up in Argentina, Belgium, Norway, United States or Spain, for whom the television and the computer have from early on formed an integral part of their surroundings.

The exploration of the relations between eras, distances and languages is the axis of the investigation by Pedro Torres, who on this occasion proposes a visual and acoustic journey through space and time, through artistic, architectural, scientific and personal references. Julia Mariscal alludes to pre-cinematographic devices in an installation where the narrative focuses on the peculiar universe of the artist and filmmaker, Carlos Pastor. Ryan Rivadeneyra presents a complex visual story configured of fragments and micro-narratives, the articulation of which is revealed in the course of a one off performance. Karlos Gil shows part of his film project in process, that is made up of different films each one made in a different city and with clear winks at science fiction films of the sixties (once again, Chris Marker appears). Tamara Kuselman carried out a narration (or more precisely, a video-narration, given that in this case the existing image is based on colours). The story recounts a plan of action in the event of an emergency, in which the simulacrum becomes confused with reality. The filming (and later manipulation) by Pieter Greenen of two peaks of Mount Ararat hides a complex history that evidences historical, political and biblical tales arising out of the conflicts between Turkey and Armenia throughout history. The echoes of Duchamp’s infra-mince united with the background noise of Georges Perec appear in one of the two proposals by Marla Jacarilla that takes the floor of a patio as a point of departure to become an exploration of cartography. The same artist explores narrative processes in the elaboration of the biography of an imaginary person, through references to writers and literary characters. Closing this circle of stories is Kaia Hugin who has made a false documentary in which she looks at the purportedly Eskimo origins of her great-grandmother.

The need to tell stories is not so far removed from contemporary artists, be it through investigating relations between the real and the fictional, between public and private, to stage personal feelings or to evidence social archetypes. Using voices, subtitles, the still or moving images, the influences of film and literature, or explicit references to them, are very present in all of these pieces.

Leaving aside the irregularity of the proposals, Laudo’s curatorial gamble situates the presentation in the exhibition space on the same level as the circulation of these images in other circuits, this time, without the security net of the exhibition space. The question is, will they be able to generate questions, irritation or just curiosity? Will they be capable of generating other stories? Or will they just be lost amidst the avalanche of images, emails, postcards and advertisements that daily file past our eyes?

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 which are open to grave doubts”. She specified that, “civil disobedience can’t be compared with the criminal, because there is a big difference between the crime that is hidden and the disobedience that defies the law in the full light of day. What is more, civil disobedience is incompatible with violence, as, unlike the revolutionary, civil disobedience accepts the existing authorities and general legal framework”.

Arendt, who gave this conference, right in the middle of the Vietnam War, observed that, “modern societies are subject to an accelerated process of change, that is legalised by law once it has occurred, but that usually is the result of extrajudicial actions. In the face of this change, the channels for citizens to participate in politics are frequently insufficient. In fact, the system of representation is in crisis, largely because the parties have become bureaucratised. Hence there is a corresponding growing relevance for civil disobedience in modern democracies: it constitutes an extreme manifestation of the right of the public to join together to make demands on the government or to protest about its decisions”.

History is full of cases of civil disobedience that have served to conquer social rights, like the suffragette movement or the public transgression of racial laws, to mention only two highly significant ones. But it is not necessary to go so far back in time. “There is the justification for a movement of civil disobedience in Spain” was the outstanding headline of Alberto Fraile’s interview with Ignacio Ramonet, director of Le Monde Diplomatique, published last summer in El País.

The exhibition that Núria Güell is currently presenting at the ADN Galería doesn´t deal specifically with civil disobedience, but it does present facts and situations that could become triggers for such actions. Alegaciones desplazadas (Displaced allegations) is the title of the artist’s first impeccable solo exhibition in this gallery, for which she has brought together a selection of works that constitute a good sample of her career up until now.

In her projects, Núria Güell analyses the institutions that govern us and evidences the abuses of power that are permitted within the margins of legality of these very institutions. Her working process includes an analysis, based on data and situations (like Hans Haacke), a questioning, followed by a laying out of the evidence (in the manner of the filmmaker Michael Moore or, more close to home, the journalist, Jordi Évole in his programme Salvados), finally carrying out an action with real impact, often employing the same strategies at the interstices of legality, that could function as a sort of example and prior step, as we said at the beginning, for this civil disobedience that at the moment seems so justified and necessary.

Alegaciones desplazadas is a journey through eight works by the artist that forms an itinerary of different problems that evidences the abuse of power of institutions, such as the banks, legislative powers or immigration policies. The oldest piece Offisde (2009) like the more recent Humanitarian Aid (2008-2013), refers to this latter sphere. In the first, she counted with the participation of an unemployed African immigrant, with an urgent need to renew his residency permit in Spain. Güell contracted him to play hide and seek in the exhibition space. At the same time, this very contract enabled him to regularize his situation in the country. Humanitarian Aid, is a longer and more complex project. Realised in Cuba, it stems from an open call in which the artist offered herself as a wife to any Cuban interested in emigrating to Spain. The outline of the open call specified that the applicants must “write the prettiest love letter in the world”. The winner was selected by a jury, made up of three “jineteras” (prostitutes for foreigners), after which the wedding took place and after a prudent period of time, nationality having been obtained, a divorce was set in motion. In her presentation in ADN the project is made up of a video that incorporates the whole process and which sagely combines the most documentary aspects with kitsch touches (what stand out are the scenes of the jury deliberating as well as the images showing the veracity of the romantic relationship to be shown as proof to the Spanish authorities), along with the letters from different candidates and the contract signed between the winner and the artist, amongst other documents.

Tangentially related to the subject, although more centred on the abuse of power on the part of the authorities is Police Offers Contribution (2009), that under the form of a police inquiry board, gathers all the documentation –photographs and notes- of a series of appointments set up with different policemen in La Habana (who are prohibited from having sexual or intimate relations with foreigners) who she invited, as if to a date, to the exhibition space.

In Displaced Legal Application #1: Fractional Reserve and #3 FIES, Güell questions respectively the banking system and certain prison policies. In the first, she organised a series of lectures under the title “How to expropriate money from the banks?” for which she counted on the collaboration of three expropriators: Lucio Urtubia, Enric Duran and the economist Qmunty, that took the form of a publication that outlines ways for creating money out of nothing, following the same manoeuvres employed by banks.

We began talking about civil disobedience and have ended up with tactics that could make it possible. With her proposals, Güell seeks to have a real impact on the aspects that she questions, sometimes in a more documentary or combative manner and in others, underlining the more personal and human aspects. This brings to mind a recent interview with Federico Mayor Zaragoza in which he talked about the need for citizens to move into action, and remembered, not by chance, Rosa Parks.

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 to be moving in the opposite direction. The proof lies in simply remembering the first paragraph of the draft of the LOMCE (Organ Law for the Improvement of the Quality of Education), that was already approved in the council of ministers last 21 September and which -attention!- Tuesday 5 December the minister Wert presented with a few slight modifications: “Education is the motor that promotes the competiveness of the economy and a country’s level of prosperity. Its educational level determines its capacity to compete successfully in the international arena and to affront the challenges set by the future. Improving the level of citizens in the ambit of education supposes opening the door to highly qualified jobs, which represents banking on economic growth and achieving competitive advantages in the global market”. No comment.

Meanwhile, and almost where one least expects it, on television, one sometimes finds little islands of creativity and imagination that can be as stimulating for children as for adults. One recent case is Adventure Time, a cartoon series produced by Cartoon Network that began in 2010. The protagonists are Finn, a 14 year old boy, and a magic dog (adopted brother?) Jake. Both live in the land of Ooo, a surreal environment that could almost be post-apocalyptic –as suggested in some episodes that refer to a War of the Mushrooms – an alternative world in another dimension. In this surreal environment different mutant and extravagant characters file past, such as Princess Bubblegum, a human and bubble-gum hybrid; The Ice King, who would be the bad guy of the series and is obsessed with marriage; Marceline, the vampire queen and Finn’s best friend, who is a thousand years old and feeds off red things; Lady Rainicorn, a rainbow unicorn that only talks Korean, Princess Bubblegum’s pet and Jake’s girlfriend, amongst many others. Rarely have so many freaky and ambivalent characters been seen together.

Extravagance, surrealism and an absurd humour are the threads behind some simple and direct arguments, in which, in a totally idiosyncratic and not at all naïve way, values such as friendship, tolerance and justice predominate. All this is encompassed within a more complex macro-context that evolves and diversifies over time.

It is not by chance that the series, already cult viewing, has a certain indie feel, because its creators also are. With Pendleton Ward at the head, the comic book artists and scriptwriters come from independent comics and in the odd interview they have declared that they draw thinking of a child audience but also write and draw thinking about what they would like to see and what they enjoy making. Undoubtedly there is a universe parallel to this other one that is so dangerous that sets its sights on “achieving competitive advantages in the global market”.