LONGITUDES

Longitudes cuts across Latitudes’ projects and research with news, updates, and reportage.

'Compositions' a programme of five artists' interventions for the second Barcelona Gallery Weekend, 29 September–2 October 2016

 Tue, Sep 20 2016

Compositions presents five artistic interventions in unique sites across the neighbourhoods of the city of Barcelona. Each of the commissioned artists is represented by a gallery participating in the second edition of the Barcelona Gallery Weekend.

Curated by Latitudes for the second time (see 2015 edition), the project further explores Barcelona as a rich fabric of the historic and the contemporary, the unfamiliar and the conspicuous. Resisting an overall theme, and instead developing from the artists’ responses to the specificity of each context—people, as well as places—the five art projects form a temporary thread that links evocative locations and public space, running parallel to the Weekend’s exhibitions in galleries and museums. 

In its second edition, Composiciones will present interventions by Lúa Coderch (Club Billar Barcelona); Regina Giménez (Antigua Fábrica de Can Trinxet, L’Hospitalet de Llobregat); Lola Lasurt (Biblioteca Pública Arús); Robert Llimós (connecting all the participating galleries) and Wilfredo Prieto (Unitat Muntada de la Guàrdia Urbana de Barcelona). Their projects will offer moments of intermission, intimacy and bewilderment throughout the weekend, highlighting some lesser-known aspects of the city’s cultural heritage and municipal life.

Interior of the Club Billar Barcelona. Photo: Courtesy Club Billar Barcelona.
 Zoom in a map here.

Intervention by Lúa Coderch – Club Billar Barcelona
Gran Via de les Corts Catalanes, 595-599
08007 Barcelona

Public transport:
Metro: Passeig de Gràcia (L2, L3, L4)
Bus: 7, 50, 54, 67, 68, H12

Opening hours:
Thursday 29 September: 5–9pm
Friday 30 September, Saturday 1 and Sunday 2 October: 11am–7pm 

Lúa Coderch’s project for the Compositions programme brings a mysterious and improbable apparition to life in the home of the Club de Billar Barcelona. Beneath the Teatre Coliseum in Gran Vía there is a rainbow. Coderch guides sunlight and a spectrum of colours down into the underground gaming space with a series of precisely positioned mirrors and prisms as if evoking the mechanics, geometry and artistry involved in billiards. Accompanying the rainbow is a turntable and a transparent vinyl record that can be used to play an audio recording of a female voice. This voice narrates and interprets what can be seen in front of us, and the process that led to its appearance. The title of her intervention, “The Rainbow Statement” (2016), refers to one of the verbal tricks used by fortune-tellers and clairvoyants in ‘cold reading’ an individual’s life or personality. Suggestively nebulous assertions maximize the chance of apparently specific and meaningful paranormal insights hitting the mark. “The Rainbow Statement” is either an experiment of the imagination or a phenomenon of optical science with which Coderch seems to have invented a form of psychic meteorology, or spectral physics.

Sunday 2 October, 12am: 
Free guided visit by the Lúa Coderch and Latitudes at the Club Billar Barcelona, Gran Via de les Corts Catalanes, 595-599.

Interior of the Biblioteca Pública Arús.
Zoom in a map here.

Intervention by Lola Lasurt  –  Biblioteca Pública Arús
Passeig de Sant Joan, 26
08010 Barcelona

Opening hours:
Thursday 29 September: 5–9pm;
Friday 30 September: 11am–7pm;
Saturday 1 October: 11am–2pm;
Sunday 2 October: CLOSED;
Monday 3 October: 11am–6pm;
Tuesday 4 October: 11am–6pm.
 
Public transport:
Metro: Arc de Triomf (L1)
Rodalies: R1, R3, R4 Arc de Triomf
Bus: 19, 51, 55, B20, B25, N4, N11

For her intervention for the Compositions programme, Lola Lasurt has collaborated with the Biblioteca Pública Arús, a study centre founded in 1895 with an outstanding collection related to the labour movement, anarchism, Freemasonry and Sherlock Holmes. The project centres on a series of grisaille paintings that form a pictorial frieze that hangs from the balcony above a presentation of books in the Arús’s display cases. Under the title “Donació” (Donation), 2016, Lasurt departs from 135 publications that once formed the personal library of Assumpta Corbera Santanach that were gifted in 2010 to the Arús after her death. Corbera Santanach identified as a feminist and a Freemason; she was not a public figure. Yet the impulse of Lasurt’s project is not primarily biographic or historiographic, but bibliographic and pictorial. Accordingly, “Donació” attempts to narrate changes in social and cultural attitudes through the selection and redrafting of images that appear on the pages of the bibliographic bequest. Treating the publications as an intimate accumulation of ‘alternative’ knowledge and a representation of a self-education, Lasurt is interested in the portrayal of a private political imagination in the midst of what is now a public collection. – Latitudes

Thursday 29 September, 6pm: 

 Free guided visit by Lola Lasurt and Latitudes at the Biblioteca Pública Arús, Passeig de Sant Joan, 26.

 Interior of Can Trinxet factory in L'Hospitalet de Llobregat.
 Zoom in a map here.
Intervention by Regina Giménez will take place at the Antigua fábrica textil Can Trinxet
c/ Santa Eulàlia 182–212
08902 L’Hospitalet de Llobregat (Barcelona)

Opening hours:
Thursday 29 September: 5–8pm
Friday 30 September, Saturday 1 and Sunday 2 October: 11am–7pm

Public transport:
Metro: Santa Eulàlia o Torrassa (L1)
Bus: L16, L52, L82, L85, LH1, N13

The manufacturing and printing of textiles formed the basis of the industrial revolution in Catalunya. Beyond the actual fabric, it is the machinery of its production and the people who operated it—especially women—that underpin Regina Giménez’s presentation of her graphic works as part of the Compositions programme. Taking place in one of the buildings that comprise Can Trinxet, a former textile factory complex that once employed the largest workforce in L’Hospitalet de Llobregat, Giménez’s intervention comprises painted compositions that are derived from schematic representations of machines and their components. Her abstractions have been applied on transparent panels that lean against a scarred factory wall, becoming devices that reanimate the marks and memories embedded in the building. An accompanying poster evokes the clamour that once would have filled the workshop in typographic form. Giménez has titled her project "La Constancia" (2016) in tribute to the labour union that called a general strike in 1913 to protest the conditions of the female and child workers who undertook the textile industry’s most monotonous and arduous tasks. – Latitudes

Friday 30 September, 12am:

Free guided visit by Regina Giménez and Latitudes at Can Trinxet, c/ Santa Eulàlia 182–212, L’Hospitalet de Llobregat.

Zoom in map here.

Robert Llimós' intervention will connect all the participating galleries of the Barcelona Gallery Weekend. 

Hours:
Thursday 29 September: 5–9pm
Friday 30 September, Saturday 1 and Sunday 2 October: 11am–7pm

Robert Llimós presents a new version of an action that was originally created in the summer of 1972. One of the very few performative works of an artist primarily known for his paintings and sculptures, "Los Corredores" (The Runners) was first realized as part of the legendary avant-garde art festival known as Los Encuentros de Pamplona (The Pamplona Encounters). On that occasion, three people dressed in identical running gear speed-walked throughout the city, connecting the various venues of the festival. As his project for the Composiciones programme, Llimós’s Los Corredores is now restaged on the streets of Barcelona. Three athletes criss-cross the city, seemingly rushing to see every venue of the Gallery Weekend. As in Pamplona, the white sports kits have been adorned by Llimós with black diagonal brushstrokes that symbolize the idea of painting. At times the speed-walking trio carry flowers, or have their ankles joined with elastic ribbon—a painting-as-workout that has left the studio for the street with decoration, discipline, and a dynamic sense of urgency. – Latitudes 

Friday 30 September, 5pm:  
Free guided visit by Robert Llimós and Latitudes. Meeting point: BlueProject Foundation, c/Princesa 57.
Façade of the Unitat Muntada de la Guàrdia Urbana de Barcelona in Parc de la Ciutadella.
Location of the Unitat Muntada in the southeastern part of the Parc de la Ciutadella. Zoom in a map here.

The intervention by Wilfredo Prieto will take place at the Unitat Muntada de la Guàrdia Urbana de Barcelona (Barcelona City Police Stables)
c/ Wellington s/n 
08018 Barcelona

Public transport:
Metro: Vil·la Olímpica (L4)  
Tram: Ciutadella–Vil·la Olímpica (just opposite)
Bus: 36, 59, 92, N0, V21, V27

Opening hours:
Thursday 29 September: CLOSED
Friday 30 September, Saturday 1 and Sunday 2 October: 11–12am*
[*] Doors open daily at 10:30am. Kindly note that a photo ID (DNI or passport) is required to enter.]
  
Conceived by Wilfredo Prieto as his project for the Composiciones programme, "Pantalones rotos" (Torn Jeans), 2012, is realised by the horses of the Guàrdia Urbana de Barcelona. The action-sculpture takes place at the Mounted Unit’s stables, a historic venue next to the city zoo that is not normally open to the public and whose exercise paddock is overlooked by the twin towers of the Torre Mapfre and Hotel Arts. In his work, Prieto makes reference to an image which appears on the tag of every pair of classic Levi’s denim jeans—two horses trying in vain to break a pair of reinforced trousers. Since their invention in 1873, Levi Strauss & Co.’s famous copper-riveted denim has become synonymous with the working people of the western United States—cowboys, lumberjacks, and railroad workers. Yet in "Pantalones rotos", this symbol of the American frontier myth has been already torn apart with bathos as two harnessed horses each drag one half of a torn pair of jeans. – Latitudes  

Saturday 1 October, 12am:
Free guided visit by Latitudes at the Unitat Muntada de la Guàrdia Urbana. Meeting point: c/ Wellington s/n. (Opposite the tram stop Ciutadella–Vil·la Olímpica)

Follow + Share: 
@Barcelona_Gallery_Weekend
#BarcelonaGalleryWeekend
#Composiciones2016
#LosCorredores1972   
@LTTDS 
#LatitudesBarcelona  



The Barcelona Gallery Weekend is an initiative of the de Art Barcelona and is supported by the Ajuntament de Barcelona (ICUB), the Generalitat de Catalunya (ICEC), the Ajuntament de L’Hospitalet de Llobregat and Acción Cultural Española (AC/E), as well as by private sponsors and individual patrons. http://www.barcelonagalleryweekend.com/


Related content:

  • Composiciones 2015 commissions;
  • 2015 social media archive;
  • Instagram of the Barcelona Gallery Weekend;
  • PRESS RELEASE: Latitudes curates "Composiciones", a series of five artists' commissions for the first Barcelona Gallery Weekend, 1–4 October 2015; 
  • NOTA DE PRENSA: Comisariado de "Composiciones", cinco intervenciones artísticas para el primer Barcelona Gallery Weekend, 1–4 Octubre 2015;
 2016, Barcelona Gallery Weekend, commissions, exhibition-making, itineraries, latitudes, Lola Lasurt, Lúa Coderch, performance, public art, Regina Giménez, Robert Llimós, Wilfredo Prieto
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Barcelona Gallery Weekend 2016 – Artists and locations of the programme "Composiciones" announced

 Tue, Jun 21 2016

A "Save The Date" press release (scroll down for different languages) has been sent out with information on the participating galleries and spaces and their exhibitions for the forthcoming Barcelona Gallery Weekend (29 September–2 October 2016). 

Returning for its second edition in 2016, Latitudes will curate "Compositions" (Composiciones), a series of artistic interventions in unique sites across the neighbourhoods of the city. Each of the commissioned artists is represented by a gallery participating in the Barcelona Gallery Weekend. 

Resisting an overall theme, and instead developing from the artists’ responses to the specificity of each context—people as well as places—the five art projects form a temporary thread that links evocative locations and public space, running parallel to the Weekend’s exhibitions in galleries and museums.  

The invited artists are Lúa Coderch  (Iquitos, Perú, 1982), Regina Giménez (Barcelona, 1966), Lola Lasurt  (Barcelona, 1983), Robert Llimós  (Barcelona, 1943), and Wilfredo Prieto (Santi Spiritus, Cuba, 1978), and the spaces where their interventions will take place are: 
The full schedule of routes, guided tours and parallel programming will be announced in September.
'Composiciones', five new commissions for the Barcelona Gallery Weekend, 1–4 October 2015.

"Compositions" is a programme of artists’ interventions originally conceived and curated by Latitudes for the first Barcelona Gallery Weekend in 2015, when it produced five projects by David Bestué (in the former ceramics factory Cosme Toda, L'Hospitalet); Dora García (at the Biblioteca del Campo Freudiano de Barcelona); Jordi Mitjà (in the Museu Geològic del Seminari de Barcelona); Rasmus Nilausen in collaboration with Pere Llobera (at the house of the former priest, gardens of La Central del Raval) y Daniel Steegmann Mangrané (in the Umbracle – Shadehouse – at the Parc de la Ciutadella). 

#BarcelonaGalleryWeekend
#Composiciones2016

Related content:

  • Composiciones 2015 commissions;
  • 2015 social media archive;
  • Instagram of the Barcelona Gallery Weekend;
  • PRESS RELEASE: Latitudes curates "Composiciones", a series of five artists' commissions for the first Barcelona Gallery Weekend, 1–4 October 2015; 
  • NOTA DE PRENSA: Comisariado de "Composiciones", cinco intervenciones artísticas para el primer Barcelona Gallery Weekend, 1–4 Octubre 2015
 2016, Barcelona, Barcelona Gallery Weekend, commissions, Gallery Weekend, Lola Lasurt, Lúa Coderch, offsite, Regina Giménez, Robert Llimós, site-specific, Wilfredo Prieto
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"Modernitat Amagada" (Hidden Modernity), an exhibition at Casa Capell, Mataró (3–31 October 2013)

 Fri, Nov 1 2013
 Casa Capell at the Parc Central, Mataró.

'Modernitat Amagada' (3–31 October 2013), organised by ACM (Associació per a la Cultura i l’Art Contemporani de Mataró), was a short-lived group show at Casa Capell in Mataró, the wonderful former home of the Masjuan family ("former" as today there are hardly any traces of its original domestic use as it has been coverted into City Hall offices for its department of sustainability). It was built in 1959 by Jordi Capell (1925–1970), a little-known rationalist architect, mathematician and humanist.

The exhibition extended over two floors, presenting works by Alexander Apóstol, Xavier Arenós, Rafel G. Bianchi, Eva Fàbregas, Carla Filipe, Regina Giménez, Terence Gower and Jaume Roure, as well as works by its two organisers, the artists Domènec and Dani Montlleó. The works were mostly produced in 2013, and ranged from sculptural interventions (Eva Fàbregas), responses to the home environment and its particular architecture (Rafel G. Bianchi, Regina Giménez, Jaume Roure), to contributions by artists whose artistic practice usually navigates the field of modern architecture (Terence Gower, Domènec, Xavier Arenós). 
 
 First room included works by Carla Filipe (on the table), Jaume Roure (by the chimney) and Eva Fàbregas (by the window). All works from 2013. 

Carla Filipe, "Ideal City and Current Town" (2013). 10 acrylic stands with collages. 
 Detail of Carla Filipe's "Ideal City and Current Town" (2013).

Extending the line of her previous projects, Carla Filipe recuperated lost or forgotten memories, trying to connect unknown fragments of local history. Her modules revived the 'Moderno Escondido' (Hidden Modernity) concept which was developed by Portuguese architects in the 1950s and 60s and which resulted in a series of offices, chuches, domestic spaces and commercial spaces though now these are mostly abandoned, both physically and ideologically. 
Regina Giménez, "Composició en vermell, groc, blau i blanc" (Composition in red, yellow, blue and white, 2013).

Regina Giménez thought of her painting as a wink to Capell, the house's modernist architect who was also a fervent activist for Catalan culture, dovetailing him with two referents of Modernism, the artist Piet Mondrian and the architect Mies van der Rohe. Her work suggested a possible intervention within the dinning room of Casa Capell – the incorporatation of a red carpet, white and blue cushions and a yellow wall – based on the principles of Neoplasticism, a movement which often used these primary colours in modern architecture, colours which are coincidentally also that of the Estelada, the Catalan independence flag. 
Jaume Roure, "RE: Projecte Casa Capell" (2013). 

Upon visiting the house and realising that little trace was visible of its original domestic use, Jaume Roure decided to recuperate the family presence by trying to locate photographs and personal memories of the original inhabitants. He couldn't find any photographs and only knew they were a couple with four children. He therefore tried to put faces to them by reconstructing a series of fictional images of what he thought they would look like, and framed them as if these memories were finally coming back to their original setting. 
 Eva Fàbregas, "Collapsible Sculptures" (2013).

The series "Collapsible Sculptures" reflected on the progressive 'containerisation' of our culture  which since the 1950s has triggered a revolution in the production and transportation of merchandising. Our daily lives have also been highly affected by this shift: our food is able to be stored and transported and so are our domestic environments with modular, foldable, extensible or stackable items. Fàbregas sculptures (located in three spaces throughout the house), revealed the correspondences between mass-production and the aesthetics of Modernity.
 
Above: Jaume Roure, "RE: Projecte Casa Capell" (2013), and below on the screen the 17' video "New Utopias" (2010) by Terence Gower.

Still from "New Utopias" (2010) by Terence Gower.

(From the artist's website): "New Utopias is a lecture about pop culture utopias filmed in the style of a 1950s Walt Disney documentary. The set, costuming, lighting and camera work are based on 1950s television production standards. But where the original Disney documentaries celebrated rockets and nuclear technology, this updated version promotes aesthetic frivolity, sexual perversion and UFO abduction fantasies. Among the new utopias under analysis are an afrofuturist extraterrestrial society, a dreary French seaside town transformed into an aesthetic paradise, and a retelling of the Frankenstein myth set in a sexual utopia ruled by the uninhibited libido. This video is shown accompanied by the Mothership Blueprints."
 Rafel G. Bianchi, Album (2013). 6x7 slides on lightbox.

Rafel Bianchi's slides portrayed the cacti he had been documenting in his own garden in Barcelona. Upon visiting Casa Capell, he felt the need to bring some of the domesticity back to a space which was heavily restored in 2009–10 for it new adminstrative use. Cacti are a recurring motif used in the photographic documentation of architectural spaces, plants that often appear in photographs of works by the Catalan architect and city planner Josep Lluís Sert. Upon finishing a commission, Sert would arrange furniture and plants, with the aim of trying to give an appearance of domesticity and commodity as well as of Mediterraneity and modenity. 
 More "Collapsible Sculptures" by Eva Fàbregas downstairs by the window towering as cacti. These are reminiscent of those projected by Mexican architect Juan O’Gorman to protect Kahlo and Rivera's studio in Mexico City.
Lower gallery with works by Domènec (left) and Dani Montlleó (right).
Lower gallery with works by Dani Montlleó (left) and Alexander Apóstol (right).

Alexander Apóstol's photographic series "Le Corbusier quemado en Bogotá" (2005), documented the interior of the burnt Centro Nariño, a residencial campus of 23 buildings built in Bogotá, developed by Colombian architects following the doctrines of Le Corbusier, who earlier proposed a modern city that was finally never built. Amindst student revolts in the 60s, the buildings were set on fire, destroying most of its interiors, which are still intact amongst the ashes and electric wiring revealing some of the important traces that the Modern thinking left in Latin American cities.

 Domènec, "Conversation Piece: Narkomfin" (2013). Maquette and formica chairs.

"Conversation Piece: Narkomfin" (2013) was supported on two formica chairs, typically used in 1950s and 60s homes, and a maquette of the social housing Narkomfin, a building that fascinated Le Corbusier in his 1930s trip to the Soviet Union and that later inspired his Unité Habitation in Marseille.
 
Maquette of Jean Prouvé's ’Maison Bulldog’ (2011) by Dani Montlleó. 

This little half-bunker, half-trench-looking house of Dani Montlleó's work was also planned in 1959 (as was Can Masjuan house) for the writer Louis-Ferdinand Céline, although he died shortly after in 1961. The house was a replica of the Villa Arpel, designed by Jacques Lagrange for Jacques Tati's film "Mon Oncle" (1958).
 
Xavier Arenós, ’Madriguera#10. Proun. Desenterrament’ (2012). 15' with music by Rafa Ruiz.

Arenós' video, suitably projected in the lower floor storage room, recreated an excavation in which a Proun – a projection of an imaginary space, a term coined by El Lissitsky in the 1920s – is seemingly unearthed, like an anachronic residue of a remote civilisation, a transitional object. The accompanying futuristic soundtrack enhanced its science-fiction atmosphere.

–

This is the blog of the independent curatorial office Latitudes. You can also follow us on Facebook and Twitter.
All photos: Latitudes | www.lttds.org (except when noted otherwise in the photo caption)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
 2013, architecture, Carla Filipe, Domènec, Eva Fàbregas, Exhibition, Mataró, modernity, Rafel G. Bianchi, Regina Giménez, report, Terence Gower
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