Individual Residencies 2018
Natalia Giglietti
RESIDENCY PERIOD: January – february 2018
Natalia Giglietti
Active archives: an approach to the group Escombros from here and there
Active Archives sets out to survey, describe and analyse the documents related to the group Escombros. Artistas de lo que queda (La Pata, 1988), both those in the fonds of the MACBA Study Centre (CED) and the ones belonging to the artist Hector ‘Rayo’ Puppo, a member of the collective. How does the CED document the ephemeral actions of Escombros? What are the correspondences and discontinuities between the two? What other archives would serve to challenge it and build new hypotheses, that is, to access new knowledge? These are some of the questions that function as triggers and as the axis around which the project will be developed.
Diana Coca
RESIDENCY PERIOD: January – may 2018
Diana Coca
Corporalities to the limit
Diana Coca’s work focuses on the body and the notion of travel/crossings/borders, that is, the materiality of the body and the bridge as an intersection between the two. A body that serves to cross, but always a body of a woman subject to violence and multiple contradictions, systematically put down as inferior for being feminine. A body that seeks multiple identities, which does not depend on structurally exclusive binary identities, but is constructed through movement thanks to translation, submitting to accidents and destabilising what has been learned, decentring the being.
Duen Sacchi
RESIDENCY PERIOD: January – june 2018
Duen Sacchi
A history of the organs
Duen Sacchi sets out to review some of our somato-political fictions, and to investigate how it is possible that certain body marks and surfaces have acquired a social, political and economic significance, and also how these marks have been formed by sovereign, disciplinary and pharmaco-pornographic colonial relationships. The aim is to create a series of theoretical and material actions that deactivate the colonial archives in use: fragments of an orthopaedic invention in which, at different points of articulation, production, resistance and classification, we create organs, body differences, species, fetishes, economic systems and contractual relationships.
Michael Lawton
RESIDENCY PERIOD: February – september 2018
Michael Lawton
Walking with Laertes
Michael Lawton wants to research into the following three interlinking themes: how to write about artwork, when to paint about something rather than write about it, and contemporary object philosophy. Which he has reduced to the following two questions: Is the best way to write about artwork with fiction? Is whatever makes writing about painting so difficult the same thing that inspires him to paint? He will be working across the Archive and Library but is especially interested in the 2009/10 exhibition “The Malady of Writing.” By his side as he wanders in the liminal area between the literary and the visual, will be the ghost of Laertes; the greyhound Laertes that Mallarmé gave to Berthe Morisot and a guide familiar with the territory between poetry and painting.
María Alejandra Ochoa
RESIDENCY PERIOD: March and july 2018
María Alejandra Ochoa
3 visual identities / 3 readings around creative processes
Following on from her doctoral thesis at the Universitat de Barcelona, Objetnography: A Narrative Research on Educational Practice in the Arts, María Alejandra Ochoa Rodríguez has continued her research on the relationship between narrative, visual poetry and creative processes and the need to find new methodologies in the teaching of the visual arts. Her investigations trace a motion of methodological inquiry linked to narrative research and leading to creative teaching, while detecting in the implication of the object, the memory and the emotions that shape the introspection of a subject related to the arts.
Pía Cordero
RESIDENCY PERIOD: May – july 2018
Pía Cordero
Art and deterritorialisation. An analysis of three Chilean works in the MACBA Collection
Pía Cordero’s project offers a reading of three works in the MACBA Collection, by artists Roser Bru, Alfredo Jaar and Enrique Ramírez, by producing a cartography of the conceptual narratives and genealogies of the figures of the immigrant, the refugee and the political asylee. These artists represent three generational milestones in Chilean art, with their works converging in the problematisation of the crisis of subjectivity of the twentieth century and the manifestation of situations of exclusion and invisibilisation such as dictatorship, war and exile.
Ricardo Iglesias
RESIDENCY PERIOD: May – june and september – october 2018
Ricardo Iglesias
Utopian systems. Constructions of thoughts
The research project of Ricardo Iglesias has been developed from the double perspective of the philosophical-socio-political and the aesthetic, and the assumption that both processes are, in any case, unified and related. It is based on a comparative analysis of the historical utopian theories and their possible critical approaches to complex situations of socio-political domination in the current European legacy, and on a study of the construction of images and artistic formats that have led to the creation of possible worlds and utopias as visible referential frameworks for the whole of society. These are the questions behind exhibitions such as Constant. New Babylon (MNCARS, 2015); Playgrounds. Reinventing the Square (MNCARS, 2014); Utopia is Possible. ICSID. Eivissa, 1971 (MACBA, 2013); Work, Power and Control. Critical Episodes (1957–2011) (MACBA, 2013); and Art and Utopia. Restricted Action (MACBA, 2004).
Blanca Sotos
RESIDENCY PERIOD: July 2018
Blanca Sotos
Libraries. A project halfway between the exhibition gallery and the reading room
Within the framework of the intersections of Conceptual art, concrete poetry and mail art, Libraries investigates the relationships, especially bureaucratic ones, that exist between certain titles (many of them classified as ‘artists’ books’) listed in the libraries and archives of contemporary art centres and museums, the users of those libraries, if there is one, and the information on particular artists available in those centres.
Joan Morey
RESIDENCY PERIOD: September – december 2018
Joan Morey
The tensed body (during the performance)
As a prologue to the current research project entitled ‘The performance of the body, the body of the performance – included in the doctoral programme Advanced Studies in Artistic Production (EAPA) at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the Universitat de Barcelona – during his residency Joan Morey will analyse the place (or places) occupied by the body in the language of performance. By highlighting the mechanisms of power and control of the body and its instrumentalisation when turning it into a means of artistic expression, the project will not only study the body as an ‘enclave’, but also the performance as a broad and dynamic field of cultural production.
Blanca Machuca
RESIDENCY PERIOD: Septembee – december 2018
Blanca Machuca
The real state of things: a game of illusions
The real state of things: a game of illusions is an artistic and theoretical project created by Blanca Machuca, together with Mechu López, that puts forward a personal methodology based on games, in order to find mechanisms that can provoke the desire to do and think. The aim is to transform the space by turning an exhibition gallery into a gaming parlour, so art can become a way of life by blurring the limits between reality and art, much as Joan Brossa did when he mixed situations that were always undefined. What is it? A magic show, striptease, or an artistic performance? The project refers to aspects of society that trouble us and make us think. Following Manuel Castells’ concept of Global Casino, it reflects on the way decisions are taken by those responsible for economic changes, such as banks, politicians and investment funds that determine how we live
Aga Wielocha
RESIDENCY PERIOD: October – november 2018
Aga Wielocha
Where the artworks are: collection and archive in the contemporary art museum
This investigation – a part of the doctoral project carried out at the University of Amsterdam within the framework of research and training network ‘New Approaches in the Conservation of Contemporary Art’- looks at art museums as keepers and custodians. It considers how contemporary artworks, upon entering a museum, become distributed between the collection and the archive, and examines the potential redundancy of the museum’s classification systems for contemporary art. This research aims to tackle and evaluate possible solutions to bridging the gap between these two categories, both at a conceptual and practical level. During her residency, Aga Wielocha will study MACBA as a museum that has been pioneering in the introduction of a cataloguing system that no longer makes distinctions between the artwork, the document, and online content. That approach departs from a theoretical concept that merges the traditional categories of ‘artwork’ and ‘document’ and therefore allows to consider artworks as more than mere objects but rather as ‘relations’ between the different elements involved in the creative process. This research will scrutinise the practical implications of this innovative method and its consequences for the perpetuation of artworks from the collection.
Peter Freund
RESIDENCY PERIOD: 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.