It's our 10th anniversary!
Fri, May 22 2015We find it hard to believe, but April 2015 marked our 10th anniversary!
In October last year, we started working on our new website so that it would be ready to mark the decade of our two-person self-organisation. We submerged ourselves in the exercise of looking back and consolidating our physical and digital archives. The last decade has certainly been marked by the transition towards the latter, and hence files and hard drives now hold the most voluminous evidence of our activity, with all manner of USB-sticks and obsolescent CDs (remember those?) having fallen by the wayside.
We devised a plan for what we wanted to improve with a website conceived as a place for reportage as well as a publicly-accessible archive. This process included developing more extensive, and larger-format, photo galleries, cross-referencing to previously "buried" texts, making descriptions more concise, adding a related content section to cross-reference project information with blog posts, and consolidating locations as well as events. After six months of work, and some down-the-rabbit-hole endless weekends with the intricacies of CSS, we had re-edited ten years of our professional life online. Ta-da!
But we also hold on to physical archives and printer matter and they continue to delight! They also bear witness to something of what has been lost. The decline of the post as a means for distributing video (VHS! DVDs!) with the rise of Dropbox, or Vimeo, for example, has meant no more of those sweet hand-written notes that used to accompany artists' packages. Exhibition invitations are frankly a rarity now too, and these are filed alongside various postcards, discarded fragments of artists' work and other amusing ephemera.
Since we commissioned our mail-and-stamp graphic identity from More Associates back in April 2005, we have seeped more-and-more online to document and communicate: our first newsletter (November 2005), our first website, our early blog posts (starting in September 2006!), our Facebook page in early 2009 started with the presentation of Jan Dibbets' filming for Portscapes, our Flickr photo archive (also in 2009, now with nearly 4,000 photos online), followed by our first tweets in 2010, and sporadically YouTube, Issuu, Storify, Soundcloud followed.
This "ecstasy of communication" as Dieter Roelstraete has ironically put it, a day-to-day reality, has certainly defined our practice and how we have come to produce, document and disseminate our projects. We always stress this rapid digital transition when presenting our practice, as adapting to it has certainly been crucial as a two-person spaceless self-organisation. Not running a regular programme of exhibitions or events has meant we have found the need to communicate the duration of what we are working on while being seemingly offline. Sometimes the standard drop-in question "What are you working on?", is not so straightforward to answer. Back to Roelstraete – "getting organised" could often be the most suitable answer. "Getting organised" for the next project, reflecting on a recently concluded activity, anticipating the one after that, sorting out finances, seeing how we might put together the next research trip, finding it a challenge to find the time to read a book from beginning to end, watching life and work go by in 'likes' and 'retweets' and 'regrams'... Yet far than being nostalgic, this transition has itself given us great food for thought. For example, we dedicated over a year to discussing the consequences of online presence for art practice and curating with colleagues from Hong Kong to Minneapolis in the #OpenCurating interview series.
We are thankful to the many artists and other creative people who have supported us throughout this past decade. Some projects started with innocuous conversations that eventually led to ongoing collaborations and friendships, and we are also grateful to colleagues willing to offer critical feedback and words of encouragement in those moments in which we most needed to regain trust. A huge thanks too to the institutions and organisations for financing our projects.
Very soon more news on a commemorative project we've been cooking up...
Related content:
Latitudes' 4th anniversary (April 2009)
Newsletter #22 – April 2010
–
This is the blog of the independent curatorial office Latitudes. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter.
All photos: Latitudes | www.lttds.org (except when noted otherwise in the photo caption).
Work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
#OpenCurating, 10th anniversary, 2005, 2015, Barcelona, commissions, latitudes, Mariana Cánepa Luna, Max Andrews, website
In October last year, we started working on our new website so that it would be ready to mark the decade of our two-person self-organisation. We submerged ourselves in the exercise of looking back and consolidating our physical and digital archives. The last decade has certainly been marked by the transition towards the latter, and hence files and hard drives now hold the most voluminous evidence of our activity, with all manner of USB-sticks and obsolescent CDs (remember those?) having fallen by the wayside.
We devised a plan for what we wanted to improve with a website conceived as a place for reportage as well as a publicly-accessible archive. This process included developing more extensive, and larger-format, photo galleries, cross-referencing to previously "buried" texts, making descriptions more concise, adding a related content section to cross-reference project information with blog posts, and consolidating locations as well as events. After six months of work, and some down-the-rabbit-hole endless weekends with the intricacies of CSS, we had re-edited ten years of our professional life online. Ta-da!
But we also hold on to physical archives and printer matter and they continue to delight! They also bear witness to something of what has been lost. The decline of the post as a means for distributing video (VHS! DVDs!) with the rise of Dropbox, or Vimeo, for example, has meant no more of those sweet hand-written notes that used to accompany artists' packages. Exhibition invitations are frankly a rarity now too, and these are filed alongside various postcards, discarded fragments of artists' work and other amusing ephemera.
Since we commissioned our mail-and-stamp graphic identity from More Associates back in April 2005, we have seeped more-and-more online to document and communicate: our first newsletter (November 2005), our first website, our early blog posts (starting in September 2006!), our Facebook page in early 2009 started with the presentation of Jan Dibbets' filming for Portscapes, our Flickr photo archive (also in 2009, now with nearly 4,000 photos online), followed by our first tweets in 2010, and sporadically YouTube, Issuu, Storify, Soundcloud followed.
Presentation of 7 years of practice as part of the programme "La Sucursal" at Casa del Lago, Mexico City, September 2012. This invitation gave us the opportunity to begin the series 'Incidents of Travel' commissioning artists tours in Mexico and Hong Kong. Photo: Latitudes.
This "ecstasy of communication" as Dieter Roelstraete has ironically put it, a day-to-day reality, has certainly defined our practice and how we have come to produce, document and disseminate our projects. We always stress this rapid digital transition when presenting our practice, as adapting to it has certainly been crucial as a two-person spaceless self-organisation. Not running a regular programme of exhibitions or events has meant we have found the need to communicate the duration of what we are working on while being seemingly offline. Sometimes the standard drop-in question "What are you working on?", is not so straightforward to answer. Back to Roelstraete – "getting organised" could often be the most suitable answer. "Getting organised" for the next project, reflecting on a recently concluded activity, anticipating the one after that, sorting out finances, seeing how we might put together the next research trip, finding it a challenge to find the time to read a book from beginning to end, watching life and work go by in 'likes' and 'retweets' and 'regrams'... Yet far than being nostalgic, this transition has itself given us great food for thought. For example, we dedicated over a year to discussing the consequences of online presence for art practice and curating with colleagues from Hong Kong to Minneapolis in the #OpenCurating interview series.
In 2010 we were awarded the inaugural Curatorial Prize given by the Catalan Gallery Association, recognising our "curatorial work and especially for their involvement in the local context and their efforts to disseminate national art in an international context." Photo: Latitudes.
We are thankful to the many artists and other creative people who have supported us throughout this past decade. Some projects started with innocuous conversations that eventually led to ongoing collaborations and friendships, and we are also grateful to colleagues willing to offer critical feedback and words of encouragement in those moments in which we most needed to regain trust. A huge thanks too to the institutions and organisations for financing our projects.
Very soon more news on a commemorative project we've been cooking up...
Related content:
Latitudes' 4th anniversary (April 2009)
Newsletter #22 – April 2010
–
This is the blog of the independent curatorial office Latitudes. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter.
All photos: Latitudes | www.lttds.org (except when noted otherwise in the photo caption).
Work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Tutors of the 2015 International Curatorial Retreat, 9–13 May, Bari (Italy)
Sun, May 17 2015
Introduction to the four-day workshop by Tara McDowell, director of the Curatorial Practice PhD. Program at MADA (Monash School of Art Design and Architecture), Melbourne.
Organised by Vessel in collaboration with the Curatorial Practice PhD Program at MADA (Monash School of Art Design and Architecture) in Melbourne – which a year ago co-hosted our Melbourne residency as part of Gertrude Contemporary's Visiting Curatorial Program – the retreat brings together participants and tutors in an intense mobile four-day format.
The 2015 International Curatorial Retreat (9–13 May) focused on issues which have gained urgency within contemporary curatorial practice under the conditions of globalization, in particular, the process of writing when related to the ‘epistemologies of the South’ – a term adopted from Portuguese sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos.
As a member of the team of tutors of the retreat, Latitudes presented two of its recent editorial projects (The Last Newspaper and Incidents of Travel in Mexico and Hong Kong) and led an afternoon workshop titled “Near Future Artworlds Curatorial Foresight Disruption Group” that operated in the realm of "art-fiction", of desirable or dystopian prototypes, speculative objects and art world services, as well as imminent and real (to use the startup term) disruptions. A kind of near-future think tank and foresight group, the workshop imagined curatorial-editorial prototypes and use-case scenarios.
Alexandra Ross presented http://www.continuous-curatorial-conversations.org/, a "compilation of supplementary histories which appropriately emphasizes the oral nature of curatorial practice".
Light display at the Piazza del Ferrarese during the Feste di San Nicola.
View from the Doppelgaenger Gallery in the old town area, the venue that hosted the seminars.
Photo: Piero Percoco
Tirdad Zolghadr during his workshop.
Photo: Piero Percoco.
Participants (via the open call): Rachel Dedman (1989, London, lives and works in Beirut; Curator-in-Residence, 98weeks, Beirut); Maya Mikelstone (1982, Latvia, lives and works in Paris/Latvia, independent curator); Jesse van Oosten (1986, Rotterdam, lives and works in Rotterdam, Associate Curator, TENT Rotterdam); Heidi Rabben (1982, Laguna Beach, California, lives and works in San Francisco; Assistant Director, Kadist Art Foundation, San Francisco); Maayan Sheleff (1976, Tel-Aviv, lives and works in Tel-Aviv, independent curator); Eszter Szakács (1983, Mór, Hungary, lives and works in Budapest; curator and researcher at tranzit.hu, Budapest); Christel Vesters (1972, Oldebroek, The Netherlands, lives and works in Amsterdam; PhD candidate, School of Humanities, Royal College of Art in London).
Participants from the Curatorial Practice PhD at MADA, Melbourne: Léuli Eshraghi, Sarah Ann Farrar, Rosemary Forde, Melanie Oliver, Joel Stern and Holly Williams.
Tutors: Tara McDowell (Associate Professor and Director of Curatorial Practice at MADA); Dr Alexandra Ross (Postdoctoral fellow, Centre for Curating the Archive at Michaelis Art School, University of Cape Town); Tirdad Zolghadr (Curator and writer currently affiliated with Al Quds Bard College and the International Academy of Art, Ramallah); Fucking Good Art (travelling artists’ magazine or editorial project for research in-and-through art); Vít Havránek (theoretician and organizer based in Prague, co-founder of Tranzitdisplay and Latitudes (independent Barcelona-based curatorial office).
Part of the group visited Monopoli for a workshop led by Rob and Nienke of Fucking Good Art.
Monopoli seafront.
Walking through the old city centre of Bari on the way to lunch.
Food shopping at the Mercato ex Manifattura Bari (former tobacco factory) in the Quartiere Libertà.
Dinner cooked by the International Curatorial Retreat's chef-in-residence Boris Portnoy.
(Above and below) 'Notes and Quotes' session led by Rob and Nienke of Fucking Good Art, a 'de-briefing' session that wrapped up the discussions by exchanging notes and quotes drawn from the previous few days.
Final remarks and feedback session. Photo: Piero Percoco.
RELATED CONTENT:
- Review of the 2015 VESSEL /MADA International Curatorial Retreat, by Dr Alexandra Ross, June 2015 Residents, Visiting Curator Program, Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne, 12 May–7 June 2014.
- Lecture and seminar, MADA | Monash University of Art Design & Architecture, 14 May 2014 (6 May 2014)
- Lead Facilitators, Curating Lab 2014–Curatorial Intensive, National University of Singapore (11–14 June) 30 May 2014
- Latitudes' writing archive (essays, reviews, catalogue entries, etc. since 2005)
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This is the blog of the independent curatorial office Latitudes. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter.
All photos:Latitudes | www.lttds.org
Work is licensed under aCreative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
This is the blog of the independent curatorial office Latitudes. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter.
All photos:Latitudes | www.lttds.org
Work is licensed under aCreative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Archive of Cover Story (April): "Beneath the Connaught Road West flyover, Hong Kong, 19 January 2013"
Mon, May 4 2015This past March we launched our re-designed website, which includes improved features as well as new sections such as "cover story" on our home page:
a monthly focus on one artwork, artist, book, site or trip we've
experienced in our recent past, accompanied by a short text.
2015, cover story, Heman Chong, Hong Kong, Incidents of Travel, Moderations, Nadim Abbas, soundcloud, Spring Workshop, website, Witte de With
Our April Cover Story titled "Beneath the Connaught Road West flyover, Hong Kong, 19 January 2013" looked back at the first 'Incidents of Travel' tour led by artist Nadim Abbas, part of our month residency at Spring Workshop.
We recommend reading the text while listening to this field recording we made on the very same spot!
Related content:
Cover Story #1: Wilfredo Prieto's work "Grease, Soap, Banana" (2 April 2015)
New re-designed website now online! (25 February 2015)
Witte de With and Spring Workshop's 'Moderation(s)' publication 'End Note(s)' is out! (5 March 2015).
Nadim Abbas' "Incidents of Travel: Hong Kong" public tour (19 January 2013)
Archive of social media posts related to "Incidents of Travel" tours and photo-documentation.
Interview between Christina Li and Latitudes on 'Incidents of Travel' for Witte de With's 'Witness to Moderation(s)' blog (7 May 2013)
13 field recordings from 'Incidents of Travel: Hong Kong'
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This is the blog of the independent curatorial office Latitudes. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter.
All photos: Latitudes | www.lttds.org (except when noted otherwise in the photo caption).
Work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
We recommend reading the text while listening to this field recording we made on the very same spot!
Related content:
Cover Story #1: Wilfredo Prieto's work "Grease, Soap, Banana" (2 April 2015)
New re-designed website now online! (25 February 2015)
Witte de With and Spring Workshop's 'Moderation(s)' publication 'End Note(s)' is out! (5 March 2015).
Nadim Abbas' "Incidents of Travel: Hong Kong" public tour (19 January 2013)
Archive of social media posts related to "Incidents of Travel" tours and photo-documentation.
Interview between Christina Li and Latitudes on 'Incidents of Travel' for Witte de With's 'Witness to Moderation(s)' blog (7 May 2013)
13 field recordings from 'Incidents of Travel: Hong Kong'
–
This is the blog of the independent curatorial office Latitudes. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter.
All photos: Latitudes | www.lttds.org (except when noted otherwise in the photo caption).
Work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Review of the exhibition "What cannot be used is forgotten" in the May issue of frieze
Wed, Apr 29 2015
Entrance to the group exhibition "Ce qui ne sert pas s'oublie".
As reported earlier in this channel, at the end of last January we visited the exhibition 'Ce qui ne sert pas s’oublie' (What Cannot be Used is Forgotten)' (on view until 3 May 2015) at CAPC musée d'art coontemporain in Bordeaux.
Curated by Mexico-based Colombian-born curator Catalina Lozano, the exhibition presents the work of Mathieu K. Abonnenc, Sven Augustijnen, Mariana Castillo Deball, Sean Lynch, Pauline M’Barek, Museo Comunitario del Valle de Xico, Wendelien van Oldenborgh, Uriel Orlow, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz and Jorge Satorre.
Below is a fragment of Max Andrews' frieze review, published in the May 2015 issue of frieze magazine (#171):
‘What cannot be used is forgotten’ proposed a biographical approach to objects and the histories and allegiances they can constitute. With an emphasis on eroding the legacy of colonial-era ethnography and archaeology, the exhibition comprised the contributions of ten artists who emphasized the accrual and dispersal of objects' meaning over time. Objects were broken apart, animated, revered, rumoured, memorized, melted; or – as in Pauline M’Barek’s sculptures mimicking display stands for imagined wooden masks – missing altogether. Sometimes, objects were not comfortably objects at all, but textiles or techniques. Occasionally they were alibis employed to provoke historical revision and necessitate textual commentary. In Uriel Orlow’s A Very Fine Cast (110 years) (2007), works ingested past traces of such commentary (captions taken from European museums’ descriptions of the Benin Bronzes robbed by the British punitive Benin Expedition of 1897).
– Max Andrews
Installation view of Sean Lynch's 'A blog-by-blow account of stone-carving in Oxford' (2014).
General view of the exhibition. (Right Wall) Museo Comunitario del Valle de Xico (Community Museum of the Xico Valley).
Report from Bordeaux: Visit to CAPC/Musée d'Art Contemporain's shows of Franz Ehrard Walther and the group show "Ce qui ne sert pas s'oublie" (27 January 2015)
Review of Maria Thereza Alves' exhibition at CAAC Sevilla published in frieze magazine (9 March 2015)
art-agenda review on Andrea Büttner show "Tische", at NoguerasBlanchard, Barcelona (21 July 2014)
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This is the blog of the independent curatorial office Latitudes. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter.
All photos: Latitudes | www.lttds.org (except when noted otherwise in the photo caption).
Work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Archive of our first Cover Story (March): Wilfredo Prieto, ‘Grasa, jabón y plátano’ (2006)
Thu, Apr 2 2015
As recently announced in this channel, we have re-designed our website. This has meant improving a few tech and editing things and introducing new sections such"cover story": a monthly focus on an artwork, artist, book, site or trip we've experienced in our recent past, accompanied by a short text.
Our first cover story centers on Wilfredo Prieto's work "Grease, Soap, Banana" presented in 2007 in the group show "Extraordinary Rendition". Above you find the full picture, below details. Enjoy!
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This is the blog of the independent curatorial office Latitudes. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter.
All photos: Latitudes | www.lttds.org (except when noted otherwise in the photo caption).
Work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Review of Maria Thereza Alves' exhibition at CAAC Sevilla published in frieze magazine
Mon, Mar 9 2015
View of the exhibition "The Long Road to Xico (1991–2014) at CAAC, Sevilla. Courtesy the artist and CAAC, Sevilla.
The April issue of frieze magazine includes a review by Max Andrews' of Latitudes on Maria Thereza Alves' solo exhibition "The Long Road to Xico (1991–2014) at the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo in Sevilla.
Curated by Los Angeles-based Spanish curator Pedro de Llano, this is a long-overdue midcareer retrospective comprising over a dozen works by an artist whose practice is little exhibited in Spain, and it's also very pertinent as it's hosted within the former Monasterio de Santa María de las Cuevas – from where Cristóbal Colón (Christopher Columbus) planned his second voyage of 1493.
Most importantly though is the connection to northern Spain with Alves' long-term research on Xico: "a town outside Mexico City, on the shores of one of the lakes that in the late 19th century, Íñigo Noriega, a Spanish immigrant from Asturias, drained the lake completing a cycle of environmental destruction and social marginalization that began with the arrival of Hernán Cortés and his soldiers." (from CAAC website) "This one man-made disaster in Chalco continues to have adverse effects that still plague the region with floods, contaminated water, land subsidence and the resulting destruction to infrastructure such as sewage pipes, large cracks which damage hundreds of houses, lack of drinking water and most recently earthquakes." (from the exhibition walltext)
View of the installation The Return of a Lake, dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel, 2012.
"Since the early 1990s, Maria Thereza Alves has addressed the devastating effects of Portuguese imperialism on the indigenous peoples of her native Brazil and of the Spanish conquest in the Americas. Hosted by the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo (CAAC), this long-overdue survey was in part a pre-history of her extensive project for Documenta 13, The Return of a Lake (2012). Extended in Seville, this room-sized installation centered on tabletop models that related the disastrous effects of the 1908 desiccation of Lake Chalco in Mexico City by Spanish businessman Íñigo Noriega Laso, and the ongoing injustices suffered by those who live in nearby Xico. Bookended by the earliest work in the exhibition, NoWhere (1991), in which overpainted photographs from Amazonas address European delusions of city planning in ‘empty’ territory, The Long Road to Xico (1991–2014) illuminates the ecological assault and epistemological violence ushered by colonialism. Given the city’s past as the main port for Spanish trade with the New World, the context of Seville granted particular acuity to the ethical armature of Alves’s decolonizing art. Moreover, CAAC’s home is the former Monasterio de Santa María de las Cuevas, from where Cristóbal Colón (Christopher Columbus) planned his second voyage of 1493 and where his remains were once interred."
RELATED CONTENT:
The work of Maria Thereza Alves has been featured in several of Latitudes' projects, starting in 2006 with her contribution alongside Jimmy Durham for the publication "LAND, ART: A Cultural Ecology Handbook" (RSA/Arts Council England). In 2008 her film "The Sun" (2006, 5'03'') was presented in the group exhibition ‘Greenwashing. Ambiente: Pericoli, Promesse e Perplessità’ (Greenwashing. Environment: Perils, Promises and Perplexities), at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, Italy (29 February–18 May 2008) and later that year it was presented as part of the film programme "A Stake in the Mud, A Hole in the Reel. Land Art’s Expanded Field 1968–2008", premiered at the Museo Tamayo, Mexico City in April 2008 (toured to another seven venues in Europe between April and October that year).
Latitudes to facilitate the Nature Addicts Fund Travelling Academy, 11–15 September, organised within the Maybe Education and Public Programs of dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel (9 September 2012)
dOCUMENTA (13) artists and Latitudes (24 August 2012)
Premiere del ciclo de video 'Una estaca en el lodo, un hoyo en la cinta. El campo expandido del Land Art, 1968-2008' en el Museo Tamayo, México DF (25 March 2008)
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This is the blog of the independent curatorial office Latitudes. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter.
All photos: Latitudes | www.lttds.org (except when noted otherwise in the photo caption).
Work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Witte de With and Spring Workshop's 'Moderation(s)' publication 'End Note(s)' is out!
Thu, Mar 5 2015
'End Note(s)' published by Witte de With. Publication photos and design by Kristin Metho.
'End Note(s)' is finally out! The publication marks the conclusion of two years of residencies, discussions, editorial and exhibition projects within the framework of 'Moderation(s)', a multiform collaboration between Hong Kong's Spring Workshop and Rotterdam's Witte de With, steered by Singaporean artist and curator Heman Chong.
Latitudes participation took place in January 2013 with a month-long residency at Spring Workshop, Hong Kong, and with the production of "Incidents of Travel": an invitation extended to four Hong Kong-based artists – Nadim Abbas, Ho Sin Tung, Yuk King Tan, and Samson Young – to develop day-long tours, thus retelling the city and each participant’s artistic concerns through personal itineraries and waypoints.
As announced a few months ago, Latitudes has contributed to the publication with a visual essay documenting each of the artists' itineraries accompanying them with a revised and re-edited version of the May 2013 conversation with curator Christina Li (Moderation(s)' witness).
Section of the book (pp. 61–89) is dedicated to Latitudes' "Incidents of Travel". Here are the names of the artists and the locations visited during each of their tours.
Itinerary and photo-documentation of Nadim Abbas' tour on 19 January 2013.
(Above and below) Itinerary and photo-documentation of Yuk King Tan's tour on 24 January 2013.
Itinerary and photo-documentation of Ho Sin Tung's tour on 29 January 2013.
(Above and below) Itinerary and photo-documentation of Samson Young's tour, 7 February 2013.
A re-edited version of a conversation with curator Christina Li – Moderation(s)' witness – originally published on Witte de With's blog dedicated to the project.
Here's an excerpt of our conversation with Christina:
Christina Li: The artists' tours were meant for you both to converse privately with each selected artist while getting to know their practices and the city. Did the public aspect of the Nadim Abbas' tour and your experience of the commercial tours suggest a different perspective of how the format could function from your initial perception? How has this attempt challenged your thinking in mediating and presenting the immediate experience and documentation of these tours to a larger audience?
Latitudes: Although the commercial tours were taking place regularly by prior arrangement, we happened to be the only participants on each of the days [Feng Shui tour and Tour of the Devil's Peak]. We tried to keep the artist tours casual and inconspicuous and to respect the notion of hospitality and privacy in the same way that if we came to your house for dinner, you would not expect us to bring a group of strangers with us. In fact, the day with Yuk King Tan concluded with a household of Filipina domestic workers making food for us – women whose trust and friendship she had earned through her personal affiliations and the concerns of her art. In this case, it would obviously have been completely inappropriate and something of a human safari to bring along an audience.
Visiting Waterfall Bay with Nadim Abbas was part of the public tour on 19 January 2013. Photo: Trevor Yeung.
But we had no desire to make the days exclusive or private as if they were some kind of bespoke tourist service. Other people sometimes joined for parts of the days if the artist had suggested it, yet the main point of emphasis was our commitment to the tour in lieu of the typically brief studio visit and a situation in which the artist has had ownership of planning the whole day. If there would be definitely something like an audience present throughout (that might expect to be engaged or come and go) the dynamics and the logistics would have changed.
The artist tours were conceived from the point of view of research, and we have been reluctant to burden the artists or overload the format to the degree that they become durational artworks or somehow theatrical. We are not particularly focused on tidying up whatever their ontological status as art might be and likewise, we have deliberately not just invited artists whose work has a clear sympathy with performative, urban research or an obvious relation with sociability or place. We feel it is important that the format is quite malleable to the personality of each artist and that in the same way that you might browse a newspaper or share a car journey with somebody, the tours do not require a wider audience to legitimize them. In the same sense, they have not necessarily required documentation to make them valid. However, we have been increasingly interested in the idea of reportage or live broadcast in terms of the ‘making of’ or ‘artist at work’ genre, while at the same time being really wary about our own positions as protagonists and photographs that might seem like they belong in a travel magazine.
The tours in Mexico City took place for five consecutive days right after our arrival, so the way we shared the photographic material was more direct via our Facebook page at the end of each day. The exhibition at Casa del Lago opened only two days after we concluded the last tour, so we had to come up with a straightforward display form. For each tour, the photographer Eunice Adorno accompanied us and in the end, we projected a selection of 200 of her images as a slideshow and displayed a few of them printed on the wall alongside a large map of the city with pins locating the sites we visited. We also had printed itineraries, written by the artists, so anyone could later follow the routes themselves if they so desired.
Visiting the Espacio Escultórico at U.N.A.M. with Jerónimo Hagerman, one of the five tours around Mexico City in September 2012. Photo: Eunice Adorno.
In Hong Kong, we were using Twitter, Instagram, and Vine during the tours, so it was an experiment in documentation-on-the-fly and live journaling which was open to real-time responses. We also made a series of one-minute field recordings. The tweets were archived soon after alongside these recordings, as well as related Facebook posts. We also published blog posts about each of the tours which included many photographs (by us and others) alongside paragraphs from the artists’ itineraries. This might seem to highlight merely mundane technical aspects of the project but it also heightened our interest in further exploring the idea of the curatorial bandwidth beyond exhibition making, something we continued to investigate in following projects such as #OpenCurating.
'End Note(s)' Colophon:
Concept: Heman Chong
Editors: Defne Ayas, Mimi Brown, Heman Chong, Amira Gad, Samuel Saelemakers
Contributors: A Constructed World, Nadim Abbas, Defne Ayas, Oscar van den Boogaard, Mimi Brown, Heman Chong, Chris Fitzpatrick, Amira Gad, Travis Jeppesen, Latitudes, Christina Li, Guy Mannes-Abbott, Samuel Saelemakers, Aaron Schuster
Copy Editors: Janine Armin, Marnie Slater
Production: Amira Gad, Samuel Saelemakers, Heman Chong
Design: Kristin Metho
Printer: Koninglijke Van Gorcum
Publisher: Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art Rotterdam, the Netherlands
ISBN: 978-94-9143-529-4
RELATED CONTENT:
First week of the "Moderation(s)" residency at Spring Workshop, Hong Kong (17 January 2013)
Nadim Abbas' "Incidents of Travel: Hong Kong" public tour (19 January 2013)
"Temple and Feng Shui Tour", a guided walk around Hong Kong Island & Kowloon (22 January 2013)
Ho Sin Tung "Incidents of Travel: Hong Kong" tour (30 January 2013)
Yuk King Tan's "Incidents of Travel: Hong Kong" tour (3 February 2013)
Tour of Devil's Peak and the Museum of Coastal Defence (6 February 2013)
Samson Young's "Incidents of Travel: Hong Kong" tour (7 February 2013)
Latitudes' Open Day at Spring Workshop on 2 February 2013 (9 February 2013)
"Archive as Method: An Interview with Chantal Wong, Hammad Nasar and Lydia Ngai" of the Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong. Concluding #OpenCurating interview (1 May 2013)
"Digression(s), Entry Point(s): An interview with Heman Chong", Singapore-based artist, curator, and writer. Eighth in the #OpenCurating research series. (4 April 2013)
Archive of social media posts related to "Incidents of Travel" tours and photo-documentation.
13 field recordings from 'Incidents of Travel: Hong Kong'
Witte de With opens the group show "The Part In The Story Where A Part Becomes A Part Of Something Else" on May 22, 2014 (21 April 2014)
Interview between Christina Li and Latitudes on 'Incidents of Travel' for Witte de With's 'Witness to Moderation(s)' blog (7 May 2013)
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This is the blog of the independent curatorial office Latitudes. Follow us on Facebook and @LTTDS.
All photos: Latitudes | www.lttds.org (except when noted otherwise in the photo caption).
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Latitudes' re-designed website now online!
Wed, Feb 25 2015
After months of re-editing, digging floppy disks and analogue archives, we're proud (and relieved!) to launch our newly designed website, same address as always: http://www.lttds.org
We have improved several things. Our home page now features a "cover story",
a monthly focus on an artwork, artist, book, site or trip we've
experienced in our recent past, accompanied by a short text. Our first
cover story centers on Wilfredo Prieto's work "Grease, Soap, Banana" presented in 2007 in the group show "Extraordinary Rendition".
Below this section we highlight three recent projects which are refreshed with each visit.
Below this section we highlight three recent projects which are refreshed with each visit.
Yes! Each page is more tablet and mobile-friendly, yet has an even wider format for your desktop.
Each of our project pages includes a sliding photo gallery complementing our flickr sets, and has clearer access to our social media networks – such as our twitter or facebook.
At the end of each project's text, we've added "Related Content": an expandable section linking to our blog posts.
The sidebar includes details of the locations, publication (if applicable) and project supporters; a calendar of events and biography of the artist (for solo shows).
Our project page now includes tags enabling you to dynamically filter our projects by 'year', 'exhibition', 'research', 'public realm', 'with publication', etc.
From here you can also check our Index, our Publications or download the pdf 'Projects Dossier' detailing a selection of our projects.
We have revised the 'About' page and placed an accordion listing our "Lectures", "Teaching", "Awards & Affiliations", "Juries", "Residencies", "Bibliography/Press" and "Research and Field Trips".
And last, but certainly not least, we continue to report from our blog on the development of our projects as well as on our field trips, news, shows, or books worth discussing.
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This is the blog of the independent curatorial office Latitudes. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter.
All photos: Latitudes | www.lttds.org (except when noted otherwise in the photo caption).
Work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Interview with Nicholas Mangan in Mousse Magazine #47, February–March 2015
Wed, Feb 11 2015The February–March 2015 issue of Mousse Magazine (#47) includes the interview 'What Lies Beneath' between Melbourne-based artist Nicholas Mangan (1979, Geelong) and Mariana Cánepa Luna of Latitudes.
The interview centers primarily on discussing the artists' methodologies through two of Mangan's recent works: 'A World Undone' – currently on view as part of Witte de With's show 'Art in The Age of...Energy' (23 January–3 May 2015) – and his film and sculptural work 'Nauru - Notes From A Cretaceous World' which will soon be featured as part of the New Museum's 2015 Triennial: Surround Audience curated by Lauren Cornell (Curator, 2015 Triennial, Digital Projects and Museum as Hub) and artist Ryan Trecartin.
Read the full review here. Following is an excerpt of the beginning of their conversation:
Mangan works with LABOR (México DF), Sutton Gallery (Melbourne) and Hopkinson Mossman (Auckland).
Related Content:
Visiting Curator Program, Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne, 12 May–7 June 2014 (28 April 2014).
'Nice to Meet You – Erick Beltrán. Some Fundamental Postulates' by Max Andrews on Mousse Magazine #31 (30 November 2011)
Interview 'Free Forms' with Lauren Cornell part of Latitudes' 2012–13 long-term research #OpenCurating, released on April 2013 via Issuu.
2015, Ecology, interview, LABOR, Mariana Cánepa Luna, Melbourne, Mousse magazine, New Museum, Nicholas Mangan
Layout of the interview in English and Italian on the pages of Mousse Magazine.
The interview centers primarily on discussing the artists' methodologies through two of Mangan's recent works: 'A World Undone' – currently on view as part of Witte de With's show 'Art in The Age of...Energy' (23 January–3 May 2015) – and his film and sculptural work 'Nauru - Notes From A Cretaceous World' which will soon be featured as part of the New Museum's 2015 Triennial: Surround Audience curated by Lauren Cornell (Curator, 2015 Triennial, Digital Projects and Museum as Hub) and artist Ryan Trecartin.
Read the full review here. Following is an excerpt of the beginning of their conversation:
'Dowiyogo’s Ancient Coral Coffee Table', 2010. Courtesy of the artist, Sutton gallery Melbourne and Hopkinson Mossman Auckland.
MCL: Unearthing
narratives embedded within matter has been at the very core of your
practice for some time now. Your most recent sculptural and film
works have inquired into natural materials, their transit and energy
flow and how their transformation – be it human-induced or
ecological – have a social, political and an economic dimension.
I'm particularly thinking of your 2010 project 'Nauru: Notes from a Cretaceous World' – featured at the New Museum 2015 Triennial– which focuses on the story of the tiny Micronesian island
Republic of Nauru and its financial collapse as a consequence of a
century of corrosive colonial exploitation of its phosphate ore
resources. Could you elaborate on how this notion of transformation
is explored in your sculpture works (traditionally static) and films
(moving image) and how you have come to interrelate the two in the
spatial narrative of your installations?
NM: As transformation is a process occurring in time, the necessity to explore duration has led me to test moving image as a sculptural possibility, to express not only the temporality of the assemblage, but also the forces and drives that produce such aggregations. In the video ‘Nauru: Notes from a Cretaceous World', narration sits over found footage and material that I shot myself, providing an account of Nauru’s material history as shaped by anthropogenic forces. The narration attempts to draw out the various histories that are embedded in material forms. In more recent projects, such as ‘A World Undone’ (2012) and ‘Progress In Action’ (2013), I have attempted to produce an intensified intersection between moving image and sculpture, enabling the materials to narrate themselves.
NM: As transformation is a process occurring in time, the necessity to explore duration has led me to test moving image as a sculptural possibility, to express not only the temporality of the assemblage, but also the forces and drives that produce such aggregations. In the video ‘Nauru: Notes from a Cretaceous World', narration sits over found footage and material that I shot myself, providing an account of Nauru’s material history as shaped by anthropogenic forces. The narration attempts to draw out the various histories that are embedded in material forms. In more recent projects, such as ‘A World Undone’ (2012) and ‘Progress In Action’ (2013), I have attempted to produce an intensified intersection between moving image and sculpture, enabling the materials to narrate themselves.
'Nauru - Between A Rock and A Hard Place' installation view at Art Gallery Of New South whales 2009. Courtesy of the artist, Sutton gallery in Melbourne and Hopkinson Mossman in Auckland. Photo: Carley Wright.
'Mined over matter', 2012. C-print on cotton paper, 69 x 103cm.
Courtesy of the artist and LABOR Mexico.
'Matter over mined (for A World Undone)', 2012. C-print on cotton paper 69 x 103cm.
Courtesy of the artist and LABOR, Mexico.
'A World Undone', 2012 (video Stills). HD colour, silent, 12min continuous loop.
Courtesy of the artist and LABOR Mexico.
Mangan works with LABOR (México DF), Sutton Gallery (Melbourne) and Hopkinson Mossman (Auckland).
Related Content:
Visiting Curator Program, Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne, 12 May–7 June 2014 (28 April 2014).
'Nice to Meet You – Erick Beltrán. Some Fundamental Postulates' by Max Andrews on Mousse Magazine #31 (30 November 2011)
Interview 'Free Forms' with Lauren Cornell part of Latitudes' 2012–13 long-term research #OpenCurating, released on April 2013 via Issuu.
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This is the blog of the independent curatorial office Latitudes. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter.
All photos: Latitudes | www.lttds.org (except when noted otherwise in the photo caption).
Work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
This is the blog of the independent curatorial office Latitudes. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter.
All photos: Latitudes | www.lttds.org (except when noted otherwise in the photo caption).
Work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Report from Bordeaux: Visit to CAPC/Musée d'Art Contemporain's shows of Franz Ehrard Walther and the group show "Ce qui ne sert pas s'oublie"
Tue, Jan 27 2015
Views of Franz Erhard Walther's show "Le Corps décide" from CAPC's mezzanine.
The exhibition 'Franz Erhard Walther: Le Corps décide' was initiated by WIELS Centre d’Art Contemporain, in Brussels – see a video of its iteration here – and has been co-produced together with CAPC musée d'art contemporain in Bordeaux, alongside The Franz Erhard Walther Foundation. The exhibition is accompanied by a beautiful publication that includes brightly colored pop up shapes that spread throughout the book.
From Wiels' website... "Franz Erhard Walther’s exhibition offers an in-depth look at an influential German artist whose pioneering work straddles minimalist sculpture, conceptual art, abstract painting, and performance all while positing fundamental questions about the conventional idea of the artwork as an immutable, obdurate pedestal or wall-bound thing. Bringing together pivotal works made between the 1950s and the present, this exhibition focuses on Walther’s ability to transform notions of object-hood and perception through drawings, paintings, fabric sculptures, participatory forms, language-based works, photographic documentation and archival material."
On the second floor, CAPC just opened 'Ce qui ne sert pas s’oublie' (What Cannot be Used is Forgotten) (22 January–3 May 2015) a group show curated by Mexico-based Colombian-born curator Catalina Lozano, that includes works by Mathieu K. Abonnenc, Sven Augustijnen, Mariana Castillo Deball, Sean Lynch, Pauline M’Barek, Museo Comunitario del Valle de Xico, Wendelien van Oldenborgh, Uriel Orlow, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz and Jorge Satorre.
The exhibition "deals with the mutating statuses of objects in relation to the possible historical narratives, especially those related to colonial past an present and the layers of cultural, spiritual and identity production that stem from them. Objects carry a wealth of immaterial aspects in and around their materiality, constituted by means of the relations they form with others, both human and non-human... This exhibition seeks to understand how our relation to the material world entails endless processes of assimilation, acculturation, re-appropriation, ritualisation which in their complexity whiteness and embody the historical binds in which they are caught." [this and following quotations describing each work are taken from the exhibition leaflet].
The exhibition is accompanied by a French/Spanish publication (Les Presses du Réel, 2015) with contributions by Mathieu K. Abonnenc, Mariana Castillo Deball, Catalina Lozano, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz and Jorge Satorre.
The exhibition "deals with the mutating statuses of objects in relation to the possible historical narratives, especially those related to colonial past an present and the layers of cultural, spiritual and identity production that stem from them. Objects carry a wealth of immaterial aspects in and around their materiality, constituted by means of the relations they form with others, both human and non-human... This exhibition seeks to understand how our relation to the material world entails endless processes of assimilation, acculturation, re-appropriation, ritualisation which in their complexity whiteness and embody the historical binds in which they are caught." [this and following quotations describing each work are taken from the exhibition leaflet].
The exhibition is accompanied by a French/Spanish publication (Les Presses du Réel, 2015) with contributions by Mathieu K. Abonnenc, Mariana Castillo Deball, Catalina Lozano, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz and Jorge Satorre.
Entrance to the group exhibition "Ce qui ne sert pas s'oublie".
The first room of the exhibition featured 'Killing Pots' (2013–14), a series of sculptural works by Jorge Satorre (1979, Mexico). Information about these pieces can be found in this extensive text by curator Caterina Riva.
Sean Lynch (1978, Ireland), 'A blog-by-blow account of stone-carving in Oxford', (2014) an installation composed of photographs, sculptures and a video projection "exploring the oeuvre of nineteenth-century stone-carvers John and James O’Shea, who carved monkeys, cats, owls and parrots on buildings in Oxford and Dublin."
(Left) 'Nocturne' (2015) a video by Beatriz Santiago Muñoz (1972, Puerto Rico); (right) Mathieu K. Abonnenc (1977, French Guyana) 'Sas titre (des corps entassés'), (2012) and 'Names and surnames' (2012-13).
The show closes with two works produced in 2007 by Uriel Orlow (1973, Switzerland): "Lost Wax" and "A Very Fine Cast (110 Years)". The first deals with the production of brass-casting artefacts in Benin City, Nigeria, produced via this already out of use technique. The latter (below) is a series of 28 engravings displaying descriptions of artefacts from museum cataloguing systems, revealing the racist and colonial narratives that lie within the looted objects that are now part of European museum collections.
This is the blog of the independent curatorial office Latitudes. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter.
All photos: Latitudes | www.lttds.org (except when noted otherwise in the photo caption)
Work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Sean Lynch, 'A blog-by-blow account of stone-carving in Oxford' (2014).
(Left) 'Nocturne' (2015) a video by Beatriz Santiago Muñoz (1972, Puerto Rico); (right) Mathieu K. Abonnenc (1977, French Guyana) 'Sas titre (des corps entassés'), (2012) and 'Names and surnames' (2012-13).(Left) Sven Augustijnen (1970, Belgium) series of photographs 'L'Histoire Belge' (2007) "question the monumentality of Belgium's history and any optimistic relation to its past, including its colonial incursions in Africa"; (right) 'Nocturne' (2015) a video by Beatriz Santiago Muñoz (1972, Puerto Rico) focusing on syncretic religions from the Caribbean, namely Haitian Vodou, characterised by the flexibility they show towards drastic change, be it geographical, social, material or natural".
General view of the exhibition. (Right wall) Museo Comunitario del Valle de Xico (Community Museum of the Xico Valley), a community organisation founded in 1996 "entrusted with the safeguard and display of pre-colonial remains found by the neighbours of the locality over the past few decades."
(Above) Detail of Mariana Castillo Deball (1975, Mexico) "Le Problème de Molyneux" (2001) "addressing the immediacy of experiencing an object without seeing it and the subjective construction of its image".
Room with "Showcase" (2012), "Rope" (2013), "Trophy stands" (2011) and "Semiophores" (2013), all works by Pauline M'barek (1979, Germany).
(Above) Wendelien van Oldenborgh (1972, The Netherlands), "La Javaise" (2012). "Shot in the former Colonial Institute in Amsterdam, explores the links between colonialism and globalisation through the example of Vlisco, a Dutch firm producing textiles for the African market."
The show closes with two works produced in 2007 by Uriel Orlow (1973, Switzerland): "Lost Wax" and "A Very Fine Cast (110 Years)". The first deals with the production of brass-casting artefacts in Benin City, Nigeria, produced via this already out of use technique. The latter (below) is a series of 28 engravings displaying descriptions of artefacts from museum cataloguing systems, revealing the racist and colonial narratives that lie within the looted objects that are now part of European museum collections.
Related Content:
- Report from the Amsterdam Art Weekend, 27–30 November 2014 (2 December 2014)
- Report from London's Frieze week 2014 (27 October 2014)
- Report from Madrid: Exhibitions during Apertura 2014 Gallery Weekend (15 September 2014)
- Report from Glasgow: Lecture at The Common Guild and studio and gallery visits (4 December 2013)
- Report from Paris: FIAC week, 21–28 October 2013 (5 November 2013)
- Report from Athens: "AGORA", 4th Athens Biennale 2013 (4 November 2013)
- Report from New York: Gramsci Monument, visiting critics at ISCP, Carol Bove at The High Line and galleries route (23 September 2013)
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This is the blog of the independent curatorial office Latitudes. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter.
All photos: Latitudes | www.lttds.org (except when noted otherwise in the photo caption)
Work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.