Contemporàni@ 2005
Contemporàni@ 2005
Contemporàni@ 2005
Contemporàni@ 2005
Contemporàni@ 2005
Contemporàni@ 2005
Contemporàni@ 2005
Contemporàni@ 2005
fromJanuary 29 toDecember 01, 2005 - EACCEXHIBITIONS
Contemporàni@ 2005 Interferences in the City and its Related Landscapes
Project curated by Juan de NievesThe cities in which we live are complex structures that transcend the everyday business of survival and habitability. In fact, the opposite is true. Urban space – and, hence, the surrounding area – is imposed upon us: a powerful economic, political and social superstructure, forcing us to float adrift among its laws and flaws. In the latter, in the non-regulated areas, art and its tactics may be able to provide some form of evasion or circumlocution; new approaches with which to perhaps ever-so-slightly transform or reinterpret the places where we coexist and are socially driven, and which we call cities.
At EACC, we believe that the city and its context – the signs of identity that have built and which make up our community, and its contradictions and disorder, too – is a subject that must be discussed and reflected upon. In order do this, systematic work has to be carried out that will help awaken critical awareness among citizens, by means of not only the tools and resources inherent to an art centre.
The aim of the Contemporàni@ project - which left its mark in previous editions - is to serve as the first step in this direction. We trust that it will be enlarged in the future, and not just in the conventional exhibition format. The city and its landscapes, its historical memory, the new elements that are modifying its social structure, its urban layout, its economic realities… These are some of the aspects that artists and others, have been working upon to show us new models and relationships on our local map.
PROJECTS
K, a Free Regular City Magazine
The magazine is intended as an instrument for promoting knowledge and citizen participation. With the city and its inhabitants as the starting point, it should serve as common ground, a meeting point to view various different community issues.
The publication will analyse situations that enable citizens to better understand their surroundings, bringing the reader closer to those global issues that have a strong local impact, such as immigration, while at the same time considering specific points that reflect universal situations, such as urban development.
The magazine aims to reflect this new, ever-changing backdrop and to be somewhere with its own identity, an identity based on its knowledge of the different subjective outlooks that make up society, defined by common experience and a sense of belonging and participating in the community. The publication itself should form a relationship with readers by creating situations that explore the possibilities for creating identity and social interaction, support and acknowledgement.
* A project by Jota García Izquierdo (Castellón, 1972). Graduate of Fine Arts, University of Valencia. He has had work in various editions of Observatori (Valencia International Festival on Artistic Research) and has held solo and group exhibitions. He is also one of the founders of the Respeto Total collective. One of his most awarded and recognized works is the action video 24FRAMES.
La Guinea
The project on La Guinea sprang from a desire to x-ray the city of Castellón. The exercise is a sufficiently large and ambitious one to be able to focus on one specific area, a physical and geographical space that, over the years, has given rise to an identity and frame of mind that, over the years, has become a space in the memory.
La Guinea today shows us, on the one hand, the face of a new wave of immigration (Romanian, Moroccan, Algerian and Asian), and, on the other, a brief glimpse of the apparent opulence of a self-satisfied society, prone to forgetfulness. Its streets still reveal a hazardous everyday life, where the hard work and patience of small shopkeepers is coupled with that of those who, at some point, had to replace their agricultural jobs with industrial ones. Urban changes also reveal the inconsistency and proximity of some of the urban planning schemes that can be seen all over the city. Yet instead of being a ‘marginal’ neighbourhood, it is in fact an urban space where social realities hold their own in a social fretwork interspersed with traditional craftsmen and solid progress.
The project, carried out jointly by members of the URBANA group and the EACC educational department, establishes both real and fictitious links between biography, historical document, specialized opinion and conceptual hypothesis, with a view to becoming instrumental in the creation of future relationships between citizens and their urban surroundings.
Lourdes Chesa (Castellón, 1970) and Joaquina Moragrega (Castellón, 1969) are two multimedia artists who make up Urbana, base de creación audiovisual (Urbana, audiovisual creation base), an activity they combine with teaching the same subject.
Archive of Occasional Cities
This is a project that examines the various overlapping temporary uses of urban areas. Giovanni La Varra has proposed the concept of the Post-it City, to examine the proliferation of brief situations that are unaffected by standard planning and based on non-codified uses that are temporary, anonymous and implicitly critical in approach.
The aim of the proposal is to widen the basic concept to become the Occasional City, and to explore this phenomenon, giving priority to the outlooks of architecture, urban planning and visual arts in all their forms, while documenting them and giving them consideration.
There are several purposes: to obtain information on the varied profile of Occasional City in different parts of the world, according to the specific features of each area; to assess the potential role of contemporary culture in researching this phenomenon, and to conduct research on the theme in various cities throughout the world. When it comes to EACC, Occasional Cities will cover some of the specific situations that reflect the phenomenon here in Castellón.
* The archive is based on a larger project called ‘Occasional Cities. Post-it city and other temporary formats’, organized by the Centre d'Art Santa Mònica and the Centre de Cultura Contemporània, in Barcelona.
Viewfinder (Marina d'Or, August 2005)
Having got over the Post-industrial age, Westerners, thanks to the purchasing power of democracy, freely exercise their right to enjoy travel.Contemporary men and women work eleven months of the year with an eye on a dream: their holidays. Every year, an increasingly large number of citizens escape for a month from the tedious routine of their own lives, at greater or lesser expense.
Being a tourist implies a particular form of acquaintanceship with time and space. The tourist is a tourist in a certain place (the destination) and for an exceptional and ephemeral amount of time (a week-end, a fortnight or a month). The limited duration of holidays brings a sense of calm and of vertigo at the same time. Everything crumbles away once we start the journey back.
Being a tourist implies a particular form of acquaintanceship with time and space. The tourist is a tourist in a certain place (the destination) and for an exceptional and ephemeral amount of time (a week-end, a fortnight or a month). The limited duration of holidays brings a sense of calm and of vertigo at the same time. Everything crumbles away once we start the journey back.
Initially a highly exclusive pursuit, during the second half of the 20th century mass tourism became the prime means to escape and achieve happiness. However, over the last few decades the tourist market has changed direction slightly and acquired more individual features.
Today, holidays have become a made-to-measure, customized consumer product. Consumers wish to be classified in one of the market categories and they expect travel firms to programme a range of different experiences: adventure, relaxation, family holidays…
This project is a tour, in stills and video, of architecture and landscapes. Like filmed post-cards, they are mini-tales of reality.
* Nacho Vega (Bembibre, León, 1969) is a Fine Arts graduate. His audiovisual work includes both creative and the documentary work. He has taken part in a number of festivals. In 1995 he won the Conde Duque Cultural Centre Video-creation Award and, in 2004, the public’s award in the Madrid documentary contest, Documenta Madrid. He also works as a TV director and scriptwriter.
Social AIDS Project / 1. Castellón
The aim of this project is to analyse the realities of AIDS in the local context, after over 20 years of pandemic. It is based on the idea of display and expansion. Therefore, the Espai d’art contemporani de Castelló will not be the only venue used: the streets, university classrooms, city squares, secondary schools, bars, the headquarters of citizen’s associations, street advertising, balconies, will all become part of this expanded display, not just as another venue for showing work, but like an informal network that, in turn, will communicate with the network or collaborators that has been set up.
During the first stage of the project (exploring the area), a survey was carried out with the purpose of creating a map of the social, ideological and medical situation of HIV/AIDS today. The exhibition has an initial core comprising four sections: one of them, called Office, will be located in the EACC exhibition space; another which we have called Using the institutional prosthesis, will be temporary; a third, called Links, will be located in other spaces, and the fourth, Collaboration, will cover agreements and working strategies that have been set up with organizations in Castellón, and everything they involve, and which affect the project and its implementation.
Workshops on sex, seminars, banners, posters... These will be the more obvious and visible signs of how HIV/AIDS is experienced in the city, taking an in-depth look at the various aspects of the problem (how to prevent HIV/AIDS, changes of attitude towards HIV/AIDS, etc.).
* Pepe Miralles (Xàbia, Alicante, 1959) works as a visual artist and as Projects teacher at the Faculty of Fine Arts of Valencia. Since 1992 he has been conducting research into the different problems relating to HIV/AIDS in our socio-cultural context, focusing on issues such as prevention and the dignity of patients.
Free Net, EACC Visible Net
The proposal consists of creating a Free Net at EACC, that would cover the various parts of the museum and stretch as far as possible to the square around it. This network would provide access to the EACC’s own Intranet, where material and resources that are generated inside the museum can be found and which would also provide Internet access inside the coverage zone.
The limits of this invisible virtual space would be defined by markers placed at various points inside the building and in the square. They would indicate the boundaries of the area covered by the wireless network (WIFI), but, above all, they would be like doors into virtual space, passageways that lead us to invisible messages that exist in space (“public space”) and which we can only see if we use a computer equipped with a webcam or with a Head Mounted Display (Virtual Reality) device.
* Clara Boj and Diego Díaz (Murcia, 1975) have been combining their solo artistic activities with joint projects since the year 2000. Their work focuses mainly on observing public space and its various transformations (architectural, technological, functional, social, etc.), as a result of the introduction of new technologies into everyday space.
Workshop: Monument
Antoni Miralda will be holding a workshop on the idea of monuments, aimed at artists, students of fine arts and catering, critics and sociologists, amongst others. This will be the first of three workshops given by the Catalan artist at EACC as from January 2006. Initial research will be conducted on the subject of the Fiesta, or local Festivity. In the context of Castellón this would be the Fiestas de la Magdalena, or Festivities of the Magdalene. The workshop on the idea of monuments will be followed by others on the subject of gastronomy and light, all closely linked to the Magdalena and the symbolic gaiatas, the traditional monumental illuminated street decorations.
* Antoni Miralda (Terrassa, Barcelona, 1942) works as an artist in both New York and Barcelona, exploring the links between art and culture. His work connects art and anthropology, using local culture as his working material, both language and ritual being the typical elements of any festive celebration.
Systems for Holding and Storing Waste Materials in Abandoned Supermarket Trolleys
Javier Pérez Aranda’s project consists of a process that will bring about an interaction – not necessarily a pre-defined one – with the city environment or eco-system and, at the same time, with the other pieces and processes present at the exhibition. The working method is inspired by biological models that are self-organised and based on constant feedback between the various items or individuals involved and on the various technical solutions that are applied at each stage. So, it is not all to do with producing a piece of work based on an initial design, although the result may be an apparently sculptural object that may reveal glimpses of a well-structure scheme.
The aim is to collect waste material from all over the city (remains of furniture and personal belongings, of public works, industry, packaging, etc.), using supermarket trolleys for storage and transport.
Advantage will be taken of the capacity of these skips on wheels, as well as the structural possibilities of the waste, in order to make sculptural modules that, once inside the EACC exhibition room, can be easily combined in different ways to make up mobile architectural features. Work will be intensive, with the help of a team of volunteers who will actively take part in the creative evolution of the piece.
* Javier Pérez Aranda (Madrid, 1963) has produced a large number of installations throughout his career based on the idea of accumulation and relocation of objects, creating sculptural, almost architectural, pieces in often unconventional places. For his work he uses waste materials, photographs and even demolition rubble; he has also constructed some of his pieces on private property, or used the leftovers of the physical infrastructure of various art fairs.
Price: FREE ENTRY
The cities in which we live are complex structures that transcend the everyday business of survival and habitability. In fact, the opposite is true. Urban space – and, hence, the surrounding area – is imposed upon us: a powerful economic, political and social superstructure, forcing us to float adrift among its laws and flaws. In the latter, in the non-regulated areas, art and its tactics may be able to provide some form of evasion or circumlocution; new approaches with which to perhaps ever-so-slightly transform or reinterpret the places where we coexist and are socially driven, and which we call cities.
At EACC, we believe that the city and its context – the signs of identity that have built and which make up our community, and its contradictions and disorder, too – is a subject that must be discussed and reflected upon. In order do this, systematic work has to be carried out that will help awaken critical awareness among citizens, by means of not only the tools and resources inherent to an art centre.
The aim of the Contemporàni@ project - which left its mark in previous editions - is to serve as the first step in this direction. We trust that it will be enlarged in the future, and not just in the conventional exhibition format. The city and its landscapes, its historical memory, the new elements that are modifying its social structure, its urban layout, its economic realities… These are some of the aspects that artists and others, have been working upon to show us new models and relationships on our local map.
K, a Free Regular City Magazine
The magazine is intended as an instrument for promoting knowledge and citizen participation. With the city and its inhabitants as the starting point, it should serve as common ground, a meeting point to view various different community issues.
The publication will analyse situations that enable citizens to better understand their surroundings, bringing the reader closer to those global issues that have a strong local impact, such as immigration, while at the same time considering specific points that reflect universal situations, such as urban development.
The magazine aims to reflect this new, ever-changing backdrop and to be somewhere with its own identity, an identity based on its knowledge of the different subjective outlooks that make up society, defined by common experience and a sense of belonging and participating in the community. The publication itself should form a relationship with readers by creating situations that explore the possibilities for creating identity and social interaction, support and acknowledgement.
* A project by Jota García Izquierdo (Castellón, 1972). Graduate of Fine Arts, University of Valencia. He has had work in various editions of Observatori (Valencia International Festival on Artistic Research) and has held solo and group exhibitions. He is also one of the founders of the Respeto Total collective. One of his most awarded and recognized works is the action video 24FRAMES.
La Guinea
The project on La Guinea sprang from a desire to x-ray the city of Castellón. The exercise is a sufficiently large and ambitious one to be able to focus on one specific area, a physical and geographical space that, over the years, has given rise to an identity and frame of mind that, over the years, has become a space in the memory.
La Guinea today shows us, on the one hand, the face of a new wave of immigration (Romanian, Moroccan, Algerian and Asian), and, on the other, a brief glimpse of the apparent opulence of a self-satisfied society, prone to forgetfulness. Its streets still reveal a hazardous everyday life, where the hard work and patience of small shopkeepers is coupled with that of those who, at some point, had to replace their agricultural jobs with industrial ones. Urban changes also reveal the inconsistency and proximity of some of the urban planning schemes that can be seen all over the city. Yet instead of being a ‘marginal’ neighbourhood, it is in fact an urban space where social realities hold their own in a social fretwork interspersed with traditional craftsmen and solid progress.
The project, carried out jointly by members of the URBANA group and the EACC educational department, establishes both real and fictitious links between biography, historical document, specialized opinion and conceptual hypothesis, with a view to becoming instrumental in the creation of future relationships between citizens and their urban surroundings.
Lourdes Chesa (Castellón, 1970) and Joaquina Moragrega (Castellón, 1969) are two multimedia artists who make up Urbana, base de creación audiovisual (Urbana, audiovisual creation base), an activity they combine with teaching the same subject.
Archive of Occasional Cities
This is a project that examines the various overlapping temporary uses of urban areas. Giovanni La Varra has proposed the concept of the Post-it City, to examine the proliferation of brief situations that are unaffected by standard planning and based on non-codified uses that are temporary, anonymous and implicitly critical in approach.
The aim of the proposal is to widen the basic concept to become the Occasional City, and to explore this phenomenon, giving priority to the outlooks of architecture, urban planning and visual arts in all their forms, while documenting them and giving them consideration.
There are several purposes: to obtain information on the varied profile of Occasional City in different parts of the world, according to the specific features of each area; to assess the potential role of contemporary culture in researching this phenomenon, and to conduct research on the theme in various cities throughout the world. When it comes to EACC, Occasional Cities will cover some of the specific situations that reflect the phenomenon here in Castellón.
* The archive is based on a larger project called ‘Occasional Cities. Post-it city and other temporary formats’, organized by the Centre d'Art Santa Mònica and the Centre de Cultura Contemporània, in Barcelona.
Viewfinder (Marina d'Or, August 2005)
Having got over the Post-industrial age, Westerners, thanks to the purchasing power of democracy, freely exercise their right to enjoy travel.Contemporary men and women work eleven months of the year with an eye on a dream: their holidays. Every year, an increasingly large number of citizens escape for a month from the tedious routine of their own lives, at greater or lesser expense.
Being a tourist implies a particular form of acquaintanceship with time and space. The tourist is a tourist in a certain place (the destination) and for an exceptional and ephemeral amount of time (a week-end, a fortnight or a month). The limited duration of holidays brings a sense of calm and of vertigo at the same time. Everything crumbles away once we start the journey back.
Being a tourist implies a particular form of acquaintanceship with time and space. The tourist is a tourist in a certain place (the destination) and for an exceptional and ephemeral amount of time (a week-end, a fortnight or a month). The limited duration of holidays brings a sense of calm and of vertigo at the same time. Everything crumbles away once we start the journey back.
Initially a highly exclusive pursuit, during the second half of the 20th century mass tourism became the prime means to escape and achieve happiness. However, over the last few decades the tourist market has changed direction slightly and acquired more individual features.
Today, holidays have become a made-to-measure, customized consumer product. Consumers wish to be classified in one of the market categories and they expect travel firms to programme a range of different experiences: adventure, relaxation, family holidays…
This project is a tour, in stills and video, of architecture and landscapes. Like filmed post-cards, they are mini-tales of reality.
* Nacho Vega (Bembibre, León, 1969) is a Fine Arts graduate. His audiovisual work includes both creative and the documentary work. He has taken part in a number of festivals. In 1995 he won the Conde Duque Cultural Centre Video-creation Award and, in 2004, the public’s award in the Madrid documentary contest, Documenta Madrid. He also works as a TV director and scriptwriter.
Social AIDS Project / 1. Castellón
The aim of this project is to analyse the realities of AIDS in the local context, after over 20 years of pandemic. It is based on the idea of display and expansion. Therefore, the Espai d’art contemporani de Castelló will not be the only venue used: the streets, university classrooms, city squares, secondary schools, bars, the headquarters of citizen’s associations, street advertising, balconies, will all become part of this expanded display, not just as another venue for showing work, but like an informal network that, in turn, will communicate with the network or collaborators that has been set up.
During the first stage of the project (exploring the area), a survey was carried out with the purpose of creating a map of the social, ideological and medical situation of HIV/AIDS today. The exhibition has an initial core comprising four sections: one of them, called Office, will be located in the EACC exhibition space; another which we have called Using the institutional prosthesis, will be temporary; a third, called Links, will be located in other spaces, and the fourth, Collaboration, will cover agreements and working strategies that have been set up with organizations in Castellón, and everything they involve, and which affect the project and its implementation.
Workshops on sex, seminars, banners, posters... These will be the more obvious and visible signs of how HIV/AIDS is experienced in the city, taking an in-depth look at the various aspects of the problem (how to prevent HIV/AIDS, changes of attitude towards HIV/AIDS, etc.).
* Pepe Miralles (Xàbia, Alicante, 1959) works as a visual artist and as Projects teacher at the Faculty of Fine Arts of Valencia. Since 1992 he has been conducting research into the different problems relating to HIV/AIDS in our socio-cultural context, focusing on issues such as prevention and the dignity of patients.
Free Net, EACC Visible Net
The proposal consists of creating a Free Net at EACC, that would cover the various parts of the museum and stretch as far as possible to the square around it. This network would provide access to the EACC’s own Intranet, where material and resources that are generated inside the museum can be found and which would also provide Internet access inside the coverage zone.
The limits of this invisible virtual space would be defined by markers placed at various points inside the building and in the square. They would indicate the boundaries of the area covered by the wireless network (WIFI), but, above all, they would be like doors into virtual space, passageways that lead us to invisible messages that exist in space (“public space”) and which we can only see if we use a computer equipped with a webcam or with a Head Mounted Display (Virtual Reality) device.
* Clara Boj and Diego Díaz (Murcia, 1975) have been combining their solo artistic activities with joint projects since the year 2000. Their work focuses mainly on observing public space and its various transformations (architectural, technological, functional, social, etc.), as a result of the introduction of new technologies into everyday space.
Workshop: Monument
Antoni Miralda will be holding a workshop on the idea of monuments, aimed at artists, students of fine arts and catering, critics and sociologists, amongst others. This will be the first of three workshops given by the Catalan artist at EACC as from January 2006. Initial research will be conducted on the subject of the Fiesta, or local Festivity. In the context of Castellón this would be the Fiestas de la Magdalena, or Festivities of the Magdalene. The workshop on the idea of monuments will be followed by others on the subject of gastronomy and light, all closely linked to the Magdalena and the symbolic gaiatas, the traditional monumental illuminated street decorations.
* Antoni Miralda (Terrassa, Barcelona, 1942) works as an artist in both New York and Barcelona, exploring the links between art and culture. His work connects art and anthropology, using local culture as his working material, both language and ritual being the typical elements of any festive celebration.
Systems for Holding and Storing Waste Materials in Abandoned Supermarket Trolleys
Javier Pérez Aranda’s project consists of a process that will bring about an interaction – not necessarily a pre-defined one – with the city environment or eco-system and, at the same time, with the other pieces and processes present at the exhibition. The working method is inspired by biological models that are self-organised and based on constant feedback between the various items or individuals involved and on the various technical solutions that are applied at each stage. So, it is not all to do with producing a piece of work based on an initial design, although the result may be an apparently sculptural object that may reveal glimpses of a well-structure scheme.
The aim is to collect waste material from all over the city (remains of furniture and personal belongings, of public works, industry, packaging, etc.), using supermarket trolleys for storage and transport.
Advantage will be taken of the capacity of these skips on wheels, as well as the structural possibilities of the waste, in order to make sculptural modules that, once inside the EACC exhibition room, can be easily combined in different ways to make up mobile architectural features. Work will be intensive, with the help of a team of volunteers who will actively take part in the creative evolution of the piece.
* Javier Pérez Aranda (Madrid, 1963) has produced a large number of installations throughout his career based on the idea of accumulation and relocation of objects, creating sculptural, almost architectural, pieces in often unconventional places. For his work he uses waste materials, photographs and even demolition rubble; he has also constructed some of his pieces on private property, or used the leftovers of the physical infrastructure of various art fairs.
Price: FREE ENTRY
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