Max Andrews’s first contribution to Artforum reviews “Refugia”, the first solo exhibition of Rosa Tharrats at Bombon Projects in Barcelona, which opened on March 20, 2024. Andrews’ review coincides with the first issue under the new editorial eye of Tina Rivers Ryan, the magazine’s recently appointed editor-in-chief. 

“One could have imagined the exhibition inside as much a sanctum for a spiritual retreat for unwinding the mind/body dualism as an outré couture collection without humans, where inscrutable organic divinities dressed for auspiciousness.” 

Continue reading here.

→ RELATED CONTENT:

• Other writing on Latitudes’ website.
• Reviews, opinions, profiles and interviews published in frieze magazine.
• Panorama traces, a year on, 21 Oct 2022
• Panorama in Madrid and Córdoba, 14 June 2022
• Cover Story, February 2022: Rosa Tharrats’ Textile Alchemy, 1 Feb 2022 
• “Panorama 21: Apunts per a un incendi dels ulls”, MACBA, October 2021–February 2022

The June 2024 monthly Cover Story “TERENCE GOWER: DIPLOMACY, URBANISM, URANIUM” is now available on our homepage: www.lttds.org (after June 2024 this story will be archived here).

“Last month, The Power Plant in Toronto opened Terence Gower’s “Embassy”, an exhibition showcasing over a decade of work exploring the diplomatic architecture of American embassy buildings in Baghdad, Havana, and Saigon, as well as an unbuilt project for Ottawa.” → Continue reading 

Cover Stories are published monthly on Latitudes’ homepage featuring past, present, or forthcoming projects, research, texts, artworks, exhibitions, films, objects, or field trips related to our curatorial projects and activities.

The May 2024 monthly Cover Story “Richard Serra & Anne Garde—Threats of Paradise” is now published on our homepage: www.lttds.org (after May 2024 this cover will be archived here).

“Marking the death last month of American sculptor Richard Serra, this month’s Cover Story looks back to the Latitudes-curated exhibition “4.543 billion. The matter of matter” at CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux. ” → Continue reading 

Cover Stories are published monthly on Latitudes’ homepage featuring past, present, or forthcoming projects, research, texts, artworks, exhibitions, films, objects, or field trips related to our curatorial projects and activities.

Pantallazo con los miembros de Latitudes mencionados en el anuncio de GCC con los 125 Miembros Activos de 2023.

Max Andrews and Mariana Cánepa Luna of Latitudes are among the 125 Members who have successfully achieved Active Membership 2023 with Gallery Climate Coalition (GCC). This is the second year running that Latitudes is an Active Member. This new cohort represents a 50% increase in successful applications and a renewal of over 85% of last year’s Active members.

To renew our Active status we continued implementing environmental sustainability best practices in line with GCC’s guidelines focusing on near-term tangible actions, and had to:

• Complete a CO2e report or audit. Latitudes’ carbon footprint was 17.4tCo2e in 2019 (baseline year), 3.8tCo2e in 2022 and 1.5tCo2e in 2023. We reduced our footprint by 78% of the emissions within the first year of the calculations and over 60% in the second year. We calculate our carbon footprint by considering travel, hotel accommodation, and energy consumption emissions, and use the GCC Carbon Calculator and DEFRA conversion factors to ensure consistent and accurate reporting.
• Establish and maintain a Green Team. Latitudes is one of the Founding Committee members of GCC Spain, one of the seven International volunteer teams currently operating in Los Angeles, New York, London, Berlin, Italy, and Taiwan.
• Publish an Environmental Responsibility Statement – our extended and illustrated version here.

The April 2024 monthly Cover Story “In Progress–Iratxe Klaas & Klaas van Gorkum” is now up on our homepage: www.lttds.org (after April 2024 this story will be archived here).

“On the occasion of their participation in Ten Thousand Suns, the 24th edition of the Biennale of Sydney, April’s Cover Story spotlights Iratxe Jaio & Klaas van Gorkum, and The Margins of the Factory, the solo exhibition of the duo’s work that Latitudes curated in 2014.” → Continue reading 

Cover Stories are published monthly on Latitudes’ homepage featuring past, present, or forthcoming projects, research, texts, artworks, exhibitions, films, objects, or field trips related to our curatorial projects and activities.

Gallery Climate Coalition (GCC) es una coalición internacional de organizaciones artísticas que trabajan para reducir el impacto medioambiental del sector de las artes visuales. El objetivo principal de GCC es facilitar la reducción de las emisiones de CO2e del sector en un mínimo del 50% para 2030, así como promover prácticas de cero residuos.

GCC desarrolla y comparte recursos prácticos sobre sostenibilidad y proporciona liderazgo en cuestiones medioambientales específicas del sector, aprovechando el poder colectivo de sus +1100 miembros provenientes de 42 países motivados a lograr cambios sistémicos.

A pesar de la influencia única de las artes en el discurso público, las emisiones de carbono y los residuos generados por este sector son desproporcionadamente elevados en comparación con su tamaño económico. Un informe de 2021 (pdf) estimó que las emisiones globales del sector de las artes ascendieron a 70 millones de toneladas de CO2e al año [*], cifra equivalente a las emisiones anuales producidas por todo el país de Marruecos.

Dicho informe, revela que la mayor parte (74%) de la huella del sector se atribuye a las emisiones por viajes de agentes del sector y visitantes (~52 millones de tCO2e). Es por ello que desde GCC se ha iniciado la campaña Climate Conscious Travel para promover la movilidad a eventos culturales con consciencia climática.

Complementando la presencia física y en línea durante la feria, la revista Exibart ha publicado una entrevista con la comisaria Carolina Grau, miembra fundadora del Comité de GCC Spain, sobre sus proyectos curatoriales y planteamientos entorno a la sostenibilidad, y un artículo donde se profundiza sobre la labor que realiza Gallery Climate Coalition (GCC) y destaca algunas de sus Acciones Efectivas, uno de los varios recursos prácticos que ofrece la organización.

En julio 2023, un informe de Greenpeace Vienna comparando precios de billetes de tren vs. avión en Europa, rezaba que “la ruta Madrid-Barcelona es una de las pocas en las que el tren es rápido, circula con frecuencia y siempre es más barato que el avión. (...) A pesar del perfecto servicio de tren, en 2019 casi 2,6 millones de personas volaron en esta ruta convirtiéndola en el 5º vuelo de corta distancia más utilizado de la UE que cuenta con una alternativa de tren. Prohibir este vuelo completamente inútil ahorraría 176.000 toneladas de gases nocivos de efecto invernadero.” (...) y concluía que “de todos los países analizados, España tiene la mayor densidad de aerolíneas de bajo coste”.

Según un estudio sobre vuelos cortos presentado por Ecologistas en Acción en octubre 2023, un total de 11 rutas aéreas serían potencialmente sustituibles en España [al contar con alternativa ferroviaria], eliminando más de 50.000 operaciones anuales que podrían proporcionar un ahorro de más de 300.000 toneladas de CO2, equivalentes a casi el 10% de todas las emisiones producidas por la aviación doméstica en España. O, dicho de otra manera, eliminar unos 200.000 coches de nuestras calles y carreteras al año.”

El sector del arte por sí solo no puede resolver la crisis a la que nos enfrentamos. Pero sí puede predicar dando ejemplo, sentando precedentes y cambiando hábitos de movilidad, adoptando acciones efectivas contra el cambio climático y utilizando su influencia cultural para introducir reflexiones cruciales sobre nuestros recursos materiales y económicos, entre otros.

GCC Spain es uno de los siete capítulos internacionales de GCC y representa a la coalición a nivel nacional. Contacte con el grupo escribiendo a espana@galleryclimatecoalition.org o siga a @gcc_spain en Instagram.

––––––

[*] La mayor parte (74%) de la huella del sector se debe a las emisiones de los viajes de los visitantes (~52 millones de tCO2e). Se calcula que el 26% (18 millones de toneladas de CO2e) se debe a la construcción, el envío de obras de arte y los viajes de negocios. El impacto digital, aunque sigue siendo una pequeña proporción de la huella, está creciendo. Esta huella anual equivale a la electricidad generada por 8.692 aerogeneradores de 10 MW.

RELATED CONTENT:

• Cover Story, February 2024: Climate Conscious Travel to ARCOmadrid, 1 Feb 2024
• Montse Badia sobre GCC Spain en la revista Bonart #198, 25 Oct 2023
• Latitudes qualify as an Active Member of the Gallery Climate Coalition (GCC), 10 May 2023
• Latitudes’ (Full) Environmental Policy Statement, 17 April 2023
• Cover Story, March 2023: Art, Climate, and New Coalitions, 1 Mar 2023
• Cover Story, February 2023: Soil for Future Art Histories, 2 Feb 2023
• Gallery Climate Coalition (GCC) en el Estado español, 25 Jan 2023

The March 2024 monthly Cover Story “Dibbets in Palencia” is now up on our homepage: www.lttds.org

“On the morning of 8 February 2009, it was still pitch dark when we arrived with cameraman Fijko van Leeuwen on a wide stretch of the beach near the extremity of the port of Rotterdam. ” → Continue reading (after March 2024 this story will be archived here).

Cover Stories are published monthly on Latitudes’ homepage featuring past, present, or forthcoming projects, research, texts, artworks, exhibitions, films, objects, or field trips related to our curatorial projects and activities.

(Above and below) Betwixt 2024 publication. Photos by Andy Stagg, Courtesy of the Freelands Foundation.

In February 2023, Latitudes was commissioned to write a text on the artistic practice of Crystal Bennes for “Betwixt 2024”, a publication produced by the Freelands Foundation as part of their Freelands Artist Programme initiative supporting emerging artists across the UK since 2018.

The book has now launched, coinciding with the opening of an exhibition across four sites in central and north London between 17–23 February 2024, in which Bennes participates alongside 19 other artists based in Belfast, Cardiff, Edinburgh, and Sheffield.

Writers in the publication are Alice Bucknell, Beth Hughes, Candice Jacobs, Cindy Sissokho, Colette Griffin, Ingrid Lyons, Jamie Sutcliffe, Jenny Richards, Kandace Siobhan Walker, Khanyisile Mbongwa, Lara Eggleton, Lucy A. Sames, Maria Howard, Mariana Cánepa Luna, Mark Peter Wright, Max Andrews, Precious Adesina, Rosalie Doubal, Sunshine Wong, Susannah Dickey, Theo Reeves-Evison and Zakiya McKenzie.

Published in 2024, 370 pages. Designed by Kristin Metho.

Available for £15 (plus shipping) here.

(Above and below) Crystal Bennes, “When Computers Were Women” (2021). Courtesy of the artist.

A month later, on March 16, 2024, Bennes will present her new project “O (Copper, cotton, cobalt, crude, naphtha, bauxite, palm)” (2023) at Talbot Rice Gallery in Edinburgh, culminating her two-year residency there and at the Edinburgh College of Art on the Freelands Artist Programme. Involving tapestry, sculptural installation, video, and performance, her project addresses the rapaciousness and sophistry of commodities trading, an arena in which financial instruments are used to bet on the future value of raw materials and natural resources including crude oil, metals, coffee, and cotton.

Latitudes’ text will also be available on the Talbot Rice Gallery website and in the gallery booklets for £2 at the venue. 

Crystal Bennes, Fragment from “O (Copper, cotton, cobalt, crude, naphtha, bauxite, palm)”, 2023. Courtesy of the artist.

A Classicist with a PhD from King’s College London, Dr Crystal Bennes previously worked in the U.S. Senate, and as an architecture and design journalist before retraining as an artist. She studied for an MFA at Aalto University, Helsinki, and École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris, and obtained a practice-based PhD at Northumbria University, Newcastle.

Her practice is grounded in long-term projects that foreground archival research, durational fieldwork, and material experimentation. Recent bodies of work include an ongoing photographic exploration of an artificial island in Sweden created entirely out of radioactive waste from industrially-produced synthetic fertiliser and the experimental recreation of a nineteenth-century hay meadow based on a myth of unintentional plant migration from Italy to Denmark. 

Recent exhibitions include Platform: Early Career Artist Award, Edinburgh Art Festival (2023); Flora Italica, Thorvaldsens Museum, Copenhagen (2023); Mauvaise Herbes, Centre Photographique d’Ile-de-France; No Island is an Island, Landskrona Foto International Festival; and Hermes and the Veil, Gallery North, Newcastle (all 2021).

Klara and the Bomb (2022) her first photobook—charting connecting threads between the U.S.’s nuclear weapons research, women programmers, the invention of modern computers, and nuclear colonialism—was published by The Eriskay Connection in 2022, and it was shortlisted for the Photo Text Book Award at Les Rencontres d’Arles in 2023. 

Between 2022 and 2024 she was a resident at Talbot Rice Gallery as part of a Freelands Foundation Artists programme. Together with Tom Jeffreys, she is the editor of The Peninent Review.

RELATED CONTENT:

• Latitudes’ writing since 2005.
• Text on Lara Almarcegui’s Graves (2021) in “Sketches of Transition. An Atlas on Growth and Decay” edited by Michele Bazzoli, 27 Oct 2023
• Text on Crystal Bennes for the Freelands Foundation Artists programme, 31 May 2023
• Latitudes’ essay “Un suelo para las historias del arte del futuro” [Soil for Future Art Histories] in TBA21’s catalogue “Futuros Abundantes”, 22 Jan 2023
• Max Andrews reviews Bruno Zhu’s exhibition “I am not afraid”, Cordova, Barcelona, 30 Mar 2022
• Nueva publicación: “Passió i cartografia per a un incendi dels ulls” (MACBA, 2022), 2 Mar 2022 
• New publication: “Things Things Say” now available, 28 Feb 2022