Often, art work consists of managing projects, negotiating, convincing and balancing budgets, and those of us who dedicate ourselves to this run the risk of forgetting the most important thing: the artists. They are the ones who give meaning to this whole framework that governs exhibitions, biennials, institutions, art schools and galleries. The art world could exist without critics, without commissioners or without galleries, but not without artists. Sometimes daily tasks make us forget that art is that space of freedom, which allows us to go beyond established limits. Making exhibitions and producing projects is, above all, working with people, with artists, collaborating with them, discussing and also defending them and supporting proposals that may seem like impossible adventures.

“El Viatge Frustrat” by the artist Enric Farrés Duran has just been presented, one of those proposals as wonderful as it is impossible that one can only support unconditionally and, occasionally, contribute experience or common sense. “El Viatge Frustrat” is a project produced by the Cal Cego collection in which the artist and collector set out to recreate the journey to France carried out by the writer Josep Pla and his friend Hermós, as recorded in the story “Un Viatge Frustrat”. While Pla’s journey never took place, Enric Farrés and the collector Josep Inglada did make it, in the middle of August, from Palafrugell to France, in a sailing boat and a small barge in which the artist was towed. Pla’s realistic fiction (with all the details of people, places and weather conditions to give credibility to the story) is contrasted with Farrés’ fictional reality, which, in video format, makes drifts, winks and connections between different places, objects and situations.

In “El Viatge Frustrat” no major events take place. Among the scenes shown we see the small boat being towed, the learning of the card game of butifarra, the visit to a fish market, the preparation of dinner in the houses of friends who welcomed them or the attempt to pick up a cushion that falls into the sea, as a high point of intensity in the film. But through this “nothing much happens” some of the themes (big themes) of today and always parade: the relationship between reality and fiction; the obsession with documenting experiences; productive time versus vacation time; waiting time; the creative potential of moments of inactivity; the demystification of the roles of artist and collector or internationalization as a path to recognition and legitimation but also as a passage from ultra-local references to the big themes of history with a capital H.

[Article published in Bonart, 2016]

One of the contradictions of art is that, even when dealing with themes that directly appeal to issues that affect us, its reflections are often framed in a context that is only accessible to groups of experts.

Sometimes it happens that thematic exhibitions conceived from cultural spaces accustomed to working in a transdisciplinary manner, incorporate artistic works that point out, insist on or illustrate the issues that the exhibition intends to address. And this is where some ambiguous situations arise, such as the selection of works responding to criteria that subordinate their quality to the subject they address. It may happen that in comparison with the level of experimentation, creativity and audacity of the scientific references included in the exhibition, the artistic proposals seem full of good intentions, but somewhat naive. It may also happen that the context of these exhibitions allows us to discover artists who do not move within the art circuit, let’s call it mainstream, of biennials, large events and museums, more or less approved.

There is nothing better than a few examples to illustrate this reflection that came up in the wake of the exhibition +Humanos. The Future of our Species, organised by the Science Gallery of Trinity College Dublin and presented at the CCCB in Barcelona. +Humanos critically explores the advances and risks of the technological changes we are currently experiencing, proposing various possible paths in which this relationship can be resolved in this post-human future to which we are heading.

In this context, scientific discoveries and experiments, design prototypes, playful proposals and artistic works are shown at the same level, among which anecdotal projects coexist alongside proposals with a broad research base and an impeccable conceptual and formal resolution. And as an example, Addie Wagenknecht and Regina José Galindo address the issue of female stereotypes, but while the former produces spectral images generated from computer algorithms, the latter subjects her own physique to a severe diagnosis by the best specialist in cosmetic surgery in Venezuela, who does not hesitate to point out with a marker on the artist’s body all the plastic interventions he would perform to make her physique fit the ideal parameters of beauty.

Julijonas Urbonas’s “Euthanasia Roller Coaster” is another example that opens an intellectual, ethical and artistic debate with a prototype to resolve the issue of euthanasia. It is an imaginary machine, in the form of a roller coaster, designed based on studies of the body’s reactions in various circumstances, to subject passengers to a series of intense movements that generate unrepeatable experiences that go from euphoria, loss of consciousness and finally death.

[Article published in Bonart, 2016]

Aballí is a long distant runner. Discrete be nature, generous, open to dialogue and with a sense of humour that isn’t obvious but is very much present. For decades now he has been methodically developing a solid body of work that is very much his own. He is a figure who acts as a bridge between artists, critics, curators and gallerists of quite different generations and for this, a key element in the Spanish artistic ecosystem. His work in the last few years has moved through painting (or its impossibility), text, photography, installation, film, and video, amongst others, and has explored subjects as relevant as the conventions of art and the relations between its cultural and economic value.

At A*DESK this month we’re exploring the notion of failure. I’d like you to talk about the idea of the impossibility (of painting, of classification, of making anything new…) for how long has it been a motor driving your work.

The concepts of error and correction form part of my basic vocabulary, as evidenced by the fact of using a material like Tipp-Ex or having made work out of the contents of a wastepaper bin, the supposed destination of errors and failures. For a while now I have had the sensation that there is always a distance between what I’ve wanted to do and what I’ve finally ended up doing. I’m not sure if this is failure or what drives you to keep on trying.

And on the way you find things and materials that you incorporate into your practice.

The pot of Tipp-Ex was an object I had on my table and I thought that it was very much like a bottle of paint and that in some way or other, one could also paint with its brush. But it was important to do so without forgetting that it was a liquid that served to correct, and it was fundamental to incorporate this condition into the work. Hence, there is a series of works titled “Correction” and “Grave Mistake”. Like others I have used, this material makes you reflect about an aspect of the work linked to its specific material condition.

On occasions you have written about the “artists of NO”, like Bartleby, “preferring not to do it” that remits to the impossibility of making anything new, to the idea that everything has been done, and it’s only possible to remake and recombine. Where therefore does one situate the role and work of the artist?

Here one finds a new contradiction that one saw on visiting the exhibition at the Reina Sofía that is full of things… It’s difficult to resist commitments, on a daily business. You want to do the least possible, and you end up doing more than you wanted. I consider the work of the artist, like any other form of work. The difference undoubtedly lies in that this work is less structured. You decide how you organize yourself, and you probably won’t find two artists who develop their practice in the same way. But beyond that I see it like any other form of work.

I imagine when you made the lists with the newspaper cuttings you had to establish working routines.

These routines help me to establish certain methodologies that enable me to construct my day to day. Often when I got home and they asked me “what have you done today?” I couldn’t find a convincing reply, because often I hadn’t produced anything, and didn’t really know what I had been doing in the studio. At the same time, I believe these apparently unproductive spaces of not doing anything and of thinking are important. But establishing tasks and a timetable, knowing that at least you will cut up some newspapers, enables you to be in contact with the work and to carry on constructing your discourse.

Aside from your work, you are a key agent in the artistic ecosystem of this country for your links with artists of different generations.

I value a lot my relations with other artists, be they older, from my generation, or much younger than me, but it’s true I have a tendency to connect with the younger generation, perhaps because for many years I’ve been teaching, and it has been easy to retain links with them. I’m very curious to know about what they are doing, what they think, how they understand the practice of art, the music they are listening to, and what they are reading. The contact with them, just as with your children, helps you to stay connected with a much more alive and current reality.

The exhibition you are presenting currently at the Reina Sofia brings together the last 10 years of your career (with some earlier references), and I suppose it allows you to take stock.

One can see a group of works that allow you to take stock and above all helps to decide how to continue. In the exhibition there are new works that point not to a distant but an immediate future. I’m happy with the exhibition because it shows in a fairly broad and representative manner all the types of work, the subjects that have interested me, the obsessions…but now, it’s necessary to carry on. It’s a moment for thought and reflection. But there is one thing I like, and that is I already the next exhibition scheduled, that will be in the Fundació Miró next summer, so immediately the mind kicks back into action again.

You’ve spent periods of time with lists, with the skies, with boxes of colours… What are you working with at the moment?

The latest works I have done that can be seen in the Reina are, on the one hand, a video that reflects on the history of art, made with some slides a teacher gave me who no longer used them. I left them for a year and a half in the window, and the sunlight modified the colours. The idea is to present a history of art that is as erroneous as possible from a historical point of view, in the sense there is no chronological order, the photographs can’t be seen clearly, they are all badly positioned, the selection was given to me, and is not made according to any logical criteria…That is to say, there are a series of questions that try to suggest another vision of the past, of art history, but from the point of view of error and failure.

Another more recent work titled “Twenty words, three times” is made by constructing words with typefaces, printed with lead letters. A list of twenty words is repeated in three different typefaces. It’s like an index that situates the limits of my work, the subjects, and basic concepts. On the one hand, depending on the typeface, the words change, and on the other, they become a three-dimensional, sculptural, and solid object that represents something as immaterial and abstract as words themselves. At the same time, I believe the way the exhibition is conceived is in itself innovative.

For a long time you have worked with newspapers, that was a way of staying in contact with, let’s say, a mediated reality. How do you relate to the present actuality?

Until now it was a contact through newspapers. In the exhibition, I’ve wanted to show not just all the lists, but all the lines of work that have derived from this object. I have shown it through the originals, the archive of collages I have made, that afterwards are amplified and end up being the work. With the idea also of showing all that it has yielded and posing the question of whether what began more than fifteen years ago all ends here, with this presentation. Another option would be to end it when the newspaper stops existing as an object. But while I was thinking about this, when I was in Madrid I carried on buying the newspaper, and I have cut out some things. Consequently, I believe it will be a process that will require a certain amount of time. On the other hand, the link with reality is also present in other works that have to do with the everyday, with gestures and things you find in daily life.

And humour? Does it play an important part in your work?

I believe that some works propose situations or aspects of daily life that in the end can be read humorously, the humour of the absurd or with irony. I believe this forms part of my work, maybe not explicitly, like some political aspects, but they are one more element that it is possible to read.

Where do you place yourself given the critical situation culture is experiencing at this time, when it is considered increasingly as something that isn’t necessary and identified with the cultural industry and has a tough time?

It’s complicated. The tendency is to consider it as one more branch of the spectacle, with all that this implies, of having to satisfy a public, comply with numbers of visitors and sales, when the work poses quite the contrary. This doesn’t mean to say one shouldn’t carry on, but undoubtedly it will be harder to find an outlet for it.

You are in contact with much younger artists for whom an institutional exhibition is sometimes not the main objective so much as they doing other things in different places…

I believe we are at an interesting moment of self-organisation, and establishing alternatives to the official route. I’m interested in their approach, how they contemplate diffusion and their relations with the structures of the art scene. I’m not sure if this is just a consequence of the period of crisis, in which unavoidably you have to reconsider relations with the established structures, or if it is something more profound. Undoubtedly many of these artists will begin to work with galleries and will exhibit in institutions or art centres, but it’s good to see that this is not the only outlet. These alternative spaces make sense and are more often than not carrying out a better programme. I also find it positive that they are proposing a new Association of Artists, adapted to this new period and with the desire to continue to improve the conditions for artists in Catalonia.

Do you think that the structures of art, the institutions, galleries and magazines are sufficiently porous, that they are adapting rapidly to the new map of needs of artists and society?

Possibly not, but I don’t think everyone has to react at the same speed. Galleries, art centres, and magazines have to be attentive and closely follow a very volatile and fluctuating scene. It is not necessary certainly for a museum to have this link with the immediate present. Its role is to look at things with a greater perspective, to give a long-term view. The work of the museum revising the past is also important, to question the reading of the present and to propose subjects that can have an impact on the problems and debates constructed in the present.

“YOU’D LIKE TO DO THE LEAST POSSIBLE AND YOU END UP MAKING MORE THAN YOU’D LIKE”. AN INTERVIEW WITH IGNASI ABALLÍ

Aballí is a long distant runner. Discrete be nature, generous, open to dialogue and with a sense of humour that isn’t obvious but is very much present. For decades now he has been methodically developing a solid body of work that is very much his own. He is a figure who acts as a bridge between artists, critics, curators and gallerists of quite different generations and for this, a key element in the Spanish artistic ecosystem. His work in the last few years has moved through painting (or its impossibility), text, photography, installation, film, and video, amongst others, and has explored subjects as relevant as the conventions of art and the relations between its cultural and economic value.

At A*DESK this month we’re exploring the notion of failure. I’d like you to talk about the idea of the impossibility (of painting, of classification, of making anything new…) for how long has it been a motor driving your work.

The concepts of error and correction form part of my basic vocabulary, as evidenced by the fact of using a material like Tipp-Ex or having made work out of the contents of a wastepaper bin, the supposed destination of errors and failures. For a while now I have had the sensation that there is always a distance between what I’ve wanted to do and what I’ve finally ended up doing. I’m not sure if this is failure or what drives you to keep on trying.

And on the way you find things and materials that you incorporate into your practice.

The pot of Tipp-Ex was an object I had on my table and I thought that it was very much like a bottle of paint and that in some way or other, one could also paint with its brush. But it was important to do so without forgetting that it was a liquid that served to correct, and it was fundamental to incorporate this condition into the work. Hence, there is a series of works titled “Correction” and “Grave Mistake”. Like others I have used, this material makes you reflect about an aspect of the work linked to its specific material condition.

On occasions you have written about the “artists of NO”, like Bartleby, “preferring not to do it” that remits to the impossibility of making anything new, to the idea that everything has been done, and it’s only possible to remake and recombine. Where therefore does one situate the role and work of the artist?

Here one finds a new contradiction that one saw on visiting the exhibition at the Reina Sofía that is full of things… It’s difficult to resist commitments, on a daily business. You want to do the least possible, and you end up doing more than you wanted. I consider the work of the artist, like any other form of work. The difference undoubtedly lies in that this work is less structured. You decide how you organize yourself, and you probably won’t find two artists who develop their practice in the same way. But beyond that I see it like any other form of work.

I imagine when you made the lists with the newspaper cuttings you had to establish working routines.

These routines help me to establish certain methodologies that enable me to construct my day to day. Often when I got home and they asked me “what have you done today?” I couldn’t find a convincing reply, because often I hadn’t produced anything, and didn’t really know what I had been doing in the studio. At the same time, I believe these apparently unproductive spaces of not doing anything and of thinking are important. But establishing tasks and a timetable, knowing that at least you will cut up some newspapers, enables you to be in contact with the work and to carry on constructing your discourse.

Aside from your work, you are a key agent in the artistic ecosystem of this country for your links with artists of different generations.

I value a lot my relations with other artists, be they older, from my generation, or much younger than me, but it’s true I have a tendency to connect with the younger generation, perhaps because for many years I’ve been teaching, and it has been easy to retain links with them. I’m very curious to know about what they are doing, what they think, how they understand the practice of art, the music they are listening to, and what they are reading. The contact with them, just as with your children, helps you to stay connected with a much more alive and current reality.

The exhibition you are presenting currently at the Reina Sofia brings together the last 10 years of your career (with some earlier references), and I suppose it allows you to take stock.

One can see a group of works that allow you to take stock and above all helps to decide how to continue. In the exhibition there are new works that point not to a distant but an immediate future. I’m happy with the exhibition because it shows in a fairly broad and representative manner all the types of work, the subjects that have interested me, the obsessions…but now, it’s necessary to carry on. It’s a moment for thought and reflection. But there is one thing I like, and that is I already the next exhibition scheduled, that will be in the Fundació Miró next summer, so immediately the mind kicks back into action again.

You’ve spent periods of time with lists, with the skies, with boxes of colours… What are you working with at the moment?

The latest works I have done that can be seen in the Reina are, on the one hand, a video that reflects on the history of art, made with some slides a teacher gave me who no longer used them. I left them for a year and a half in the window, and the sunlight modified the colours. The idea is to present a history of art that is as erroneous as possible from a historical point of view, in the sense there is no chronological order, the photographs can’t be seen clearly, they are all badly positioned, the selection was given to me, and is not made according to any logical criteria…That is to say, there are a series of questions that try to suggest another vision of the past, of art history, but from the point of view of error and failure.

Another more recent work titled “Twenty words, three times” is made by constructing words with typefaces, printed with lead letters. A list of twenty words is repeated in three different typefaces. It’s like an index that situates the limits of my work, the subjects, and basic concepts. On the one hand, depending on the typeface, the words change, and on the other, they become a three-dimensional, sculptural, and solid object that represents something as immaterial and abstract as words themselves. At the same time, I believe the way the exhibition is conceived is in itself innovative.

For a long time you have worked with newspapers, that was a way of staying in contact with, let’s say, a mediated reality. How do you relate to the present actuality?

Until now it was a contact through newspapers. In the exhibition, I’ve wanted to show not just all the lists, but all the lines of work that have derived from this object. I have shown it through the originals, the archive of collages I have made, that afterwards are amplified and end up being the work. With the idea also of showing all that it has yielded and posing the question of whether what began more than fifteen years ago all ends here, with this presentation. Another option would be to end it when the newspaper stops existing as an object. But while I was thinking about this, when I was in Madrid I carried on buying the newspaper, and I have cut out some things. Consequently, I believe it will be a process that will require a certain amount of time. On the other hand, the link with reality is also present in other works that have to do with the everyday, with gestures and things you find in daily life.

And humour? Does it play an important part in your work?

I believe that some works propose situations or aspects of daily life that in the end can be read humorously, the humour of the absurd or with irony. I believe this forms part of my work, maybe not explicitly, like some political aspects, but they are one more element that it is possible to read.

Where do you place yourself given the critical situation culture is experiencing at this time, when it is considered increasingly as something that isn’t necessary and identified with the cultural industry and has a tough time?

It’s complicated. The tendency is to consider it as one more branch of the spectacle, with all that this implies, of having to satisfy a public, comply with numbers of visitors and sales, when the work poses quite the contrary. This doesn’t mean to say one shouldn’t carry on, but undoubtedly it will be harder to find an outlet for it.

You are in contact with much younger artists for whom an institutional exhibition is sometimes not the main objective so much as they doing other things in different places…

I believe we are at an interesting moment of self-organisation, and establishing alternatives to the official route. I’m interested in their approach, how they contemplate diffusion and their relations with the structures of the art scene. I’m not sure if this is just a consequence of the period of crisis, in which unavoidably you have to reconsider relations with the established structures, or if it is something more profound. Undoubtedly many of these artists will begin to work with galleries and will exhibit in institutions or art centres, but it’s good to see that this is not the only outlet. These alternative spaces make sense and are more often than not carrying out a better programme. I also find it positive that they are proposing a new Association of Artists, adapted to this new period and with the desire to continue to improve the conditions for artists in Catalonia.

Do you think that the structures of art, the institutions, galleries and magazines are sufficiently porous, that they are adapting rapidly to the new map of needs of artists and society?

Possibly not, but I don’t think everyone has to react at the same speed. Galleries, art centres, and magazines have to be attentive and closely follow a very volatile and fluctuating scene. It is not necessary certainly for a museum to have this link with the immediate present. Its role is to look at things with a greater perspective, to give a long-term view. The work of the museum revising the past is also important, to question the reading of the present and to propose subjects that can have an impact on the problems and debates constructed in the present.

Origins, influences and, finally, the decisions we make are the three main elements that contribute to defining our identity as individuals and also as collectives. They are great themes for great reflections. And also for artists to explore the cracks between identities constructed by individuals and collectives and official narratives. Many examples come to mind related to the construction of individual identity (Gillian Wearing starring in photographic portraits characterized as the different members of her family); racial (Adrian Piper delving into the ambiguity allowed by his own specificity of mixing two races); sexual (Valie Export breaking taboos related to women or Giusseppe Campuzano with his project “The Transvestite Museum of Peru”). We also think of political identity (with all the works focused on post-colonialism, or, more radically, Núria Güell’s will to be legally declared stateless).

Sometimes, by taking distance, a more precise analysis can be carried out. But what one does not expect is that an exhibition about Star Wars would pose an in-depth reflection on this subject: who we are and how we become who we are. This is what Star Wars. Identities does. An exhibition organized by George Lucas’ studios conceived as a cultural consumer product, currently touring various European countries, which works with impeccable effectiveness at various levels and is organized around ten sections (taking the inputs that make us who we are: species, genes, parents, culture, mentors, friends, events, occupations, personality and values) that repeat modules composed of preparatory sketches from the Star Wars saga to define the characters, models and costumes of the characters, an interactive part in which visitors can configure the identity of a character they have previously chosen and, most interesting, some brief introductory videos made at the Montreal Science Centre by specialists in genetics, neuropsychology, psychology and sociology that aim to answer some fundamental questions: How is identity defined? Is it biological? Is it cultural? Or is it people and events that influence us throughout our lives? Are our choices what determine who we are?

As I said, let’s start with Luke Skywalker and Anakin Skywalker to reflect on ourselves. Where we come from, how we were raised, our influences and, ultimately, our choices are what make us who we are, both individually and collectively.

[Article published in Bonart, 2015]

The future worlds or the futures of the world that Okwui Enwezor points out at the 56th edition of the Venice Biennale are not exactly optimistic, but dark, confusing, motley, unjust and full of inequalities. We are heading towards George Orwell’s 1984, thirty-one years later than the British writer predicted and with a more colourful but equally totalitarian appearance. The power of corporations and the control to which we are all subjected grow by leaps and bounds in parallel with the ease of access to information, although not necessarily to knowledge. And this maximum control is directly proportional to the infantilisation of society. Promoted by the rise of the digital environment and video games, there is a process of gamification, that is, the use of techniques and dynamics typical of games, which affects all fields, from education to the business field, passing through communications. Everything must be pleasant, playful and entertaining, it must guarantee immediate enjoyment and reward and, above all, it must not make you think too much.

The world of culture and art are not immune to these processes and dichotomies: very large and powerful institutions or very small and fragile initiatives fighting for their survival. And in between, almost nothing. The Venice Biennale itself is a perfect example of a machinery of legitimation and assured profitability, of noise and rapid consumption and entertainment for hordes of visitors/tourists, and depending on who the guest curator is, of more or less rigorous content, but always in relation to this background.

While it is true that this polarization of which we spoke occurs in society and culture (the example par excellence would be the construction of the Louvre or Guggenheim franchises in Abu Dhabi) it is also true that detecting these mechanisms and making them public is the best way to raise awareness and take action. The artist Daniel García Andújar was aware of this some time ago when he started the Technologies to the People project in 1996, a fake of a company that allowed access to new technologies and the information society and that showed its strategies of control and repression. There is no doubt that there is a gamification and infantilisation of society, but it is also a fact that access to communication technologies makes collective organisation and reaction possible. We see it in culture and we are also seeing it in politics.

Apple made an advert in 1984 to present its first model of Macintosh computer. It was directed by Ridley Scott and featured a sportswoman dressed in red shorts and a white T-shirt who, carrying a hammer, appeared running among a grey, uniform audience, throwing it and making a large screen explode on which “Big Brother” appeared with his authoritarian and hypnotising speech. “You will see that 1984 will not be like 1984” was the slogan that we should now make our own so that the 21st century is not like 1984.

[Article published in Bonart, 2015]

http://a-desk.org/highlights/THE-VENICE-BIENNALE-IN-12-NOTES.html

All the World’s Futures is a colossal and motley biennale, that doesn’t give a moment’s respite, nor, of course, leave anyone indifferent. One way of fighting against this situation of accumulation, under the assumption it’s not possible to see everything, is to let oneself go and define a pathway with which to try to discover, more than to recognise. This is the desire of this mini-dictionary, that it goes without saying, has no pretentions of being encyclopaedic.

ABSENCES A short note added to the guide of the biennale bears witness to a couple of absences due to political-economic conflicts: the 16 and 23 April 2015, the Federal Republic of Nigeria and the Republic of Kenya, respectively renounced their participation due to the exceptional situation caused by Boko Haram in the first case and the quasi purchasing of the pavilion by a Chinese art gallery, with the intention of exhibiting solely artists of that nationality in the second.

ANGELUS NOVUS Or the beginning of everything. The painting by Paul Klee with the same title, the angel of history that looks at the past, at the chain of events that gives rise to history, but which is driven towards the future, by a tempest that Walter Benjamin (in Theses of the philosophy of history) called progress, is the point of departure of this biennale, curated by Okwui Enwezor. The need to look at history to endeavour to understand the present and the future (a fairly disheartening future, by the way) is the essence of this 56th edition of the biennale.

ARENA Is one of the grand ventures of Enwezor, to underline both the spatial and temporal incidence of the exhibition. Performances, film, theatre, discussions, readings, presentations and lectures are proposed as elements to activate the exhibition as it unfurls over time.

DAS KAPITAL Or the be all and end all. Welcome to Marx Reloaded, read, interpreted, analysed, deconstructed or referenced it becomes one of the main axes of the whole biennale. In short the economy and work as keys to understand the present and perhaps the future.

FORCEFULNESS Art as a shock therapy, that doesn’t endeavour to be amiable so much as stir up awareness, without necessarily resorting to violence, nor shouting, given that a whisper can often have the same effect. In this sense the intervention in the Giardini by Raqs Media Collective or that of Raimond Chaves/Gilda Mantilla in the Peruvian Pavilion, for example, resulted as as powerful as the knives rammed into the ground by Abdel Abdeseemed.

GLOBAL WORLD Already in Documenta 12 of Kassel, Enwezor proposed opening up to a large cultural diversity, a tendency he has followed and even incremented in Venice. For which one is grateful.

HISTORIC POSITIONS Extensive presentations of key artists or referential figures, such as Harun Farocki, Bruce Nauman, Marcel Broodthaers, Fabio Mauri, Chris Marker, Alexander Kluge, Hans Haacke, Robert Smithson or Adrian Piper, amongst others contributed to trace thematic or artistic genealogies.

HOSTILE FUTURE The 56th edition of the Venice Biennale evidenced (particularly during the professional preview days the contradictions between the crude discourse of the event and the glamour of the contemporary art jet-set. It also remains curious the large quantity of artistic proposals that revolve around the re-vindication of certain fundamental rights, achieved at the beginning of the century or already in the 70s, which are now in peril.

NATIONAL PAVILIONS Questioned at the beginning of 2000, the idea of the national pavilions is once again a relevant subject not so much for their validity so much as because their questioning became a theme in itself. As is the case of the Belgian Pavilion in which the artist Vincent Meessen opened it up to multiple voices, inviting other international artists to place the colonial past of the country in the forefront, directly linking in with the founding moments of the biennale.

TREES .. burnt, displaced, split, dejected…are a constant in several national pavilions as much as in the central exhibition. From the land art of Robert Smithson to the “mobile” trees by Céleste Boursier-Mougenot in the French Pavilion, amongst many others, there is an important number of proposals recouping and bringing up to date the preoccupations of land art and arte povera.

VENICE Unreal, uncomfortable, excessive, decadent and a theme park. Venice is not just a background so much at times contributes to accentuate the contrasts and contradictions between reality and its representation.

WHAT’S REAL Reality imposes itself and social and political conflicts appear not just as representations. So, a group of Ukranians occupied the Russian pavilion for a few hours, while the Guggenheim Foundation was barricaded by union members in protest against the working conditions in the Guggenheim of Abu Dhabi. And the authorities decided to close the mosque created by Christoph Büchel in the Icelandic Pavilion (in the Catholic Church of Santa Maria de la Misericordia) for “converting it into a place of workshop rather than a work of art” (one which in some way was completed with this intervention).

EXTRA BONUS Just for them a visit to the biennale is worth a visit: the emotional memory of Ashes by Steve McQueen in the Arsenale; the subtle dialogue with the architecture by Heimo Zobering in the Austrian Pavilion; the bravery and generational shift of the Spanish Pavilion with Martí Manen as curator and Francesc Ruiz, Cabello/Carceller y Pepo Salazar as artists under the shadow of the most mediatic Dalí; the rich historical, musical and literary references of Graham Fagen in the Scottish Pavilion (as part of the Collateral Events) and, last but not least, Hito Steyerl, one of the artists present in the German Pavilion, exploring a world in which images transfer reality to the virtual sphere.

The idea of ​​testimony, of confession, speaking in the first person to narrate one’s own experience, as an expression of subjectivity or as an exposition of the intimate is a way of transmitting truthfulness. We see it in books, in documentaries, in television programmes and also in the works of artists. At a time when reality appears constructed, mediatised and virtualised, what we are often left with is the “here and now”, the most personal experiences and the relationship with others. The artist Sophie Calle, who we can see in an exhibition these days at the Virreina. Centro de la Imagen in Barcelona, ​​is a good example of this. Calle writes fragments of her biography, which are true slices of life: she has herself followed by a detective; she invites people to sleep with her and tell her stories; she shares a letter about a break-up and asks more than a hundred women from very different professions to analyse it, interpret it, comment on it and sing it, if they consider it appropriate.

In Calle’s case, it is very difficult to separate the professional from the personal, probably because she works the circumstances of her life as a form of artistic approach: she asks for love letters to be written for her, commissions her biography from a professional writer or films as fiction the love story that she confesses is the most authentic she has ever had. Calle is the protagonist of her own novel and also of others such as Leviathan by Paul Auster, in which she is not hard to recognize in the character of Maria Turner or in the story “Because she didn’t ask for it” from the book Explorers of the Abyss by Enrique VIla-Matas.

But Calle is not the only one. The American artist Jill Magid also likes to see herself as “the protagonist of someone else’s novel.” In 2007 Jill Magid returned to her city after having spent five years abroad. Since she lives in Brooklyn, she takes the subway often and is amazed every time she hears the announcement over the loudspeaker that “for security reasons” any passenger may be subject to a search. Without hesitation, Jill approaches an officer and asks him to search her. The policeman’s refusal leads to an agreement: the possibility that the artist will accompany him during his night patrols. The worlds to which the protagonists of this story belong could not be more different, but the fascination is mutual and she writes a diary that records all her impressions during the patrol shifts.

Calle, Magid and many other artists use strategies of (self)representation, they move in the realm of the private, they focus on the everyday, the intimate, the affective, the emotional and the confessional. They put the self at the centre of the discourse in order, in essence, to speak about all of us.

[Article published in Bonart, 2015]