Downtime for physical and mental "reparations" begins.
Photos: Latitudes (except where noted otherwise).
It's the end of the 2016–17 season, at last. Following a Latitudes' tradition we mark the summer downtime with an "out of office" post (see the 2008-9, 2009-10, 2010-11, 2011-12, 2012–13, 2013–14, 2014–15, 2015–16 ones) with a series of "behind the scenes" and "making of" moments from the year gone by. Here are some glimpses of the past season, from September 2016 to July 2017.
We'll be back in September 2017, when we'll be leading a residency programme at Banff Centre in the Canadian Rockies!
15 September 2016: The 2016–17 season started with glitter and sparkle as Antoni Hervàs' "The Mystery of Caviria" exhibition opened in La Capella. The eight chapters of his complex scenario revolved around the legend of Jason and the Argonauts’ expedition in search of the Golden Fleece. The spectacular scenography took as its point of origin the section of the tale in which the expedition led by Jason stops for a few months in Lemnos, the island of fire, in the northern part of the Aegean Sea. Taking this fragment, Hervàs explored the transformist and genre-bending possibilities of drawing, a medium that enabled him to unite two mythologies: the Cabeirian rites of Classical Greece and figures from Barcelona’s dwindling cabaret scene. Photos of the exhibition here.
Toni's exhibition was the focus of the September and November Cover Story series on our home page, archived here.
Photos above: Latitudes and Toni Hervàs.
18 September 2016: More sparkle awaited on the former site of the Copacabana club and nearby frontón court. The former is currently a parking lot used by the Department of Culture of the Catalan Government. The lone castanets master Juan de la Cruz el Rosillo interpreted a moving repertoire of popular Spanish coplas. For the second part of the event, the audience walked a few meters up Las Ramblas towards the frontón, where Gerard López, Senior Spanish Champion in male rhythmic gymnastics, interpreted newly-commissioned choreography with specially-produced music by Norman Bambi, while wearing a Hervàs-designed garment (exhibited as part of his exhibition).
20 September 2016: Just as we are catching our breath from the memorable exhibition opening and the first event related to Toni's exhibition, street banners popped up around the city announcing the second Barcelona Gallery Weekend.
26–28 September 2016: Installation of "Composiciones" projects, five site-specific commissions for the second iteration of the Barcelona Gallery Weekend. Three days of intense preparations! Curated by Latitudes for the second time (see 2015 edition), the project further explored Barcelona as a rich fabric of the historic and the contemporary, the unfamiliar and the conspicuous.
Above and below: Lola Lasurt at the Biblioteca Pública Arús.
(Above) Lúa and Mariana admiring the serendipitous finding of "El espejo equivocado" painting at the Club Billar Barcelona. An almost spooky, yet incredibly fitting find.
(Above) With Rafel Bianchi and Gina Giménez unpacking Gina's works and spreading them around the former textile factory Can Trinxet, L’Hospitalet de Llobregat.
Silkscreened outfits for the runners finally ready to be worn throughout the weekend. Photos: Robert Llimós.
Runners pass by Galeria dels Àngels. Photo: Gabriela Moragas.
Testing the resistance of a pair of Levi's jeans in preparation for Wilfredo Prieto "Pantalones Rotos" at the Mounted Unit of the Barcelona City Police.
29 September–2 October 2016: Opening and guided visits around the five "Composiciones" interventions by Lúa Coderch (at the Club Billar Barcelona); Regina Giménez (at the former textile factory Can Trinxet, L’Hospitalet de Llobregat); Lola Lasurt (at the Biblioteca Pública Arús); Robert Llimós (connecting all the participating galleries) and Wilfredo Prieto (at the Mounted Unit of the Barcelona City Police) in unique sites across the neighbourhoods of the city. Their projects offered moments of intermission, intimacy and bewilderment throughout the weekend, highlighting some lesser-known aspects of the city’s cultural heritage and municipal life.
Archive of social network posts. Photographs here.
Guided tour by Lúa Coderch in her intervention at the Club Billar Barcelona.
Guided tour by Gina Giménez to ARCOwalks group in Can Trinxet.
Interviewed for the radio at the Mounted Unit of the Barcelona City Police.
TV presenter Josep Paris modelled Robert Llimós' 1972 updated runners design during the weekly cultural TV programme Àrtic. Photo: Àrtic.
Double spread on "Composiciones" in the cultural supplement "Tendències" by the national newspaper El Mundo. Photo: Vanessa Graell.
26 October 2016: Launch of Rasmus Nilausen's book "Soups & Symptoms" at Múltiplos, which includes an essay by Max Andrews. For the event, Rasmus and Max served up a carrot soup (potage crécy) and requested questions from friends, family and collaborators which would be accepted as long as they fitted onto Jacob's Cream cracker.
The catalogue was produced thanks to funding from Premi Art Nou 2015, Art Barcelona, Associació de Galeries d’Art Contemporani in collaboration with the Institut de Cultura de Barcelona, García Galeria (Madrid) and Estrany de la Mota (Barcelona). It can be purchased in La Central.
Max and Rasmus prepare the carrots for a large pot of Potage Crécy, questions are written on Jacob's Cream crackers (that will later accompany the soup) and book launch at Múltiplos.
3 November 2016: Runway show at La Capella with some costumes from the 1980s and 90s designed by actor and impresario Victor Guerrero. Part of the activities programmed on the occasion of the exhibition.
Photos: Latitudes.
8 November 2016: Mariana Cánepa Luna's review on Ana Jotta's exhibition published on art-agenda, focused on "her ongoing series 'Notas de rodapé' [Footnotes] [which] provide a key to understanding the semantic complexity of her work. It comprises a selection of the eclectic bits and pieces Jotta has gathered for decades and that coexist in her studio alongside works that she has fabricated." Continue reading
18–20 November 2016: Attended the CIMAM 2016 Annual Conference hosted in several venues in Barcelona, and hosted by the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) and CaixaForum, focusing on ‘The Museum and its Responsibilities’.
Mariana holding the CIMAM 2016 Annual Conference programme.
CIMAM 2016 Annual Conference speakers and delegates at the Fundació Tàpies, Barcelona. Photo: CIMAM.
Selfie from Museum Nacional d'Art de Catalunya with Portuguese curator Miguel Amado.
23-24 November 2016: Latitudes participated in a two-day summit "You are such a curator!" organised by the Curatorial Programme of De Appel, Amsterdam. With contributions by Mira Asriningtyas, Lucrezia Calabro Visconti, Renata Cervetto, Mateo Chacon-Pino, Galerie (Adriano Wilfert Jensen and Simon Asencio), Natasha Hoare, Kati Ilves, Prem Krishnamurthy, Inga Lace, Latitudes (Max Andrews and Mariana Cánepa Luna), Ariane Loze, Shona Mei Findlay, Fadwa Naamna, Kim Nguyen, Emma Ines Panza, Aneta Rostkowska and Kuba Woynarowski, Chris Sharp, Niels Van Tomme, Huib Haye van der Werf, and others. We took the opportunity to extend our stay on the occasion of the Amsterdam Art Weekend 2016, which included the opening of Jordan Wolfson's at the Stedelijk and the Open Studios at the Rijksakademie.
Latitudes' presentation "Following the Holy Greyhound" reflected "on the disinterment of a sculpture from 1991 – part of an exhibition by the Venezuelan artist José Antonio Hernández-Díez curated by Latitudes at MACBA, Barcelona, earlier this year – and their approach to a group exhibition in preparation for CAPC Musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux in Summer 2017.
→ Full report here.
Photos: Carina Erdmann/De Appel.
November-December 2016: Two of Latitudes' projects ("Composiciones" commissions for the Barcelona Gallery Weekend and "El misterio de Caviria" by Antoni Hervàs) are shortlisted for the best exhibition of the year by the TV culture programme Tria33. The audience casts their votes online until January. Antoni Hervàs won with 40% of the audience votes. "Composiciones" ends in the third position with 17% of the votes.
January 2017: Issue of frieze magazines includes Max Andrews' "Salon Selectives" text in the Opinion section, discussing "How open are open calls?":
"While competition organizers typically trumpet the volume and cosmopolitanism of applications received an ebullient endorsement, others may rue the sheer amount of collectively wasted effort made by the also-rans. (In Spain, Bilbao-based studio Taller de Casquería estimated that the hours involved in the 1,715 submissions received for the Guggenheim Helsinki open call for designs represented over €18 million worth of speculative work.) In Gary Hustwit’s 2011 documentary film, Urbanized, Rem Koolhaas stated that such competitions were a ‘complete drain of intelligence’, inviting mass creative thinking with the guarantee that the vast majority of it will be discarded. This addiction in the field of architecture appears to be gaining traction in contemporary art as a means not only of generating exhibitions but of programming institutions."
The text was the January Cover Story on our website.
25 January 2017: Presentation of Antoni Hervàs' La Capella publication at the Antic Teatre in the background of one of his scenographic drawings dedicated to Gilda Love (this was the second time this had been displayed in this space, following the recording in May last year of Gilda performing, a video later included in the exhibition). The evening was followed by the "Desplume" monthly cabaret show.
16 February 2017: A moving evening seeing Toni Hervàs receive the Premi Ciutat de Barcelona for visual arts exhibition of the year at the Sala de Consell de Cent in the Barcelona City Hall. The jury recognised "the artist's research in linking Greek mythology with the Barcelona cabaret scene from the 1960s–80s and for the recuperation of its vitality."
Toni receiving the award from Barcelona mayor Ada Colau. Photos: Latitudes.
1 March 2017: Launch of the fourth 'Incidents (of Travel)' episode, in which Galician curator Pedro de Llano met Lisboeta artist Luisa Cunha in Lisbon. Their offline day took place in early December and went through key locations in the artist's life – from Ar.Co, the School of Visual Arts in Almada where she enrolled at age thirty-seven, to the Largo da Academia de Belas Artes in Chiado, where she conceived a public project that never materialised.
→ Project website.
Above: captures from the project website.
2 March 2017: Opening of Joana Hurtado Matheu's "Nostalgic Dissidence" exhibition mentored by Latitudes as part of the Barcelona Producció 2016 season. Repairs and conservation work in the Baroque cupola had delayed the opening by three months, so we were all pleased the day finally arrived.
Working on the exhibition layout.
Francesco Arena's "Mare della tranquillità" (2013) is activated by a performer. "An old wooden table, taken from the family dining room, has been cut into four pieces to form the corners of a much bigger new table. Enlarged with inserts of metal, its size evokes the table on which, on May 7, 1945, the signing of the German surrender ended World War II in Europe. The work is the support for a participative action which consists of walking back and forth on the five-metre table a total of 155 km, the length of the Berlin Wall. Every day during the two months of the exhibition someone will get up on the table and, wearing shoes that have never touched the ground and holding a tally counter, walk from one end to the other 596 times." (exhibition wall label by the curator)
Photo: Pep Herrero/La Capella.
January 2017: The artist Alexandra Navratil posts an image of the work she will present in the forthcoming exhibition "4.543 billion" due to open June 29 at the CAPC musée in Bordeaux.
22–24 March 2017: Third trip to Bordeaux. Packed with meetings. Three months to go to the opening of "4.543 billion" exhibition. In two weeks deadline to submit the texts for the gallery guide.
Running through each work through our sketch-up exhibition rendering with the curatorial, collections, registrar, press and installation teams.
23 March 2017: Meanwhile in Barcelona, Toni Hervàs wins yet another award – for the best exhibition of the year, and given by the Catalan Association of Art Critics.
Hervàs during the award ceremony. Photo: ACCA.
April 2017: A bit of a website refresh – these things are so darn tedious yet they feel so good when they are done and dusted!
26 April 2017: Fifth 'Incidents (of Travel)' episode online narrating the encounter between curator Simon Soon and artist Chi Too. Their offline day took place in April 2016, when they visited the Malaysian state of Terengganu, where chi spent some time in 2013, surrounded by "men and women who work(ed) multiple jobs as a fishermen, housebuilders, boat builders, farmers, coconut pickers, food producers, and everything else that matters."
'Incidents (of Travel)' is a chartered day-long itinerary as an alternative to the standard studio visit, inviting an extended conversation between a curator and an artist. Previous destinations have included Chicago, US; Jinja, Uganda; Suzhou, China; and Lisbon, Portugal. Produced by Kadist; photographs and video by Awang Ketut; site built by The Present Group.
Above: captures from the project website.
3 May 2017: Conversation with Korean-born, Berlin-based artist Haegue Yang at the Fundació Tàpies, Barcelona. The evening discussion analysed Yang's practice from the perspective of historical development and cyclic fluctuations, asking, as phrased by sociologist and economist Giovanni Arrighi – what is accumulative, what is cyclical, and what is new?
Photos: Fundació Han Nefkens.
May 2017: After three intense weeks of the jury process, eighteen selected projects of Barcelona Producció 2017 grant scheme are announced. We begin the year-long mentoring process of three projects out of the seventeen selected projects this year as part of the Barcelona Producció 2017 production grants. David Mutiloa's SYNTHESIS (18 July–25 September 2017) is the first to occupy La Capella's 15th-century exhibition space. The other two projects mentored by Latitudes are a publication by Anna Moreno and an exhibition "Artengo2000" at the small exhibition space by Camille Orny and Magda Vaz.
Jury searching for a solid wifi spot to watch video documentation sent by an applicant.
12 June 2017, in Basel: Max Andrews of Latitudes contributed the essay "C-H-R-I-S-T-O-P-H-E-R-K-N-O-W-L-E-S. SO LISTEN UP" about the spoken-word works, "typings", poetry and paintings of Christopher Knowles. The publication is made to accompany his solo presentation in the stand of NoguerasBlanchard gallery at Liste art fair in Basel. The exquisite short-run publication is designed and printed by Barcelona-based independent publishers and Riso printers Do The Print. Read on.
Photos: Latitudes
"Using sculpture, video projections and human presence, David Mutiloa’s exhibition Synthesis proposes that this condition has led to the appearance of pharmacologically managed depression, “an illness of responsibility”. It has also induced a terrible form of boredom – the spectre of both the boundless outsourcing of undesirable labour to the developing world and automation leading to a world without work. – Text from the gallery guide, written by Latitudes (pdf here).
Photos: Latitudes
19 June–2 July: We're off to Bordeaux for the installation and opening of "4.543 billion. The matter of matter" exhibition in ten days. After two years of preparation, it's a truly exciting moment to see it all coming together.
→ Press release here.
→ Archive of social media posts
Lucy Skaer's 26 coal and resin sculptures after Brancusi's 26 different editions of "Bird in Space".
Deciding the layout of Félix Arnaudin's incredible suite of photographs kindly lent by the Musée d'Aquitaine Bordeaux.
Anne Garde's photos documenting Richard Serra's "Threats of Hell" (1990) production from Dillinger Hütter (Germany) to its exhibition at the CAPC nave, to its current location at a private collector home on the banks of the Garonne, where it changed its name to a happier "Hopes of Paradise".
Part of the CAPC installation team having a coffee break enjoying Stéphane's awesome chocolate cake.
Rayyane Tabet's mobile pieces arriving from Hamburg at the CAPC.
Registrar thick checklist file.
François measuring Lara Almarcegui's works before placing them on the wall.
Construction of the warehouse and jetty. Statements of works by engineer and architect Claude Deschamps.
Christophe moving the 600kg rock by Hubert Duprat to the entrance.
Pascal lighting the exhibition.
Christina Hemauer and Roman Keller stretching their new work "Untitled (Blue)" (2017), a work focused on indigo and colonial trade.
Christina Hemauer and Terence Gower listening to Pep Vidal explaining his sculpture work "19-metre tree cut in 7 equal volumes" (2015).
One of the many guided visits for press, staff, and friends of the museum during the opening days. Photo: Latitudes/RK.
11–14 July 2017: Installation of "SYNTHESIS" in La Capella. David Mutiloa's solo exhibition is the first of the 2017–18 season of Barcelona Producció. Opening on July 18, on view until September 25.
"In the modern office workplace, spatial design and brand communication have evolved in step with novel notions of management, business efficiency and a labour market that progressively favours flexibility and adaptability. The typical Western office worker – their physiology as well as their psychology – has also been overhauled. Twentieth-century time-and-motion studies first standardised and rationalised the salaried worker’s time and space. And today the twenty-first-century worker is increasingly a co-working independent contractor who navigates an entirely dissolved working-week structure, continuous competitive ‘disruption’ and the so-called ‘gig economy’." – Text by Latitudes from the exhibition sheet.
Scheme to help assemble the platform.
Artist at work.
24–26 July 2017: Trip to Copenhagen to visit the impressive solo exhibition by John Kørner, "Altid Mange Problemer" at Kunsthal Charlottenborg, curated by Marie Nipper—the largest exhibition of his works to date. Max Andrews of Latitudes has been invited to contribute an essay for his forthcoming monograph published by Roulette Russe which is due to come out in November 2017. Max has previously written on John's work for his 2006 exhibition "Problems" at Victoria Miro Gallery in London. Our first visit to Copenhagen to see John's work was precisely the subject of our first blog post in September 2006!
Everything in Copenhagen seemed to have turned yellow – we knew John's love for the colour (first image below), but also Mark Leckey's exhibition at the x-room of the Statens Museum fur Kunst, seemed to have been inspired by "the Nyboder yellow" hue – the historic row house district of former Naval barracks in Copenhagen.
An example of the "Nyboder yellow" hue – is the historic row house district of former Naval barracks in Copenhagen.
27 July 2017: Visit Ricardo Bofill's Walden7 and his nearby studio Taller de Arquitectura with Anna Moreno. Moreno was awarded a grant of Barcelona Producció 2017 to produce the publication "The Drowned Giant", a project focusing on a performance–happening staged by Bofill in 1970 to promote his unrealised architectural project La Ciudad en el Espacio in Moratalaz (Madrid). The publication will be launched in late November 2017 and is mentored by Latitudes. As part of Moreno's ongoing research on Bofill's practice, she has been living in Walden7 for the past month to carry out research for a forthcoming commission for the Spring 2018 exhibition "Beehave" at the Fundació Miró.
(Above) Taller de Arquitectura studio. (Below) Walden7 in Sant Just Desvern (Barcelona).
Anna Moreno walking around Walden7 in Sant Just Desvern (Barcelona).
At the time of writing, we are frantically preparing for what will be an intense September. On September 10 we'll travel to Banff, where Latitudes will be Lead Faculty of the month-long residency programme "Geologic Time" at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity which will bring together 10 curators/artists/writers from around the world to discuss geological formations and timescales while speculating about a more expansive and longer-term view of art, exhibitions, and their institutions. We will be “thinking with” geology (beyond the depiction of the landscape) as a potential way to consider non-conventional, deep-time perspectives on curating, exhibition making, programming, and fieldwork within contemporary art.
Julius Schoppe (1795–1868), “Illustration of giant stone near the Rauenschen Mountains near Fürstenwalde”, c. 1827. Public domain – Wikimedia Commons.
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