Barcelona Producció 2017

As in 2016, Latitudes was one of the tutors of the eleventh edition of Barcelona Producció 2017, the yearly open-call initiated by the Culture Institute of the Barcelona City Council supporting the “artistic community of Barcelona and its area of influence”. Alongside curators David Armengol, Alexandra Laudo, Monica Bello and artists Mireia Sallarès and Joan Casellas, Latitudes was also part of the jury awarding 17 projects from a pool of 230 applications.

The 2017–18 season supported exhibitions produced for La Capella’s 275m2 space (three solo exhibitions in the main space, three solo projects in the smaller space, and two curatorial projects) it also funded non-exhibition projects (two off-site projects, one publication, two research, two digital proposals and three performances).

Latitudes mentored three of the seventeen awarded projects: ‘SYNTHESIS’ by David Mutiloa (solo show, main gallery), “The Drowned Giant” by Anna Moreno (publication project), and “Artengo2000” by Camille Orny & Magda Vaz (solo show, small gallery).

Using sculpture, video projections and human presence, David Mutiloa’s exhibition ‘SYNTHESIS’ proposes that a labour market that progressively favours flexibility and adaptability 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. SYNTHESIS shadows these ideas through two video projections, live action by human worker-performers and the display of a series of sculptures made from steel, silicon, resin, computer components, pharmaceutical drugs and other materials.

In 1970 a happening took place in Moratalaz (Madrid) to promote the utopian housing project La ciudad del espacio (The City in Space) by architect Ricardo Bofill. An event that was never documented, a project that was never built. On June 7, 2017, the artist Anna Moreno reenacted the happening in the same location. On November 22, 2017, the LP was launched at the Col·legi d'Arquitectes de Catalunya (COAC). ‘The Drowned Giant’ contains the soundscapes of the restitution process, the only existing documentation of the original event. The vinyl contains the testimonies of Gila Dohle, The Downton Alligators, Enrique Doza, Peter Hodgkinson, JC Ramone, Toti Soler, Ramon Del Solo and the artist herself, among others. The edition includes a poster and a booklet insert with fiction stories written by the architects Paula Currás & Havi Navarro, the curator María Montero, the blues expert Ramón del Solo and the artist.

‘Artengo2000’ is a perverse miniseries, a six part drama-documentary based around a group of five flatmates—including semi-fictionalised versions of Camille Orny and Magda Vaz—who have struck a sponsorship deal with a corporation known as Artengo. In one reality Artengo is a sub-brand of the sporting goods retailer Decathlon dedicated to racket sports, yet in another reality, it is an arcane Russian-American multinational corporation. Artengo2000 is set in a familiar but twisted near future in which gig economies, collaborative work and service sharing have developed in even more bizarre ways.