Latitudes in the 'OMONOIA' Summit of the Athens Biennale 2015–2017

Mon, Nov 16 2015

1960s view of Omonoia Square (Concord Square) in Athens – one of the many views of the site shared in this Flickr.

Latitudes will participate in one of the three panels that will comprise a two-day International Summit (18–19 November) that initiate the next two years of activities of the next edition of the Athens Biennale, titled “OMONOIA” (Concord). Intuitive towards the institution of biennales, the Athens Biennale intends to revise its identity and bridges the past with the present and the future by merging the fifth edition (2015) with the sixth (2017).

The Summit is framed within the "Synapse 1: Introducing a laboratory for production post" the first synapse of what will be an ongoing series of events that will run over the next two years.

The first day (18 November, 9:30–20h: National Theatre – New Rex, 48 Panepistimiou ) of the Summit will be organised under three panel discussions – Alternative Economies, The Performative in the Political, Rethinking Institutions. See the programme here.

The second day (19 November 2015, 9:30–20h, Bageion, 18 Omonoia Square) will host a series of working groups between scholars, self-organised initiatives, cooperatives and activists as well as an open assembly that will summarise the proceedings and discuss potentials for the future.

The aim of the Summit is to promote transnational knowledge-exchange and consider common grounds among academics, artists, activists and initiatives involved in practices of commoning, urban welfare and grassroots participation and kickstart the urban laboratory that the Athens Biennale aims to become for the next two years.

#AB5to6
#ΟΜΟΝΟΙΑ
#AthensBiennale

RELATED CONTENT:

Report from Athens: "AGORA", 4th Athens Biennale 2013, 4 November 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.

2015, Athens, biennale, latitudes, Omonoia, panel discussion, rethinking institutions, summit

'Near-Future Artworlds Curatorial Disruption Foresight Group' seminar convenes in its third iteration in Birmingham's Eastside Projects, 15 November 2015

Wed, Nov 11 2015

Façade of Eastside Projects in Birmingham.

Latitudes will lead a day-long session on November 15, one of the two-day self-reflective evaluation sessions that the Extra Special People (ESP) Associate scheme programme of Eastside Projects is organising under the title "Re-Imagining ESP II".

Taking place during the weekend of the 14–15 November in Birmingham, UK, these two sessions are aimed at stimulating a conversation amongst the current members of the practice-led peer support network ESP in order to explore the possibility of them becoming active participants and even producers instead of receivers of predefined formats and contents.

This will be the third iteration of the “Near-Future Artworlds...” meetings (following those in Bari and San Francisco) – a forum for informal dialogue about megatrends and the future of contemporary art institutions.

The first meeting in Bari broadly addressed to what degree organisational forms of art institutions are embracing or resisting similar transformations through various curatorial/editorial prototypes and prognosticative use-case scenarios. With an emphasis on cross-pollination between design thinking and curatorial thinking, the second meeting in San Francisco broached, among other things, the notion of the post-disciplinary, and the question of appropriate speeds or periodicities institutions should follow.

Poster produced for the seminar by Kadist Art Foundation, San Francisco.

In Birmingham, the session will collectively imagine a ‘What if?’ – a post-apocalyptic scenario in which an art ecology has to be regrown from the ground up. What would be most urgent in terms of organisation, facilities, and tools? The second part of the meeting will involve a practical exercise modelled to prototype initiatives that might be best suited to Birmingham’s real or imagined artistic, economic and social context.

In order to be conducive to freedom of interaction, these meetings are held under the Chatham House Rule. This allows participants to express personal views, to listen, reflect and gather insights with a clear distinction from the position of their employers and/or the policies of any associated organization. Participation is expected, but there will be no resolutions issued, no votes are undertaken, and no policy statements proposed.

Archive photo of ESP activity. Courtesy: Eastside Projects.

Extra Special People (ESP) is a practice-led peer support network organised by Eastside Projects that "works with artists, designers, curators and writers to support the development of work, ideas, connections and careers through a programme of events, opportunities, and projects. Members become active contributors to a practice-led peer support network and benefit from Eastside Projects’ experience of the contemporary art world and regional, national and international contacts."

Eastside Projects is an "internationally renowned centre of excellence based in a free public gallery imagined and organized by artists, in partnership with Birmingham City University." Eastside Projects is an Arts Council England National Portfolio Organisation, supported by the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Breakthrough Fund 2010-14, and Esmée Fairbairn Foundation.

Eastside Projects
86 Heath Mill Lane
Birmingham B9 4AR
0121-771-1778
www.eastsideprojects.org
www.extraspecialpeople.org

RELATED CONTENT:

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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.

2015, Birmingham, evaluation, fieldwork, latitudes, Near Future Artworlds, prototyping, rethinking institutions, seminar, Workshop

LaPublika – Public sphere laboratory for artistic research, consonni, Donostia, 10–11 November 2015

Mon, Nov 2 2015

Latitudes has been invited by consonni to give a two-day seminar and a public lecture in the context of LaPublika, a programme of activities concerning the way artistic practices construct the public sphere. The programme will take place over the next two years in the recently opened International Centre for Contemporary Culture Tabakalera in Donostia, on the 10 and 11 November, and is a joint initiative together with Donostia-San Sebastian European Cultural Capital 2016.

"Public sphere here is understood as spaces considered to be public (the street, the square, the city), as well as the internet or the communications media, and the mechanisms with which we participate in managing what is common (language, rites, norms, the aesthetic of collective processes). At a time when new social and civic paradigms are arising, LaPublika seeks to provide a framework of work and reflection upon those processes." (....) "In addition to the presence-based programme, all the activities have their version in podcast format on LaPublika’s radio-web, the central hub of the project, which is also backed up by programming involving interviews, radio spots and sound pieces."

Visitors at Robert Smithson's "Broken Circle" (1971), an event organised by Land Art Contemporary. Picture: Kunstbeeld.

Breaking Ground: Broken Circle/Spiral Hill, by Robert Smithson & Nancy Holt - See more at: http://ajuntament.barcelona.cat/lavirreina/en/activities/breaking-ground-broken-circlespiral-hill-robert-smithson-nancy-holt#sthash.8wxhhHQB.dpuf

Latitudes' workshop titled “Beyond the roundabout, or what’s public about public art?” will take the legacy of Land Art as a starting point – or more specifically, Robert Smithson’s notion of “continual movement” – to address the multiple temporalities which can constitute the form of an artwork in public space. Approaching projects (rather than beholding objects) the workshop will discuss artists who conceptualize or actualize their works against a backdrop of vast stretches of time or topological change. In the context of a networked culture which seems to offer an accelerating and horizontal concept of the public sphere, the workshop will furthermore address what is at stake when “digging deep” and slowing down.

Production of Jan Dibbets' "6 Hours Tide Object with Correction of Perspective" (1969–2009) on 9 February 2009 the Port of Rotterdam, a beach that has now disappeared to become Maasvlakte 2. Photo: Latitudes.

For the public lecture on November 11, Latitudes will forgo a chronological account of its projects of the last decade, and instead attempt various transects through its curatorial projects determined by the public sphere, raw materials and their transformation. From the zinc which led to an Esperanto micro-nation, to the air of a Beijing shopping centre, or the dead trees of printed news, Latitudes will join some traits and ideas around “human resources”, extractive modernity, obsolescence and the carbon cycle.

RELATED CONTENT:

More about Consonni
More about LaPublika
Launch of LaPublika to the basque press
Video de Latitudes sobre el taller desarrollado en LaPublika.

2015, human resources, public art, raw materials, research, Robert Smithson, slowing down, Workshop

Photodocumentation of the five commissions 'Composiciones' now on flickr

Thu, Oct 22 2015

'Composiciones', five new commissions for the Barcelona Gallery Weekend, 1–4 October 2015.

We just uploaded photos of the five new commissions "Composiciones" on Latitudes' flickr. These projects by artists active in the Barcelona art scene complemented the first Barcelona Gallery Weekend (1–4 October 2015) programme of exhibitions and events.

Each intervention responded to site and context-specific private and public location outside the contemporary art circuit – a private psychoanalytic library, the former home of the director of a ceramics factory, a public botanical collection, the home of a former priest and an invertebrate fossile collection.

Pinpointing some lesser-known aspects of the city's cultural history and municipal life, Composiciones offered moments of interruption, intimacy and immersion throughout the weekend.

Map of the five locations for the temporary projects.

Commissions by David Bestué (at the Factory complex Cosme Toda, L'Hospitalet); Dora García (at the Biblioteca del Campo Freudiano); Jordi Mitjà (at the Museu Geològic del Seminari de Barcelona); Rasmus Nilausen in collaboration with Pere Llobera (at the gardens of La Central bookstore, Raval); and Daniel Steegmann Magrané (at the Umbracle, Parc de la Ciutadella). Details of each project and locations.

Also on our website (highlighted in yellow where to locate it) you'll find the links to the audio and video documentation of the three talks led by Dora García as part of her intervention at the Biblioteca del Campo Freudiano. We recommend you read a nicely written account of these three sessions (in Spanish) by two of its participants.

On the same page and under 'Related content' you will find links to the press coverage related to 'Composiciones'. The most extensive and in depth review so far has been this considered and detailed blog entry by Barcelona-based art critic and curator Fede Montornés, which of course made us really happy.

And last but not least, we gathered the many tweets, instagram, press links, etc. that appeared in the last few weeks in Storify.

View the story "‘Composiciones’, five commissions curated by Latitudes for the first Barcelona Gallery Weekend, 1–4 October 2015. " on Storify

#BarcelonaGalleryWeekend
#Composiciones

Related content:

Storify – Social media archive

Details of the Barcelona Gallery Weekend programme.

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

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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.

2015, Barcelona, commissions, Composiciones, Daniel Steegmann Mangrané, David Bestué, Dora Garcia, Gallery Weekend, Jordi Mitjà, Pere Llobera, photo, press coverage, Rasmus Nilausen

'Compositions' a programme of five artists' interventions for the first Barcelona Gallery Weekend, 1–4 October 2015

Fri, Sep 25 2015

'Save the date' cards of the Barcelona Gallery Weekend. Graphic design: Hey Studio.

Latitudes is curating Compositions a programme of five newly commissioned temporary interventions specially produced for the first Barcelona Gallery Weekend (1–4 October 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.

Cosme Toda factory complex.

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.

Biblioteca del Campo Freudiano de Barcelona (Freudian Field Library in Barcelona). Photo: BCFB

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.

Gardens of La Central del Raval.

Former priest house, Gardens of La Central del Raval, located at Carrer d'Elisabets 8. Opening hours: Thursday 1 October, 5–9pm; Friday 2, Saturday 3 and Sunday 4: 11am–8pm.

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.

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.

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/

2015, Barcelona, commissions, Composiciones, Daniel Steegmann Mangrané, David Bestué, Dora Garcia, Gallery Weekend, Jordi Mitjà, latitudes, Pere Llobera, Rasmus Nilausen

Symposium participation, "The Shock of Victory", Glasgow, 25 September 2015

Mon, Sep 21 2015

Symposium participants: In the Shadow of the Hand, Sacha Kahir, Caleb Waldorf, Max Andrews of Latitudes, Angeliki Roussou, WHW (What, How and For Whom?).

9.30am | Arrival and coffee

10am - 10.15am | Introduction by CCA Curator Remco de Blaaij and Dr Deborah Jackson

10.15am - 11am | In the Shadow of the Hand

11am - 11.45am | Angelika Roussou

11.45am - 12.30pm | Caleb Waldorf

1pm - 2pm | Lunch (provided)

2pm - 2.45pm | Sacha Kahir

3pm - 3.45pm | Sabina Sabolovic, WHW

3.45pm - 4.15pm | Break

4.15pm - 5pm | Max Andrews, Latitudes

The Shock of Victory is a programme consisting of an exhibition, a symposium organised in partnership with the University of Edinburgh and digital publication. Taking place exactly one year after the Scottish Independence Referendum of 18 September 2014, the programme proposes artistic approaches, techniques, provocations and motivations in a post-referendum reality departing from Scotland, but certainly not constrained by it.

The programme takes its title from the pivotal essay ‘The Shock of Victory’ from 2007, by anarchist and scholar David Graeber, in which he argues that protesters often have difficulty in recognising their moments of success. Accompanying the exhibition the symposium allows for a timely re-consideration of the complexities of the relations between alternative and established (art) institutions that might have been sparked by political moments such as the Scottish Independence Referendum of 2014.

The underpinning emphasis is on the ‘organisational turn’, a shift from hierarchical to self-organised models of organisation. In particular the focus is on the potency of radical (artistic) practices and ideas, which propose imaginative ways of organising – collectivism, anarchism, activism, networks, and self-organising. Can we think of a new artistic landscape that might have been formed? How do we organise ourselves in such times?

Article by Max Andrews published in Frieze, October 2013.

Max Andrews from Latitudes will offer a perspective on recent cultural politics in Barcelona. Looking in particular at visual art institutions, the 'open submission' format has become a pervasive tool. As an extraction of a democratic process, such an apparently accountable mechansim can nevertheless be complicit in a neo-liberal agenda, undermining institutional robustness and advocating continual 'present-ness'.

Other independent and self-organised realities do of course exist, and following recent municipal elections the political tide offers the promise of change. With reference to art practices that have connected with specific moments of Catalan social history, some contemporary case studies show a thinking around site, scale, longevity and depth – and perhaps reveal a connection with Scotland.

Organised in partnership with the University of Edinburgh.
Co-convened by Dr Deborah Jackson.
Funded by The University of Edinburgh’s Innovation Initiative Grant.

CCA, 350 Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow G2 3JD, UK

Related content:

Two texts by Manuel Segade and Max Andrews analyse the current Spanish art scene 16 October 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.

2015, Barcelona, Glasgow, Max Andrews, Open Call, Spanish Art Scene, symposium

Session with first year participants of the MA Curatorial Practice at the California College of the Arts (CCA), San Francisco, 8 September

Tue, Sep 15 2015

Photo: Arash Fayez.

On September 8, 2015, Latitudes led a 3h session with the participants of the first year of the MA in Curatorial Practice at the California College of the Arts (CCA) in San Francisco. This was our last day as residents at the Kadist Art Foundation.

As a mode of introduction, we presented a range of projects we have worked on and referred to the closed-door seminar ‘The Near-Future Artworlds Curatorial Disruption Foresight Group’, we had led a week earlier with the participation of colleagues and art professionals – an informal dialogue about the future of contemporary art institutions, and more particularly concerned with programming speeds, institutional scale, and periodicity.

For the second part of the evening, we split the group in three and asked them to prepare descriptions of hypothetical art organisations and to reflect on urban/ non-urban contexts and mission statements.

RELATED CONTENT:

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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.

2015, curating, Curatorial Practice, Kadist Art Foundation, Near Future Artworlds, research, residency, seminar, teaching, Workshop

Latitudes contribution to Kadist Art Foundation's 'One Sentence Exhibition'

Tue, Sep 1 2015

To visit the exhibition,
please check ose.kadist.org

Recognizing that not everyone can visit Kadist Art Foundation venues in Paris or San Francisco, Kadist recently inaugurated a series of online projects with artists and curators around the world.

First of these initiatives is the One Sentence Exhibition (OSE), for which the foundation invites curators to write or choose a single sentence, making each word in the sentence a hyperlink to an image, video, text or website. As a result, the One Sentence Exhibition becomes a compact architecture, accompanying the reader as they explore far-reaching corners of the internet.

Following on from the contributions by Rudolf Frieling (Media Arts Curator at SFMOMA) and Nato Thompson (Chief Curator at Creative Time) to OSE series, Latitudes has chosen the statement "A CLOTH OF COTTON WRAPPED AROUND A HORSESHOE OF IRON TOSSED UPON THE CREST OF A WAVE" by Lawrence Weiner in English, Spanish and Catalan, commissioned for his 2008 solo exhibition THE CREST OF A WAVE at the Fundació Suñol in Barcelona.

Sugar packets where freely distributed during the duration of the exhibition around Barcelona. Photo: Pierre-Jean Moulis.

Originally distributed as a free ephemeral sculpture on 300,000 sugar sachets and presented on the wall of the exhibition space, Weiner’s striking typographic rendition of the statement triggers a chronicle of mercantile, maritime and equestrian power, of trade and occupation, of spheres of influence and change, a memory of matter and of language.

Lawrence Weiner tote bag. Available from http://www.lttds.org/totes/weiner/

The statement is also silkscreened on the commemorative limited edition tote bag that celebrated Latitudes' 10th anniversary in Spring 2015.

As elaborated by Latitudes in the exhibition guide, "A CLOTH OF COTTON WRAPPED AROUND A HORSESHOE OF IRON TOSSED UPON THE CREST OF A WAVE indicates an object record of early human technologies (woven textiles, reusable protection for the hooves of working animals) and a marine setting. Weiner’s phrase facilitates a richly ambiguous material and symbolic universe. Why is the horseshoe wrapped? What story, personal or historical, might account for the event that is described? The artist’s statement leaves such questions open for us to consider. It is known that muslin and calico was brought to Spain by the Arab traders in the 1st Century. After the Conquest of Hispania during the 7th Century, facilitated by the Muslim cavalry’s more agile horses, cotton was cultivated by the Moors in Spain. Barcelona’s industrialization in the late 1700s and early 1800s was driven by the printing of calico and later the spinning and weaving of cotton. [1]

Poster of the exhibition at Fundació Suñol's Nivell Zero space, Barcelona.

In the manner of a biography of substances, such as Mark Kurlansky’s books Cod and Salt, A CLOTH OF COTTON... thus triggers a chronicle of mercantile, maritime and equestrian power, of trade and occupation, of spheres of influence and change, a memory of matter and of language. [2]" (...)

(...) The statement is distributed on a sugar packet throughout a selection of Barcelona bars and cafés during the city's Mercè Festival and for the duration of the exhibition – a sweet gift to accompany one’s café con leche,
cortado, carajillo, or conversation. Printed on hundreds of thousands of standard 7 gram white sugar sachets – sugar production technology too was spread into Spain by Moorish occupation – Weiner’s striking typographic rendition of the phrase in red and yellow (the colours of both the Catalan and the Spanish flag) is accompanied by an emblem which evokes the trajectory of a certain horseshoe over a wave in diagrammatic form.

View of Lawrence Weiner's piece at the patio space of Fundació Suñol, Barcelona.

(...) On the five metre-high wall of the exterior space [of Fundació Suñol’s Nivell Zero] we read A CLOTH OF COTTON WRAPPED AROUND A HORSESHOE OF IRON TOSSED UPON THE CREST OF A WAVE painted in Catalan, Spanish and English. The use of the same stencil font as the sugar packet layout suggests a method of functional and clear application which reinforces the fact that Weiner is dealing with the language in terms of modification and use. [3] The word for a company which produces typefaces – a foundry – neatly preserves a link to a time when type was cast from metal, in much the same way as horseshoes are made from iron."

Ceremony of the 2008 ACCA (Art Critics Association) awards which granted Fundació Suñol the best art programme of the year – a season that included two projects curated by Latitudes.

[1] See J.K.J. Thomson, A Distinctive Industrialization: Cotton in Barcelona 1728-1832, Cambridge University
Press, 2003.
[2] Salt: A World History, Walker and Co., 2001; Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World, Walker
and Co., 1997.
[3] The font is FF Offline Regular, designed by Roelof Mulder in 1988.

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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.

#Latitudes10Years, 10th anniversary, 2008, 2015, exhibition-making, Fundació Suñol, Instagram, Kadist Art Foundation, Lawrence Weiner, online, public art

Instagram takeover of Kadist Art Foundation in San Francisco

Fri, Aug 28 2015

As part of Latitudes' residency at Kadist Art Foundation's instagram, we are taking over their instagram [@kadistfoundation] for the next 10 days.

You can follow the hashtags #‎artistnotatthestudiocuratornotattheoffice‬ ‪#‎LatitudesBarcelona‬ ‪#‎IncidentsOfTravel‬

Today we've posted pictures of the first Incidents Of Travel artist-led day tour, a day spent with Megan and Rick Prelinger, founders of the Prelinger Library, "An appropriation-friendly collection of books, periodicals and print ephemera, open to the public in downtown San Francisco". The library "is a free-offering, an installation, a workshop, an extension of our living-room" and holds some 30,000 bound objects, 60,000 loose sheets and 10,000 zines following a unique home-made "geospatial arrangement scheme". Megan and Rick have described the project as never static and compared it to "a long-cooking pot of stew, [that] continuously takes in new ingredients while also reducing down, becoming richer and more concentrated with time".

Posts will be progressively archived in this storify.

Forthcoming events:

29 August: Closed-door seminar 'Near-Future Artworlds Curatorial Disruption Foresight Group' #NFACDFG;

1 September: Launch of Latitudes' contribution to the One Sentence Exhibition online initiative;

3 September: #‎IncidentsOfTravel‬ with Amy Balkin;

4 September: #‎IncidentsOfTravel‬ with Will Brown.

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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.

2015, documentation, Incidents of Travel, Instagram, Kadist Art Foundation, residency, San Francisco

Residency at the Kadist Art Foundation, San Francisco, 26 August–9 September 2015

Wed, Aug 26 2015

Kadist Art Foundation, San Francisco, 2014 (exterior view). Photo: Arash Fayez, Courtesy Kadist Art Foundation.

Between 26 August–9 September 2015 Latitudes will be in residency at Kadist Art Foundation in San Francisco. During this time, and following its two previous iterations in Mexico City (Casa del Lago, 2012) and Hong Kong (Spring Workshop, 2013), Latitudes will do a new iteration of 'Incidents of Travel' exploring San Francisco. Three specially-commissioned tours by artists Amy Balkin, the artist collective Will Brown (a collaborative project of David Kasprzak, Jordan Stein, and Lindsey White) and outsider librarians Megan and Rick Prelinger as expanded studio visits will focus on the Bay Area and link to Latitudes's current research around the carbon cycle.

You can follow the tours via Kadist's Instagram as part of the 'Artist not at the Studio, Curator not at the Office' Latitudes' takeover, and as a series of posts that will be published on this channel.

In the afternoon of August 29, Latitudes will co-host a 'Near-Future Artworlds Curatorial Disruption Foresight Group', a workshop which extends the seminar recently developed in May for the International Curatorial Retreat in Bari, Italy.

The 'Near-Future Artworlds Curatorial Disruption Foresight Group' is a forum for informal dialogue about megatrends and the future of contemporary art institutions.

In the same way that the Internet has untethered television from fixed schedules and newspapers from print deadlines, the first meeting broadly addressed to what degree the organizational forms of art institutions are embracing or resisting similar transformations through various curatorial/editorial prototypes and prognosticative use-case scenarios.

Convened by the Barcelona-based curatorial office Latitudes together with Kadist Art Foundation, this second meeting will bring together individuals and expertise in the Bay Area with an active interest in institutional prototyping and emergent usership. With an emphasis on cross-pollination between design thinking and curatorial thinking, the meeting will discuss, among other things, the notion of the post-disciplinary, and the question of appropriate speeds or periodicities of institutions.

In order to be conducive to freedom of interaction, the meeting is held under the Chatham House Rule. This allows participants to express personal views, to listen, reflect and gather insights with a clear distinction from the position of their employers and/or the policies of any associated organization. Participation is expected, but there will be no resolutions issued, no votes undertaken, and no policy statements proposed.

RELATED CONTENT:

Tutors of the 2015 International Curatorial Retreat, 9–13 May, Bari (Italy) 17 May 2015
Nadim Abbas' "Incidents of Travel: Hong Kong" public tour (19 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)
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 of social media posts related to "Incidents of Travel" tours and photo-documentation.
13 field recordings from 'Incidents of Travel: Hong Kong'
Interview between Christina Li and Latitudes on 'Incidents of Travel' for Witte de With's 'Witness to Moderation(s)' blog 7 May 2013
Inauguración de 'Incidentes de viaje' & 'Proyectos 2005–2012' en La Sucursal, Casa del Lago, México DF, 27 de septiembre 19:30h 25 septiembre 2012

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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.

2015, Amy Balkin, Bruce Sterling, Hong Kong, Incidents of Travel, Kadist Art Foundation, Megan and Rick Prelinger, Mexico, Near Future Artworlds, residency, San Francisco, Will Brown, Workshop

LONGITUDES

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