Reset, together with Maria Muñoz. Special Portfolio by A*DESK for Bonart (December 2021 – February 2022)

Financing culture

“We understand patronage and philanthropy as a tool for creating capital and social wealth”. Interview with Maite Esteve

“Goteo encompasses access to culture, democratization of financing and the right to sustain long-term citizen projects”. An interview with Olivier Schulbaum – Platoniq / Goteo

“When we speak of cultural industries, we must add the economic element so that cultural agents can make a living”. An interview with Carmen Paez

«El emprendimientos, para cultura y para otras actividades, tiene que estar apoyado por una infrastructura de estado que dé facilidad y flexibilidad”. Entrevista a José Guirao

Documentaries have long been appreciated, not so much for their objective approach to reality, but for being formats that can play (in the broadest sense of the word) with truthfulness and, at the same time, approach the making of or reveal the mechanisms of systems.

The documentary genre (although it would be more accurate to speak of format rather than genre) can become an extraordinary approach to the work of artists. Whether through interviews, records of the creative processes, showing the story behind the works or from more speculative perspectives, documentaries become exceptional mediators that contribute to dissolving the damned “gap” that continues to exist between society and contemporary art.

At the end of 2020, the fourth edition of dart Festival Barcelona was held, “the first documentary film festival dedicated to contemporary art, the main objective of which is to intertwine culture and knowledge with the general public.” In this edition in the midst of the pandemic, dart has managed to find the best ally to make this year’s edition possible: Filmin, the digital distribution platform for audiovisual content that takes the greatest care to offer a catalogue carefully selected to avoid mainstreams and carry out impeccable curatorial work in the selection and presentation of its content.

From this year’s edition we would like a gem (literally) to not go unnoticed: The Proposal (2018) by the North American artist Jill Magid, a complex and ambiguous work, because it is a documentary but also an artistic project in itself. The story begins with Jill Magid’s fascination with the Mexican architect/artist Luis Barragán and the discovery, when going to his House Museum in Mexico, that only the architect’s personal archive is accessible, since the professional archive was acquired by Swiss collectors who keep it in a bunker and with extremely restricted access. After further investigation, Jill discovered that the Barragán archive was offered as an engagement gift by Rolf Fehlbaum, director of the Vitra Museum, to his future wife, Federica Zanco. With a narrative thread based on her correspondence with Federica, Jill traces a path towards making her a proposal: to offer her a ring with a diamond, made from the ashes of the architect Barragán (with the approval of the Barragán family) in exchange for returning the archive to Mexico and making it accessible.

In this way, issues such as the legacy of artists, control, ownership of copyright or access to knowledge are raised through this fascinating story, explained as if it were a novel using cinematic and epistolary resources.

[Article published in Bonart, 2021]

Empathy ADN Blog

…And nature recovered its lost ground: fish in Venice’s canals, deer in the middle of the roads, coyotes on the streets of San Francisco, wild plants pushing their way up through concrete, cleaner air and less noise pollution in cities… The idea was not to leave anyone behind… But it was only a parenthesis, a reminder not deep enough to really revisit the social-natural contract, to learn the animal’s ability to adapt and adopt more complex intelligence models to once and for all assimilate that growth per se cannot be the aim.
Right now it is not the time for megaprojects. The key is the scale, it is changing what we may really touch, to choose minimal gestures for a maximum effect, to apply the notion of arm’s length, equal terms. Intelligence hangs on empathy. Empathy and gratitude.
Gratitude is the title of one of the last essays by Oliver Sacks, in which he wrote the following words: “It is the fate of every human being to be a unique individual, to find his own path, to live his own life, to die his own death (…) My predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved. I have given much and I have given something in return. Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.”
When viewing these days the documentary Oliver Sacks: His own life, we may rediscover a complex, contradictory, vital, passionate and highly empathic personality. Neurologist and writer, Sacks did not want to be a theoretician, but rather stay close to his patients, many of them in very serious and desperate conditions, to ask them “how they were”, to listen to their answers and write their stories. However, it was only after several of his books had reached quite a large audience that the medical establishment started to take his research, which contributed to a better understanding of how the brain works and the diversity of human experience, seriously.
Creative thinking (not only that of male or female artists -by the way, how much we need now to also recover Joseph Beuys!-) is organised along these very same assumptions, it follows individual, idiosyncratic processes, to put oneself “in another’s shoes”, it is transversal, it allows us to see things from renewed points of view… This is the type of thinking that we must put into practice and fight for, the one that will reconcile us with ourselves and with our environment.