'Compositions' a programme of five artists' interventions for the first Barcelona Gallery Weekend, 1–4 October 2015
Fri, Sep 25 2015
With the aim of distinguishing the Barcelona gallery weekend from similar initiatives, Latitudes' project Compositions compliments the existing calendar of exhibitions in galleries and museums by commissioning six artists active in the Barcelona art scene, to develop a series of public interventions responding to singular locations – sites significant for their architecture or their history. Here's a map of the five locations.
Latitudes has invited artists David Bestué (Barcelona, 1980. Lives in Barcelona); Dora García (Valladolid, 1965. Lives in Barcelona), Jordi Mitjà (Figueres, 1970. Lives between Lladó and Banyoles); Rasmus Nilausen (Copenhagen, 1980. Lives in Barcelona) & Pere Llobera (Barcelona, 1970. Lives in Barcelona) and Daniel Steegmann Mangrané (Barcelona, 1977. Lives in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) to produce site-specific temporary installations and one-off performances. Pinpointing some lesser-known aspects of the city's cultural history and municipal life, Compositions offers moments of interruption, intimacy and immersion throughout the weekend.
Home of the former director of the ceramic factory Cosme Toda. c/Enric Prat de la Riba 60, L'Hospitalet de Llobregat.
Opening hours: Thursday 1 October, 5–9pm;
Friday 2, Saturday 3 and Sunday 4: 11am–8pm.
David Bestué is primarily a sculptor who is fascinated by architecture – not with its hubristic icons or celebrity heroism, but by the very normality with which architectonic tropes underpin an emotional understanding of form.
For Compositions Bestué is producing a new installation in the form of a sculptural timeline defined by ignition and invention, fat and oil, obsolescence, fluorescence, luminescence and incandescence – a history of humanity from antiquity to the present day told through the evolution and refinement of lighting technology. Sited in the domestic setting of the Director’s house within the former Cosme Toda ceramics and tile factory, the installation is companioned by a sculptural intervention recuperating pieces found in the factory, linking to Bestué's ongoing interest in the evolution of architectural materials and building techniques.
Freudian Field Library in Barcelona located at Avinguda Diagonal 333, 3º 1ª. Opening hours: Thursday 1 and Friday 2 October 5–9pm; Saturday 3 October 10am–2pm. Sunday 4 October closed.
Dora García's collaborations and performances engage with radicalism, inadequacy and the marginal. Her contribution to Compositions consists in pointing out the wealth of information and the activites programmed by the Freudian Field Library in Barcelona, an organisation founded in 1977 by Argentinean Oscar Masotta (1930–1979). García's intervention considers the library as a knot which ties together art, psychoanalysis and literature.
A display of publications drawn from the library shelves and three conversations will activate the space over consecutive days. The first talk (1 October, 7pm), a "solo" by García, will focus on the library's holdings of literary fiction. The second talk on October 2nd, at 7pm will be a group conversation moderated by García, amongst Miquel Bassols, Enric Berenguer, Rosa Calvet, Estela Paskvan and Montserrat Rodríguez, who will discuss the founding of the library and its ongoing role in Barcelona, and the final event on October 3 at 10am will be a conversation around the work of Irish novelist James Joyce and French psychiatrist and psichologist Jacques Lacan, between García and psychoanalyst Xavier Esqué and Patrick Bohan, who has worked at the James Joyce Center in Dublin.
Rasmus Nilausen and Pere Llobera are painters that approach painting with a respect – at times melancholic, sometimes parodic – for its traditional genres and its ancient integrity as a craft. Nilausen’s canvases have often taken on ‘minor’ or anecdotal subjects such as candles or vegetables. Llobera frequently addresses the perils virtuosity and painterly heroism in his paradoxical, restless works. Nilausen and Llobera share a workspace in the Salamina studios in L’Hospitalet de Llobregat – which they cofounded – yet the invitation to collaborate in a presentation for Compositions is the first time they are exhibiting together.
In the Gardens of La Central del Raval their works occupy a former priest's house and explore "acheiropoietic" images – those that have supposedly come into being not by human hand, but miraculously. The Veil of Veronica, for example, refers to various Catholic relics and icons which tell of a piece of cloth said to have been imprinted with the image of the face of Jesus.
Geological Museum of the Seminary of Barcelona is in Carrer de la Diputació, 231.
Opening hours: Thursday 1 October, 5–9pm;
Friday 2, Saturday 3 and Sunday 4: 11am–8pm.
Jordi Mitjà’s recent “povera” approach to sculpture, has comprised works utilizing discarded wood, metal, burned paper and clay. His contribution to Compositions takes place in the Geological Museum of the Seminary of Barcelona – an institution dedicated to paleontology and the study of fossils since 1874.
Mitjà considers the borders between evolutionary biology and the ancient geology of Catalonia in an installation which focusses on a primitive relationship between materials and morphology. A series of overheard projectors illuminate the central space of the museum with a panoply of images, shadows and geometries – layers that are unearthed by Mitjà’s exploration of the geospatial taxonomy of this unique collection of 70,000 specimens.
Umbracle in the Parc de la Ciutadella, Passeig Picasso, 13.
Opening hours: Thursday 1 October, 5–9pm;
Friday 2, Saturday 3 and Sunday 4: 11am–8pm.
The art of Daniel Steegmann Mangrané hinges on the natural and the geometric, often splicing the unfathomable dimension of the forests of his adopted home Brazil with the clear lines of abstraction and man-made order.
His contribution to Compositions takes place amongst the subtropical plants of the 1887 Umbracle (shade house) in the Parc de la Ciutadella and centres on the acoustic installation “Surucuá, Teque-teque, Arara” (2012). We hear sounds that were recorded along a 60 metre transect through a section of the Atlantic Rainforest of Brazil, the tropical forest that Portuguese colonists would have encountered on their arrival in the year 1500. The sound loop reproduces the disembodied calls of colourful birds such as trogons and macaws which merge with the ambient sounds of the city. As if a 1:1 scale collage, the artifice of an urban botanical collection becomes intertwined with an acoustic slice of the authentically wild.
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Calendar of Related Events and Guided Visits
Thursday 1 October, 5pm:
Guided tour of the intervention by Jordi Mitjà at the Museu Geològic del Seminari de Barcelona by the artist and Latitudes.
c/ Diputació, 231
Thursday 1 October, 7pm:Guided tour of the intervention and talk by Dora García on the library holdings of literary fiction, Biblioteca del Campo Freudiano de Barcelona (Library of the Freudian Field).
Avda. Diagonal 333, 3º 1ª
Limited seating. Reservations: bcfb@illimit.es
Friday 2 October, noon:Guided tour of the intervention by Daniel Steegmann Mangrané at the Umbracle del Parc de la Ciutadella by the artist and Latitudes.
Passeig Picasso, 13
Friday 2 October, 7pm:
Conversation moderated by Dora García with Miquel Bassols, Enric Berenguer, Rosa Calvet, Estela Paskvan and Montserrat Rodríguez, on the origins of the Biblioteca del Campo Freudiano de Barcelona, its founder Óscar Masotta and the Barcelona of 1977.
Avda. Diagonal 333, 3º 1ª
Limited seating. Reservations: bcfb@illimit.es
Friday 2 October, 7:30pm:Guided tour of the intervention by David Bestué at the house of the former director of the Cosme Toda factory by the artist and Latitudes.
c/ Enric Prat de la Riba, 60
L’Hospitalet de Llobregat
Saturday 3 October, 10am:
Conversation between Dora García and the psychoanalyst and psychologist Xavier Esqué at the Biblioteca del Campo Freudiano around James Joyce and Jacques Lacan.
Avda. Diagonal 333, 3º 1ª
Limited seating. Reservations: bcfb@illimit.es
Sunday 4 October, noon:Guided tour of the intervention by Rasmus Nilausen and Pere Llobera at the Jardines de La Central del Raval by the artists and Latitudes.
c/ Elisabets, 8
Additionally, ARCO Foundation offers ARCO Gallery Walks, five free guided tours around the galleries throughout the weekend. Limited places. Pre-registration required: info@therealthing.es
Thursday 1 October
Route Eixample South
Meeting place: Galería Joan Prats at 5pm
Friday 2 October
Route Ciutat Vella – Born
Meeting place: Galería Senda at 11am
Route Montjuïc – L’Hospitalet
Meeting place: Galería Carles Taché at 5pm
Saturday 3 October
Route Ciutat Vella – Raval
Meeting place: etHALL at 11am
Route Eixample North
Meeting place: ADN Galería at 5pm
The Barcelona Gallery Weekend is an initiative of the Asociación de Galerías de Arte Contemporáneo Art Barcelona and is supported by the Ajuntament de Barcelona (ICUB), the Generalitat de Catalunya (ICEC), the Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte; and the Ajuntament de L’Hospitalet de Llobregat.
http://www.barcelonagalleryweekend.com/
