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”.

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 obtain different nationalities. His objective was to obtain as many nationalities as possible, going a wee bit further than the legal restrictions, to explore the idea of citizenship within a globalised world. Within this working framework, for example, in 2001 invited by Harald Szeemann to participate in Venice Biennale, he decided to write a letter (along with the curator) to the 111 countries that weren´t participating in the biennale, offering them the possibility of representing them officially at the event, in return for obtaining citizenship from said country. Evidencing in this way not just the cynicism of the globalised world but also the absurdity of nationalities.

Spain wasn´t one of these 111 countries given that it has its own pavilion in the Giardini,but now, if Laurette wanted to obtain Spanish nationality, he would simply have to present documents crediting him with the purchase of home of a value superior to 160.000 €. With this alone, it is already possible to become a Spanish citizen or quite literally acquire Spanish citizenship. Without a doubt, these measures along with the current fiscal amnesty open up new perspectives for the future…A future full of reductions, obviously. Lamentably, the model that is currently being followed here is not that of Sweden, but that of the brand Eurovegas.

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 initiative that has just begun cause us to reflect about the use of the internal archive, that is also on occasions more subjective and personal, in order to remember and make public.

The Galeria Estrany – de la Mota has commissioned from an external curator, ferranElOtro a proyecto based on its archives (that encompass the Àngels de la Mota gallery (1987-1996), the Antoni Estrany gallery (1990-1996) and finally Estrany-de la Mota, since1996). The aim was to propose a history of the gallery/ies and indirectly to vindicate the historical documentation of the gallery spaces, though they were already present, for example, in the project by Manuel Segade La cuestión del paradigma (The question of the paradigm) (2011), in which, the gallery Estrany-de la Mota was indicated specifically as one of the most outstanding hotbeds of agents within the Catalan context.

The Fundación Suñol is also revising its archives. In celebration of its five years of existence in the Paseo de Gracia site, it is presenting in Nivell Zero Documents and Memory, a chronogram that includes historic, cultural, local, and personal events, selected from their own archive. The result is a chronology that, albeit subjective, makes it possible to draw conclusions about the fluctuations, projections and divagations of the context.

Access to personal and working archives can also be used in an intent to be transparent, to reveal working processes. This was the case, last summer, with the publication The Logbook/Das Logbuch, something akin to a travel journal, in which a series of documents were published (basically emails and photographs) related to the preparations of Documenta 13. But obviously, in an event where the figures (of organisers, participants, activities, sites, etc.) ricochet, what appears documented? Which emails are reproduced and which aren’t? What criteria does the selection respond to? What are the aims?

Finally, a proposal in process, undoubtedly the most complex one, is Archive-Thesaurus, that is being carried out at the Fundació Tàpies. In its declaration of intent it explains that the project “combines the organization and dissemination of the records, documents, traces, remains, etc. produced by the Fundació Antoni Tàpies and by the different people or groups connected with it, be this in a continuous or extemporaneous manner. It includes all that remains of what has been created in the Fundació throughout its existence, as well as what is appearing right now.” A brave proposal and one which makes it possible to get closer to those peripheral records and documents that are so important in determining how one understands the results, that is to say, what the Foundation has presented since its inauguration, as well as how to create complementary itineraries and multiple readings. Though one shouldn’t forget that there is always a prior step which is the sorting out of the archives, that is to say, a pre-selection of those documents and records that are considered worthy of being in the archive or not.

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 few of the possibilities. Underlining a stance between critical and poetic that vindicates the element of the subjective, in the following interview, Mario García Torres talks about the reasons for choosing his formats for production and presentation, his relation with the Internet and the structures of art, and his negotiated comfort with the art system.

Montse Badia: In your projects there is a diversity regarding forms of production/presentation/distribution. I’m thinking of two examples: “Alguna vez has visto la nieve caer” (Have you ever seen snow) (2010), a piece in which, on the one hand, all the research into Hotel One and Kabul has been carried out from your home computer, via the Internet, without the need to travel to Afghanistan, and on the other, the interesting feature that it is a diaporama, that could also function as a narrative. Another case: is your exhibition at the Jeu de Paume, where you intervened in the bookshop, inserting postcards into some of the books. I would like to know how you decide the form or channel for presentation that you use for each one of your pieces.

Mario García Torres: My practice is not defined by my commitment or development of a medium. Each project has a distinct nature and the medium in which each aesthetic transaction is distributed is governed, in my point of view, by being the most efficient depending on its nature. My work in general explores the structures of art and the way in which these structures make possible this thing that we call art. My approach ranges from historical investigations into the practice of other artists to personal and intimate reflections about the negotiation of my practice in the art system. As you mentioned, “Alguna vez…” and the intervention in the bookshop at the Jeu de Paume are very different in nature. The first is the result of a long investigation –it is worth noting one not done exclusively on the computer– into the history of Boetti in Afghanistan, and specifically the hotel that he managed in Kabul during the seventies. The intervention in the Jeu de Paume was the extension of another project – the ones that I call more personal, intimate and immediate, the majority of which take place in the studio – one that I have now been doing for several years. It consists of each time I go on a work trip and find myself in a hotel where there are sheets of headed notepaper, I sit down for a moment and reflect about what I have done as an artist, as well as the future of my work, and I write a promise on the paper. It is more or less always the same phrase, a version of: “ I promise to give the best of myself in the years to come”. There must be forty or fifty of these sheets in existence and the project that continues today, consists of a collection of these promises. This project exists as I’ve described it, but also in a musical form – the explanation of the project became the words for a song that I commissioned from a musician friend, Mario López Landa – and a number of postcards, illustrating the modes of transport (airplanes, boats, buses) that had taken me to work, on which I had written the same phrase were distributed in the bookshop of the Jeu de Paume. I aimed for the discovery of these postcards to be a surprise, and not on the wall as is customary, in the way that the headed sheets are exhibited.

MB: To investigate the structures of art sometimes you develop projects, books or curate exhibitions. In the case of the show “Objetos para un rato de inercia” (Objects for a moment of inertia), that took place in the Elba Benítez gallery in Madrid and which brought together works by David Askevold, Alighiero e Boetti, Luis Camnitzer, Barry Le Va and Francesc Torres. The declaration of principles was clear: “History, despite its insistence on the contrary, pertains to the present. History is always being made. It is a process not a result. History, and the writing of History, are one and the same thing.” Is it a way of activating propositions that took place in the past, of which only the record or narrations are left? Do the historic investigations serve to understand the present better?

MGT: Definitely. If it wasn´t for the fact that I believe that each historic narrative, that I use as an excuse to generate another narrative, didn´t have an impact on our contemporaneity their wouldn´t be any reason to use them. In this sense, my initiatives are a conversation between my personal interests, with the understanding that I do them through a subjectivity that is situated in the present, as well as an interest in the more complex range of art that makes it possible for my work to exist. In this sense, it’s not just me as a person that activates these narratives, but a more complex system that supports the need for this revision.

MB: Your works function perfectly as stories, you meticulously investigate events, details about other artists’ projects, rumours and from there elaborate a history, a story in which the objective data and your interpretation coexist, sometimes endowed with a certain poetics. What is your stance in relation to more recent art history, to what is told, what is omitted and what is very superficially explained?

MGT: My pieces are very personal narratives that have to do with sharing my own experiences, desire or interest in a specific history. In this sense I see it as a way of making history, though very different from the one that pretends to tell the truth. Perhaps my narratives function as complements to those more official ones, as it is these details that are omitted that, most of the time, catch my attention.

MB: What is your working methodology?

MGT: When a piece is exhibited, a long time has passed from the moment when the episode in question excited me. The majority of times I begin an investigation, not very methodologically, about something that interests me and afterwards, at some point, I see the potential for it to convert into something that would be interesting to recount more publicly. The majority of times I rely on these things that have drawn my attention, the notes in a box on my desk and, little by little, different invitations end up also defining which ones are made and presented in specific temporal or geographic situations.

MB: What are the main points of confluence and also differences between your role as an artist and when you expand it on occasion to become curator of exhibitions?

MGT: To me there don’t seem to be that many differences. I am an artist, and my interventions as a curator have to do with looking for a different way of sharing my interests. Sometimes it can seem more to the point to make an exhibition that tells the story in a more personal manner, hence the exhibitions. But in reality I see it all as a single body of work.

MB: You often cite works or parts of work that are already made to begin your own process. Would you allow your works also to become the object of citations, appropriations, re-enactments or revisions?

MGT: It would be an honour if somebody one day saw them this way, and would continue these narratives, in whatever manner, to know that in some place in the world someone might continue to be interested. In the end, one works just for this to find people who have similar interests. I think that in the end my work comes down to this.

MB: Are you concerned about the notion of truth? Do you think that truth is possible in art?

MGT: No, I have absolutely no interest.

MB: What is your relation with the Internet, for you, is it a tool for research, communication or dissemination?

MGT: Obviously it is always my first point of contact with a subject and many times it leads me to investigate things in a less methodological way, a richer way. It situates normal people, everyday people, at the same level as books and official sources. Internet is present all the time, and I don´t blame it for often being wrong. I like it. What better way to divert an investigation towards something contradictory or further from the truth. It is there that one finds relations that potentially become something interesting, in the weaving of a new way of telling a story.

MB: Many of the works that you make at present could be disseminated perfectly via the Internet however they tend to be shown within the parameters of the institution. Have you ever thought about sometimes using the possibility of other routes to show and distribute your work?

MGT: I’ve never thought about it in depth. I believe that in the end I’m interested in the experiential part of art however contradictory that might seem. The use of films and slides, for example, has to do with having a cinematic experience, which would be lost if it was seen on a small monitor. I believe that there are pieces that can be disseminated on the Internet, but not the majority of mine. I am as concerned about the experience, as about the data within them.

MB: Do you think that the institutional framework (museums, art centres and also big events like Documenta or international biennales) is flexible and does it adapt to the new needs required by artistic practices?

MGT: Yes, it doesn’t trouble me. I believe that I have constantly tried to use this framework to talk about what I want to. Obviously there are limitations, but there is also a lot of flexibility. I believe that up until now, each time they have invited me to exhibit in a biennale or an exhibition of this type, I have ended up doing my work elsewhere. For me the work exists where it is executed and not where it is exhibited. That’s the least of it.

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 real. In the following interview Abad talks about the details of this evolution, the changes experienced in his role as an artist, the needs and production requirements for his current work, the channels of distribution that he uses and his independence in relation to the art market.

Montse Badia: You began working as a sculptor and now make projects where you don’t produce any specific objects. I’d like you to tell me about this evolution in your work and how you conceive it.

Antoni Abad: To respond to this question I would have to go back to the time I spent as an artist in residence at the Banff Centre for the Arts in Canada, in 1993. I went to Banff with the measuring tape pieces and there I discover video and make my first video-projection in the space. There, I become aware of the existence of the Internet, for the first time. I arrived in Canada with the tools for relating in which I employed the tape measures and returned to Barcelona with videotapes. I also brought back my first email address. It is the moment that I modelled the last sculpture, the metal hands, and made the first video-projection in the space: my hand infinitely measuring palm by palm, the everyday.

There is another crucial moment, in 1996, when there isn’t even any projection in the space. It is when Roc Parés invites me to do a project specifically for the Internet within the now disappeared MACBA on line, a project driven by the Pompeu Fabra University and MACBA. The result was a renewed interpretation of Sisyphus, a video-projection from 1995. The new version adapts to the Web and is located between two Internet servers, one in Barcelona and the other in the Antipodes, in New Zealand. The virtual space overpowers Sisyphus and nothing takes place any more in the physical space. To enjoy this experience it is essential to connect to the Internet.

Later on I experiment with video-projects realised with made to measure software programmes, like the piece “Ego” in 1999, in which flies infinitely draw the phrase “YO y YO y YO…” (I and I and I), harking back to the egocentric miseries that we all suffer. Based on these experiences, in 2001 I began a long lasting project on the Web. It’s a programme that manifests itself in the form of a virtual fly that is alive when the screen of the computer is connected to the Internet. This was a project predating what we now call social networks, where the users installed the fly in their computer and could communicate with each other without being detected by a central server. This network had a horizontal design realised with p2p technology, so that the communications between users couldn´t be intercepted. The fly project couldn´t have existed without the users, who, by installing the programme in their computer, entered into forming part of the virtual community.

It wasn´t until 2004, with the arrival of telephones with integrated cameras, that I began to work with different groups, and communities at risk of social exclusion.

MB: When you began Megafone.net it was more difficult for people to have their own communication channels in the Internet, now it is more usual. How has this side of things affected your work?

AA: In 2004 when we began the first project with mobile phones in Mexico City, the taxi drivers didn’t know what Internet was. After this discovery, the taxi drivers had to discover what was the thread of their discourse. It was foreseen that this was a project for small groups of people, that met up weekly, to propose, debate and decide the subjects that they would deal with. These projects are not open to everybody, like Facebook or Twitter, where it is not necessary to meet in person or agree subjects. They serve more for everyday exchanges and it is only recently that they have been used to denounce and promote certain causes. On the other hand, the projects of megafone.net, enable certain groups at risk of social exclusion to self-represent themselves and they aren´t open to everybody to be able to participate, though they can be consulted on the Internet.

Normally these projects arise in order to distort the proposals that I receive from art centres. At the beginning it wasn´t like this, they asked, for example, for a project of video-projections and I tried to give it a twist, asking what collectives there were in each city who might be interested in a creative project with alternative communication channels via mobile phones.

MB: How does your role as an artist change, what is your job and what is your responsibility?

AA: I came from sculpture and had used materials like foldable chairs, sponge-rubber, meccano and iron… afterwards I used more ethereal materials like photography or video. Now the materials that I use are the data transmission networks of mobile phones and the Internet. I try to model them so that they can serve as a way for these groups to express themselves with total freedom. My work as an artist consists in giving form to these networks, as well as getting involved with the groups I work with.

I try to use the technology in a minimalist manner, keeping it to a minimum. Megafone.net is not baroque, nor complicated and endeavours to express the ideas of these groups in the barest possible way.

MB: How are your projects financed?

AA: There’s a bit of everything, from major sponsorship, both private and public, as in the first case, that of the taxi drivers in Mexico, where we had sponsorship from the Centro Nacional de las Artes in Mexico, the Centro Cultural in Spain, as well as from Telefónica, that had just arrived in Mexico. Or in the Centre d’Art Santa Mònica, we had sponsorship from Nokia and Amena (later Orange). Or, in the Centre d’Art Contemporain of Geneva, where there was a long list of foundations that sponsored the project. There are also projects, such as that of Manizales in Colombia organised by the Universidad de Caldas, that have practically no budget at all, with a few mobile phones that are taken as contraband from Spain, or that of the Sahrawis, where we didn´t even have a mobile data network, so much as used the antenna of the Internet connexion supplied by an Italian NGO.

MB: In these cases the art centre is used as a meeting point.

AA: Yes, it’s about trying to make the most of the art centre’s resources. First of all, the physical space. The centre wants there to be art within that space, an installation, a representation. In Megafone.net they use it to have the weekly meetings of the participants. When it is opened to the public, the table and the computers that we use become an installation. I call them documentary installations that try to explain what is going on, that a few people have telephones and remotely feed the Web with their images, sounds, videos and reports.

On the other hand, the art centre always has a public relations section and a press department that we endeavour to take advantage of to disseminate the projects. The aim is to use any device that the museum has to try and parasite all the media with information about the project. These media disseminations have the objective of making the user choose to enter into the Internet, to see what the participants in these projects want to tell us.

There are places where the project has had a lot of visibility. In Mexico, for example, when it was made public through a press release those anonymous taxi drivers became the perfect disseminators of the project. From that moment on, they were interviewed non-stop by the radio, the television, and the newspapers. There was a time when the server received 50.000 visits daily. We managed to make what those people expressed, those who are never listened to, reverberate across the Web.

MB: What you don´t do is produce photographs of the participants, for example, to be exhibited in art galleries. What are your relations with commercial galleries?

AA: Currently none. At the beginning there were portraits of the participants that formed part of these documentary installations. But there came a time when I considered that it was no longer necessary. If I write on the wall of the art centre the phrase: “18 taxi drivers transmit from mobile phones on the Web”, the project is already explained it isn’t necessary to know what faces the participants have.

I could have played the world of the gallery and the market but decided to abandon it. Whoever wants to enjoy these projects only has to visit them on the Web. I don´t produce anything that could have any exchange value on the market. I try to work with institutions that can finance these projects.

Another aspect is the technological investigation behind it, that I have to improve, so that the device can be ever more fluid and easier to use. This I call “social software” as the modelling I talked about at the beginning is done according to the needs of each group of participants. This effort to minimise the use of software and to make the device as easy as possible, ties in with the idea of media minimalism that has always interested me.

MB: Sometimes you have used telephones for each one of the participants and at others communal telephones, that are passed from hand to hand between the participants, why?

AA: The idea of the communal telephone arose in the project with the motorbike messengers in São Paulo. The channel *MOTOBOY started with twelve participants where each one used a mobile phone. When the initial period of the project was over, the participants decided to make the project theirs and to continue it. But as they no longer had the support of the art centres that organised them, the funding ran out. I consider that this decision by the participants to give continuity to the projects is the maximum success that this type of project can have. What happened in São Paulo, is that the participants couldn´t maintain the accounts of 12 mobile phones, so I invented the communal phone: a mobile phone that changes hands at every weekly meeting. This ends up making the network much cheaper to maintain. São Paulo has been making uninterrupted transmissions for 4 years with 3 telephones that enable 6 motoboys to continue the project.

When the participants decide to give continuity to the projects, sustainability becomes a key factor. In the case of the project with the young Saharans, in the year 2009-2010, we adapted the device so that it could publish via WIFI, so that the publication on the Internet had a cost of zero.

MB: What human team do you need to carry out your work?

AA: As well as the teams from the art centres that I mentioned before, each project needs a local coordinator, to whom all the knowledge about how the device functions is transmitted, who is the person who coordinates and energises the weekly meetings in which the group decides democratically what subjects are going to be dealt with. The computer programmers who I have been working with these last years are, naturally, indispensable, a job that is currently fulfilled by Matteo Sisti Sette.

MB: How has technology modified your way of working? How has the type of telephone that you use changed and how has the access evolved?

AA: Things have changed a lot; we have gone from the first projects where the telephone with a camera was the latest fad in technology to the popularisation of smartphones. Recently the appearance of the operating system Android, that facilitates enormously the programming of this type of mobile device, facilitates the experimentation with and rapid execution of mobile applications.

The interface that grows most rapidly – and is now well ahead of computers – is that of mobile phones. For example, in the project that I am now doing in New York we have found that many of the participants already have a telephone with a camera and an Internet connection, something that facilitates enormously the realisation of the projects.

At the beginning of these projects, in 2004, it was often necessary to explain to the participants what the Internet was. The processes were a lot to do with digital inclusion. Currently the participants are familiar with the Internet, are users of social networks and already have mobile phones.

MB: The fact of giving a voice to different communities, has it at any time entered into contradiction with the very bases of the community and generated some type of conflict?

AA: At a certain point, the two groups of gypsies with whom I have worked ended up in the odd conflictive situation, they fell out but it didn´t go beyond that. In the gypsy world, those who have the right to express themselves in the name of the community are the patriarchs. I, on the other hand, proposed to give the young people a voice. In the first instance, this proposal wasn´t well received, but finally the patriarchs accepted that it was the young people who represented the community in the project. In the case of Lleida, it ended up being very difficult to find gypsy girls who wanted to participate. The community tried to censor some of these girls, for the images that they had published. But in all cases the conflict was resolved.

In the case of Colombia, I proposed that, instead of a single group, two potentially conflicting groups participated. One would be made up of people displaced by the conflict, who had had to abandon the rural area to take refuge in the city. The other would be made up of people who had formed part of illegal armed groups, like the FARC. When I made the proposal they told me I was mad because these people ran a huge physical, and even life threatening, risk. That no way could they meet together in the same space. I insisted and what I did was ask them to meet separately but with only one virtual space, so that the dialogue that they couldn´t have in person, could be carried out on the Internet.

It was the best possible result, because after the third meeting, seeing that the subjects were the same, I proposed that they meet in person. They accepted and from that moment they became one single group, which was later integrated into the working group at the Universidad de Caldas.

So the desire to express oneself has always been over and above internal conflicts. In São Paulo the messengers had the odd scare with the unions, who wanted to appropriate the project to convert it into the voice of the union, but the Motoboys decided to remain independent.

MB: When they invite you to present Megafone in the context of a group exhibition, how do you do it?

AA: Normally, through an installation that recreates the documentary installation that took place during the project. That is to say, a meeting table, a random projection and a computer, where one can consult the contents published by the participants. If there is any printed documentation it is placed on the table so that it can be consulted. It is about publicising what happened. I say random projection but maybe I should call it the “breaking news” of each project. It is an application that searches in the database for the most recent publication so as to project it like a billboard. If it doesn’t find any, it looks within the latest publications.

MB: Your responsibility is to maintain the database, which is what is left after all these projects. The preservation of Megagafone is your responsibility.

AA: Yes, we maintain an Internet server that makes it possible to publish in real time and that also constitutes the repository that preserves the memory of all the projects, around 300.000 photographs, texts, videos and sounds.

MB: Can you imagine always continuing with this type of project, or do you at times have the temptation to return to the studio and produce objects? Or, on the contrary, is turning back the clock no longer possible?

AA: At the moment I plan to carry on within this field. No doubt I will take other routes, as in the project with blind people in 2010, and in other more specific areas of research. It could be that the sense of this investigation turns towards people who can take advantage of these technologies for problems with blindness or Alzheimers. This represents a new and complex shift, to try and construct a more refined and simple device that could be of use to these people.

If I evaluate it on a personal level, remembering my times as a sculptor, when I was thinking about the sublime of art, and I compare it to the situations where these projects take me, where you are often in the street with people who otherwise you would never have had the chance to meet, and I find myself sharing with them a whole series of problems that I had no idea could even exist, then I think that I wouldn’t swap any of this for my earlier practice. Though maybe a time will come when I will miss what sculpture had, that building, little by little, with physical materials. Going back the next day to the studio and continuing. You didn’t have to connect to the Internet to confirm the sculptural presence.

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 thesis exhibitions, the fruit of rigorous research that, above all, elaborate temporally transversal trajectories.

In this sense we’re fortunate because until 24 February, the Miró Foundation in Barcelona is presenting “Explosion! The legacy of Jackson Pollock”, co-produced with the Moderna Museet and curated by Magnus af Petersens, who until a few days ago was head of Exhibitions and Collections at the Moderna Museet and, since October, is the chief curator of the Whitechapel Gallery in London. In 2006, Magnus af Petersen was preparing a solo show of Paul McCarthy and while talking about some of his first works (that can also be seen in “Explosion!”) the artist commented on the influence that Jackson Pollock had had on him and, in particular, his working process. This brief reference was the point of departure for the exhibition.

It is true that Petersens hasn´t discovered dynamite and he recognises it explicitly. The subtitle of the exhibition “The legacy of Jackson Pollock” reproduces the title of the essay written in 1956 by Allan Kaprow, the same one that coined the word “happening” and contributed to the appearance of the practices of conceptual art. Petersens follows Kaprow’s diagnosis in identifying the time after World War II, as being the detonator for a need to start from scratch, to attack painting, already perceived as an exhausted process, and to explore new routes. And in this starting from scratch a few images were key in indicating a before and after: the photographs of Hans Namuth that accompanied an article about Jackson Pollock, that appeared in “Life” magazine, which showed his works, but above all, the artist in action (and never a truer word said).

The thesis of the exhibition is more than clear: to evidence the legacy of Pollock, that is to say, the artist in action, underlining the relevance of gesture and its consequences: the change in the role of the artist, a distancing with regard to “the work”, the emphasis on process and the change in role that the spectator has had to adopt. Different options and interpretations are shown along the way: the Gutai group in Japan, throwing bottles full of paint against canvases; Niki de Saint Phalle shooting paint; Jean Tinguely’s painting machines; Yves Klein dressed in black tie giving instructions to his models to carry out “live and in situ” his Anthropometries, or the same artist realizing his paintings with fire; etc. etc.

And here one of the major achievements of this exhibition is introduced, that is situating the audio-visual documents on the same level as the works, documents that, otherwise can be accessed via youtube, however, by situating them right beside the “work” (in the way we studied Art History at the University of Barcelona), they turn into a brutal “update” of these works.

Chance, instructions, choreographies or performances are issues that artists are currently working with. And this relation to the present that formed part of the exhibition when it was presented in Stockholm has been circumvented in its journey to Barcelona or it has been done with minimal brushstrokes (read video works of Janine Antoni or Tracey Moffat and Gary Hillberg, without excess complications nor requirements for their installation). And it is a real shame, because performance is present in different exhibition programmes within the city, such as Fabra i Coats or the Fundación Tàpies, but as yet has not managed to mark out a real circuit, beyond being mentioned in the different informative leaflets of these institutions.