The Espai 13 programme for the 2016-17 season, One Foot Out. Expeditions and Diasporas, features six works produced on the periphery of the usual circuits of contemporary art. Halfway through the programme, essayist and writer Eloy Fernández Porta addresses the notion of periphery in seven pieces of short fiction.
Continue reading Citizens of Neitherbarnormad
The explanation is as follows: to consider a risk involves calculating. It’s true that this is probably determined by the verb to consider, but it is no less true that the noblest of things (in Montaigne’s terms) tend to deprecate risk. They don’t ‘consider’ it. Or not much. Risk in art is nothing in itself. At the most, it is a subsidiary element to other deeper things, by no means an ultimate goal. Does risk really mean anything at all in art? Isn’t risk simply a token of what we had previously been determined to do?
Continue reading The Curse of Saying
‘Have you ever dreamed about Miró?’ The first question that the participants from Susoespai asked us sounded easy enough to answer and not particularly awkward; however, it shook the invisible threads that had the potential to bind us together. The Cruïlles project offered an opportunity to be involved in a joint participatory experience: an exchange of letters written between members of the Fundació staff and participants from Susoespai.
Continue reading Cruïlles, Crossroads: A Correspondence
I placed the objects, the performers and the visitors at the same level, pushing the concept of uncertainty a bit further by not choosing all the performers myself, but instead openly inviting the viewers to participate and seeing what unforeseen relationships would emerge.
Continue reading Responses at an exhibition
Art requires our attention and our effort, like chess, for which we may know the basic rules, but if we are to truly enjoy it, we need to have experience – some form of training –, commitment, and an open attitude towards the infinite paths it can open up before us.
Continue reading The Challenge of Thinking
‘I play chess day and night. I like painting less and less,’ stated Marcel Duchamp in 1923 after finishing one of his great works, Le Grand Verre (The Large Glass). It is impossible to separate the painter from the chess player, because Duchamp’s art was always in check, and he viewed this mental sport as a source of creativity.
Continue reading Art in Check: Passion and Obsession
In the 1930s, assemblages, constructions and collages made with unconventional materials led Miró to produce three-dimensional work. His powerful attraction to the object was the first step towards the construction of poetic and dramatically violent images – and a path of artistic subversion leading to the transformation of the object into sculpture.
Continue reading The Eroticism of Objects
Living abroad means having time stand still in one place while it speeds up somewhere else. It isn’t the effect of jet lag or of different time zones. A capricious, subjective internal sense of time stirs up emotions and changes priorities. Who do we belong to? Where do we belong? Psychologists and sociologists who have considered the matter in depth would speak of it with more authority, but it would be terribly boring to take the intuitions that a new life can give us and sum them up in a scientific headline, wouldn’t it?
Continue reading From leaving as a learning experience to ‘Muna’s Journey’