Individual Residencies 2019
Peter Freund
RESIDENCY PERIOD: October 2018 – January 2019
Peter Freund
Lost Grids
Inspired by the incommensurability of surface and depth, Peter Freund generates digital materials by hacking the underlying code of iconic photography with the use of poetic, critical and quotidian texts. His project will ultimately result in a set of variegated grid prints that harness the impulses of conceptual art in exploring the history and politics of the grid, from the renaissance perspective machine and the geometrical configurations of cartography, architecture and design to the abstract, gridded constructions of modern and contemporary art and the pixel system undergirding the raster image. The radical ornamentalism of Freund’s prints presents an interventionist strategy in a politics of enjoyment.
Núria Gómez Gabriel
RESIDENCY PERIOD: November 2018 – may 2019
Núria Gómez Gabriel
Love me, Tinder
In parallel to the research project Body-Image. The Hauntology of Visual Dis-identity, linked to the CINEMA research group of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Núria Gómez Gabriel begins a period of residence at the MACBA Study Centre (CED) in order to analyse the effects of active culture on online dating applications. Love me, Tinder is a study of the patterns of representation circulating in ‘Hot or Not’ fiction and about how the binary narratives of the body-enterprise give users maximum optimisation of their experience. Issues such as emotional pornography, industrial humanitarianism and spiritual materialism come together in an essay that ultimately seeks to track the effects of the wellness dictatorship. The research is part of the edition of a book made together with the visual artist Estela Ortiz that will be published by the Editorial Planeta in September 2019.
Caterina Almirall
RESIDENCY PERIOD: July – may 2019
Caterina Almirall
Self-management as a ‘magical’ practice
In the context of the doctoral thesis she is currently working on at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Barcelona, her intention during her CED residence at MACBA is to explore the possible relationship between self-organised and institutional practices in the context of contemporary art in Barcelona. In order to better understand where each of these strategies (habitually-considered ‘alternatives’) fit in, she begins by questioning their separation and respective limitations, seeking to establish a connection outside of the terms of a ‘dichotomy’. She sets off from an interrogative that might allow her to think of the ‘effects’ of one set of practices on the other, or, to express this in another way, of how certain practices ‘affect’ and constitute others. With an emphasis on mediation tasks carried out by the curator, she will strive to uncover such effects, revealing how power relationships emerging in relation to them might be transformed, activating discourses, values and objects.
Beatriz Regueira
RESIDENCY PERIOD: January – april 2019
Beatriz Regueira
Voi c e ssss Ma t t ersss s s s
As part of the preparation of her thesis, entitled Critical flesh. Art, biopower & plasticity in the posthuman (IMARTE research group, Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Barcelona, during her residence at the CED Beatriz Regueira seeks to deepen understanding of aesthetic, political and therapeutic interconnections by analysing Lygia Clark’s Estructuração do self, the archives of Francesc Tosquelles and the sound practices of Joan La Barbara. The goal is to construct a border language able to employ voice in representative (linguistic) and tactile dimensions (sound as frequency), in the fields of writing and video-performance. Her focus is on formal language and its relationship to the arousing of psychotic unease, understood as a symbolic hypertrophy that creates the illusion of an autonomous I-word bound to discursive identity, and fictitiously separated from our existence understood as felt corporealities that are concrete and situated. In this framework, the voice, understood as a somatic technique (the technique of corporal awareness), would be presented as evidence of the encounter between the symbolic and the corporeal, working as a performative instrument of simultaneous presence (the body) and representation (language).
Alba Giménez
RESIDENCY PERIOD: January – february 2019
Alba Giménez
Sense and distance. The postproduction of experience in Harun Farocki and Antje Ehmann’s film-installation work
The research work of Alba Giménez Gil consists of a theoretical study of the film-installations of Harun Farocki (Germany, 1944–2014), including the works made with Antje Ehmann (born 1968), the artist’s partner and collaborator. The research is part of the doctoral thesis currently being written by Giménez under the umbrella of the European Centre for Documentary Research at the University of South Wales, UK. During the residency period, Giménez will investigate the various items on Farocki that are part of the CED’s documentary fonds, including those related to the promotion of the artist’s work in Barcelona and the rest of Spain.
Marta Pujades
RESIDENCY PERIOD: March – may 2019
Marta Pujades
Activating photography: beyond the immobilisation of gestures
The project of Marta Pujades focuses on the relationships and tensions generated between photography and performance, especially in those works that regard the photographic process as a performative action in itself. Her research puts forward a possible genealogy at national level from the early nineties to the present. What is being offered is a complementary vision in relation to the approximations that favour the presentiality of performance at the expense of the photographic element, seen here as mere documentation or as an annexe. The works suggests other ways of articulating these practices and questions some of the approaches regarded as ontological in both these media.
Francesca Mas
RESIDENCY PERIOD: April – july 2019
Francesca Mas
Pere Portabella and filmed activism: political and creative radicality
The research project of Francesca Mas focuses on the convergence between Pere Portabella’s films and other artistic disciplines, in particular performative art and cinema’s capacity to intervene in the museum space. Based on the idea that this convergence is the result of a political and creative radicality, the aim of the project is to conduct a transversal study on a revolutionary film proposal that is inseparable from the subversion of the language it uses.
Lluís Vecina
RESIDENCY PERIOD: May – august 2019
Lluís Vecina
Narrative reminiscences of an avant-garde practice: the artist as curator through multimedia installations
Focusing the attention on Francesc Torres, an icon of multimedia installation practice, Lluís Vecina’s project will trace the genealogies of multimedia installations in Spain, from the first recorded instances and their development through the years, to the reactionary turnaround and the ‘era of enthusiasm’ (with its insidious cultural practices), and the gradual disappearance of the best part of Conceptual practices. At the same time, the project will also try to investigate the consequences of these works: how they were perceived; the ideation of a corpus stating whether these artistic practices ended up being reified; whether they supported conventionalisms pretending to be avant-garde; whether they carried within themselves the germ of their emancipatory neutralisation; or whether, on the contrary, they were able to accomplish their task successfully. Equally, it will try to understand the position of the public museum, the paradoxes and wise decisions when supporting such objectives. And all this, and for entirely whimsical reasons, with an eye on the possible interrelations and the disguised, or rather more than evident analogies with the revolutionary experimental practices of Russian art in the 1920s. The final aim would be to claim a type of artistic production free of fetishisation and mythological connotations. With the support of Institut d’Estudis Baleàrics.
Luz del Carmen Magaña
RESIDENCY PERIOD: June 2019
Luz del Carmen Magaña
Art, the Body and Post-pornography
Visual artist, feminist, theoretician and performance artist, Luz Magaña is coordinator of the Performance and Gender Laboratory (LPG) of the Faculty of Fine Arts of the Universidad Autónoma de Querétaro, Mexico. Her postdoctoral project, which she developed at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, addresses the relationship between painting and post-pornography. She is currently working on a new research project regarding topics related to performance, post-pornography, the body and feminism in contemporary art, within the context of Barcelona and Mexico. The aim is to discover and create both theoretical and practical links between the LPG and performative movements within the city of Barcelona, as well as creating a theoretical research archive on the topics raised in her research.
Olga Martí
RESIDENCY PERIOD: June – august 2019
Olga Martí
The Slightest Movement
Addressing the field of the performing arts, Olga Martí’s research analyses works that involve no action, emptiness or minimal movement as their motor or central element. On the one hand, it is a poetics of insignificance, linked to experimental approaches that question the rules of the visual arts and movement. On the other, her proposals generate cracks intending to break the imperative of movement, work, visuality and contemporary sonority, situating its creators in an other space. This project is part of her recent doctoral thesis research developed in the Laboratory of Intermediate Creation of the Faculty of Fine Arts of the Universitat Politècnica, Valencia.
Daniel Amorós o Daniel Loves The Sodomites
RESIDENCY PERIOD: February – december 2019
Daniel Amorós o Daniel Loves The Sodomites
Forms of self-representation. Gender and sexual dissent in photography, poetry (written and sung), performance and the artist’s book
Daniel Amorós’ research provides continuity to both his studio praxis and his artistic practice, in which he aims to critically and exhaustively dissect issues related to the concepts of gender and sexuality from the perspective of self-representation and dissent, as well as other ontological aspects of the media and languages used; such as site-specific performance, photography, video, poetry, etc. Central to his task is the desire to apply, transform and materialise the results and responses obtained in an artist’s book that will dialogue his early (photographic) work and his most recent (poetic) work, as well as other narrative texts and essays.
Christina Schultz
RESIDENCY PERIOD: September – december 2019
Christina Schultz
Resonances, an experimental choir on pleasure and sexual diversity
Christina Schultz is a transdisciplinary artist, oral performer and linguistic nomad who attended the MACBA Independent Studies Programme (2017–18) and has a permanent residency at SaTorre, a minimal art space. Her research is made possible thanks to the artistic space ‘Homesession’ and the grant ‘Art for Change’ from Caixa Social, in cooperation with the Stop AIDS association. Both in theory and practice, she addresses issues related to sexual dissent and the needs of the LGTBI+ community, while the axis of her artistic proposal is the creation of an experimental choir, a vocal and corporeal group that literally gives voice and body, in a coordinated and collective way, to the choir’s own experiences. Based upon freedom and the absence of judgement, this is seen as a space for creation and collective expression where differences add up and harmonise.
Montse Morcate
RESIDENCY PERIOD: September – december 2019
Montse Morcate
The grieving project: photographic responses of contemporary creation to death and loss
Montse Morcate’s research focuses on the analysis of the representation of disease, death and grief, using family photographs and online material, as well as drawing on the contemporary creation project, among other areas. During her residency, she aims to develop a theoretical body of work analysing the various meanings of the representation of grief in contemporary art, addressing all means of creation, but in particular works within the current photographic scene.
Mireia c. Saladrigues
RESIDENCY PERIOD: July 2019 – January 2020
Mireia c. Saladrigues
Behaving Unconventionally in Gallery Settings. Alteration and Strangeness in Cultural Practices as Fruitful Tension for Rearticulating Relations among Makers, Objects, Audiences, and (Virtual) Museums
The researcher and visual artist Mireia c. Saladrigues will be working on the written part of her doctoral thesis for the University of the Arts, Helsinki, Finland. Behaving Unconventionally in Gallery Settings documents and supports situations of action that could change the paradigms of our relationship to art. Her research, based on artistic practice, sees cultural alteration as a consequence of social conditioning and reacts to the reduction of imaginative capital (real-virtual) by suggesting an artistic and theoretical re-reading of alteration and non-conventionality as fertile ‘tools’.