Latitudes' "out of office" 2015–2016 season
Mon, Aug 1 2016
"CLOSED. We open when we arrive, close when we leave, and if you come and we're not here, we just didn't coincide."
The end of the season is approaching and high summer is looming. Following Latitudes tradition we mark the summer break not by presenting a memo of activities per se, but with an "out of office" post (see the 2008-9, 2009-10, 2010-11, 2011-12, 2012–13, 2013–14, 2014–15 versions) with a series of 'behind the scenes' photos revisiting moments from the year gone by. So here are some glimpses of the past season, starting September 2015 to July 2016. See you in September!
Latitudes 2015–16 season started with a residency at Kadist, San Francisco (26 August–9 September) during which time we had the opportunity to develop several projects. Three artist-led tours with SF-based artists Amy Balkin, Rick & Megan Prelinger and Will Brown were part of our ongoing series 'Incidents of Travel' (see 2012 in Mexico City, 2013 in Hong Kong and most recent 2016 online incarnation). We took over Kadist social media with an Instagram residency and contributed to the online programme 'One Sentence Exhibition'.
Furthermore, on August 29, we convened the second ‘Near-Future Artworlds Curatorial Disruption Foresight Group’ at Kadist, a "by-invitation meeting bringing together individuals and expertise from the Bay Area with an active interest in institutional prototyping and emergent usership" initially presented in May 2015 for theInternational Curatorial Retreat in Bari, Italy.
The workshop is "a forum for informal dialogue about megatrends and the future of contemporary art institutions. In the San Francisco iteration, an emphasis was put on cross-pollination between design thinking and curatorial thinking. Participants also discussed, among other things, the notion of the post-disciplinary, and the question of appropriate speeds, scale or periodicities of institutions."
Photo: Arash Fayez.
(Above and below) BAF technical team and artist Daniel Steegmann Mangrané installing the sound piece “Surucuá, Teque-teque, Arara” (2012) at the Umbracle (shade house), Parc de la Ciutadella. One of the "Composiciones" commissions for the Barcelona Gallery Weekend.
September 25: Max Andrews of Latitudes participates in the symposium "The Shock of Victory" held at CCA Glasgow. Meanwhile, installation is well underway for the first Barcelona Gallery Weekend, for which Latitudes devised a special programme of five artists' commissions.
(Above and below) Jordi Mitjà discussing his work with the team at the Museu Geològic del Seminari during the installation of his "Composiciones" piece.
Rasmus Nilausen lights up Pere Llobera's drawing in dust, part of their joint "Composiciones" adventure.
(Above) Second seminar at the Biblioteca del Campo Freudiano de Barcelona, project by Dora García for "Composiciones".
(Above) Display of the books selected by Dora García from the holdings of the Biblioteca del Campo Freudiano de Barcelona.
'Composiciones' received some great write-ups – including a long text on Frederic Montornés popular blog and by Jörg Heiser in frieze magazine. We also gathered hundreds of tweets, Instagram shots and press material on this Storify.
Board announcing the seminar and public talk.
Closed-door seminar at Tabakalera. Photo: Consonni.
Public presentation of Latitudes' projects at Tabakalera. Photo: Consonni.
November 2015: Latitudes travelled to Donostia's recently opened Tabakalera. We were invited by LaPublika's programme, created by Consonni, to lead a two-day seminar and public lecture around artists working in the public sphere.
Moments before starting the ESP people assembly at Birmingham's Eastside Projects.
International Summit Synapse 1 at New Rex of the National Theatre of Greece. 'Session II: Rethinking Institutions': (from left to right) Leo Panitch, Maria Hlavajova, Adam Szymczyk, Amalia Zepou (moderator), Hilary Wainwright, Emily Pethick, Latitudes (Max Andrews & Mariana Cánepa Luna) © Eva Galatsanou.
Shortly after, on 18–19 November Latitudes participated in the OMONOIA summit which began the Athens Biennale 2015–2017. For a short report see the Cover Story of December 2015 and this blog entry.
December 2015: Mariana joined Hangar's renewed Board of Trustees as its Secretary, a responsibility she will fulfill for the next three years.
December 4: Participation in the BAR module: Curating the space / Space for curating open public conversation with Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy, Carles Guerra, Michy Marxuach and BAR module participants.
(Above and below) Courtesy: BAR Project. Photos: Eva Carasol.
January 2016: After an intense jury process in January, we began the year-long mentoring process of three exhibition projects out of the nine selected projects as part of the 2016 season's BCN Producció 2016.
The first project Latitudes mentored was by Pau Magrané/PLOM who turned the Espai Cub, a 3x3x3 metre white cube, into "a sound stage/instrument, an echo chamber hosting different screenings and objects to be played by PLOM at the opening". The two other projects Latitudes is mentoring are by Antoni Hervàs (September 15) and a group exhibition "La dissidència nostàlgica" by curator Joana Hurtado Matheu (December 1).
From January onwards: Preparations for the five projects produced in the context of the second edition of the Barcelona Gallery Weekend. Studio visits, site visits, project proposals, budget and production planning, taking measurements...
May 2016: Regina Giménez and Rafel G. Bianchi taking measures of Can Trinxet's walls, a former 19th Century textile factory in L'Hospitalet de Llobregat.
March 2016: visiting Robert Llimós's studio in Sant Pere neighbourhood.
Lola Lasurt doing some tests positioning her paintings at the Biblioteca Pública Arús.
February 2016: Trip to Arles to attend the 'How Institutions Think' symposium at the LUMA Foundation, this time not participating but listening and reporting. Read Max Andrews' report on the frieze blog.
Besides the reportage from the Arles conference, Max also published other reviews in Frieze magazine as one of its team of contributing editors: Xavier Ribas at ProjecteSD (Barcelona); Joachim Koester at BlueProject Foundation (Barcelona); Alexandre Estrela at the Museo Reina Sofía (Madrid) and Critic's Guide: Barcelona highlighting some of the interesting shows in the city on frieze website. He has also contributed the text "Soups & Symptoms" for a forthcoming publication of Barcelona-based Danish painter Rasmus Nilausen.
On February 25, Mariana Cánepa Luna's review of Francesc Ruiz's exhibition at garcía | galería, Madrid, was published online on art-agenda: "Ruiz’s second solo show at Madrid’s garcía galería delves into the visual communication of one of Spain’s most iconic institutions, the Sociedad Estatal Correos y Telégrafos—the national postal service, commonly known as Correos—whose graphic identity was created in 1977 by Spanish designer and artist José María Cruz Novillo (b. 1936)." continue reading...
Mariana also contributed to the publication "Great Expectations: Prospects for the Future of Curatorial Education" edited by Leigh Markopoulos and published by the California College of the Arts and The Banff Centre – with some insightful questions by Banff Centre Walter Phillips Gallery curator Peta Rake.
Miquel from MACBA's AV team checking the connections behind the monitor that presented 'Houdini' (1991) – one of the most challenging works in the exhibition for the technical team as it meant dismantling a 40-year-old TV and submerging the front part into water.
March 2016: Installation begins! After over a year and a half of preparation, the exhibition "I Will Fear No Evil" opened at Convent dels Àngels del MACBA on March 17, 2016. Two busy weeks of installation in the Convent dels Àngels space preceded the opening. Many press tours, exhibition reviews, photo and video recordings, guided visits, film screenings, and music events followed – they're all archived here!
Lightbox of "El Resplandor de la Santa Conjunción aleja a los demonios" in progress, a piece from 1991, exhibited for the first time in the Sala RG in Caracas, and also reconstructed for the present exhibition.
TTI installation team placing twelve pork rind skateboards on the metal structure. "La Hermandad" (1994) was commissioned for the 1994 exhibition "Cocido y Crudo" at the Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid, and it's now part of the "la Caixa" Collection.
March 17, 11:30am: Presentation to the press. Left to right: Ferran Barenblit (MACBA director), exhibition curators Mariana Cánepa Luna and Max Andrews of Latitudes, and artist José Antonio Hernández-Díez. Photo: MACBA twitter.
April: We love snail mail and handwritten notes! We received a note from Rick & Megan Prelinger alongside a copy of their Yearbook 2015. We relished spending time at the Prelinger Library in San Francisco last August as part of our 'Incidents of Travel' series! (Our extended heartfelt thanks to the Kadist team for hosting us!).
Card and Yearbook 2015 by the Prelinger Library.
April 20: Wrapped-up a five-part interview with Melbourne-based artist Nicholas Mangan to be published in the catalogue of his forthcoming solo exhibition ‘Limits to Growth’, co-produced by Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA), Melbourne (opening July 20) and Institute of Modern Art (IMA), Brisbane (where it will be on view from October 29). The exhibition will travel to KW in Berlin in Summer 2017.
Installing Pau Magrané exhibition at the Cub space in La Capella. Photos: Pau Magrané.
April 27 (until June 12): Exhibition "Demo" of Pau Magrané/PLOM at Espai Cub, La Capella. This is the first of the three projects Latitudes is mentoring throughout 2016 as part of BCN Producció'16 production grant scheme. Video of the project here (Catalan with Spanish subtitles) or here (English).
April 25–May 7: Two-week residency at CAPC Bordeaux to research for a group exhibition that will take place in 2017. One strand of our investigations departs from the CAPC building itself, known as Entrepôt Lainé – a 19th Century warehouse for colonial commodities. We learned from the museum staff that coffee beans are occasionally found atop a pile of papers on an office desk or in the middle of the exhibition galleries. This became the focus of our May Cover Story (archived here).
First and last pages of the first online dispatch by Chicago-based curator Yesomi Umolu within the distributed phase of Incidents (of Travel). http://incidents.kadist.org/
May: Launch of the online project Incidents (of Travel), produced by Kadist Art Foundation. The web marks a new ‘distributed’ phase of ‘Incidents (of Travel)’ as an online periodical. The ongoing series will be edited by Latitudes and produced by Kadist.
Originally conceived by Latitudes as day-long artist-led tours commissioned to artists in and around Mexico City (2012) – followed by Hong Kong (2013) and San Francisco (2015) – ‘Incidents’ expands on the format of the curator-meets-artist studio visit to explore the chartered itinerary as a format of an artistic encounter. The first dispatch came from Chicago and featured Yesomi Umolu (Exhibitions Curator at the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts at the University of Chicago) and artist Harold Mendez, an offline day photographed by Nabiha Khan.
June: Launch of the second Incidents (of Travel) dispatch, an encounter between curator Serubiri Moses and photographer Mohsen Taha in Jinja, Uganda, narrated throughout 18 photos by Taha with an introduction, captions, sound and commentary.
And finally July. Some are off on holiday but many remain working full speed despite the less frantic inbox. Many surely agree that this is one of the weirdest months in the calendar, a bit like the pre-Christmas rush, but with a whole month of heated intensity.
4–8 July: Second trip to Bordeaux, more archival appointments and more geology. Led by Bruno Cahuzac (Maître de Conférences, UFR Sciences de la Terre et de la Mer) from the Faculté des Sciences de Bordeaux, we visited the incredible carothèque-lithothèque at the Université de Bordeaux in Talence which houses over 30,000 core samples from the subsoil of the Aquitaine basin.
(Above) Gerard Ortín's exhibition "Vijfhoek" at Galería Estrany-de la Mota and (below) Gerard receiving the award.
July 9 and 20: As jurors of this year's award Art Nou/Primera Visió we visited the twenty participating commercial galleries, non-profits, private foundations and museums alongside BCNProducció'16 co-tutors Mireia Sallarès and David Armengol. We unanimously decided to award Gerard Ortín for his solo show at Galería Estrany-de la Mota. Ortín receives 2,000 Euros to produce a new publication. The ceremony took place on July 21 at La Capella. Last year winner Rasmus Nilausen produced the publication "Soups & Symptoms" which includes a text by Max Andrews of Latitudes.
Instagram post by Fireplace project.
July 11: Presentation of the publications of the projects by artists Ricardo Trigo and Pau Magrané resulting from the production grant BCN Producció'16.
February 2016 Cover Story was dedicated to Sarah Ortmeyer.
Cover Stories on www.lttds.org: Over a year ago we began the monthly section "Cover Story" on our home page (archive of this section). October 2015 was dedicated to David Bestué's "Luces" installation commissioned for Composiciones, November 2015 marked the sixth anniversary of Globalising the Internationale, Christina Hemauer and Roman Keller’s project for Portscapes; December presented a shot taken during OMONOIA, the International Summit at the National Theatre of Greece’s New Rex which kicked off the Athens Biennale 2015–2017.
January shifted to black-and-white with a Mediterranean shot from E.1027, the 1920s Côte d'Azur house designed by Eileen Gray and Jean Badovici near Monaco meticulously documented since 2008 by Danish artist Kasper Akhøj. February stayed in France, going up to the Tour Eiffel and looking back at a piece by Sarah Ortmeyer presented in a 2011 exhibition in Brussels. March showed a behind-the-scenes moment of the production of "Sagrado Corazón Activo" (1991) a work by José Antonio Hernández-Díez that was only ever exhibited once before, in 1991 in Caracas. The piece was reconstructed for the exhibition "I Will Fear No Evil" at MACBA presenting a selection of his early works. In April we announced the forthcoming launch of 'Incidents (of Travel)', a series of online curatorial dispatches produced by Kadist; and in May (back to France) we began our research at CAPC Bordeaux, where we'll be curating a group exhibition in June 2017. June took us back to Hernández-Díez's show which was coming to an end – some exhibition reviews here; and July took us back to the Latitudes-devised Composiciones commissions last October (the programme of artists’ interventions returns later this year).
June Cover Story – all cover stories archived here.
Antoni Hervàs preparing his installation for BCN Producció'16.
RELATED CONTENT:
We are now presently preparing for what will be a rather intense September: firstly, Antoni Hervàs's exhibition "El Misterio de Caviria" at Sala Gran of La Capella (third round of exhibitions of the grant scheme BCN Producció) opens on September 15. It will be shortly followed by the presentation of the five "Composiciones" commissions by Lúa Coderch, Regina Giménez, Lola Lasurt, Robert Llimós and Wilfredo Prieto for the second Barcelona Gallery Weekend, inaugurating on Thursday 29 September, and on view until Sunday 2 October.
We have also been invited to contribute to Oslo Pilot, the two-year project investigating the role of art in the public realm led by Eva González-Sancho and Per Gunnar Eeg-Tverbakk. We will be writing on a selection of case studies based around their four areas of research – Reactivation, Periodicity, Public and Disappearance – which will be published in the magazine launched during a three-day symposium in mid-November 2016.
- Latitudes' "out of office" 2014–2015 season, 7 August 2015
- Latitudes 'Out of office' 2013–14, 31 July 2014
- Latitudes' "out of office" photo album, 2012–2013 season, 31 July 2013
- Latitudes' "out of office" photo album 2011–2012, 31 July 2012
- Latitudes 'out of office' photo album 2010–11 season, 1 August 2011
- Latitudes 'out of office' photo album 2009–10 season, 30 July 2010
- Latitudes' "out of office" photo album 2008-9, 30 July 2009
