2021 RESIDENCIES

Marianne Márquez Blanco,  From productivism to semi-capitalism through factography. January - April 2021

Marianne Márquez Blanco’s research project is part of MACBA’s Independent Studies Programme (PEI), specifically the Political Imagination sessions. It focuses on the search for correlations between aspects of the productivist legacy of the Russian-Soviet avant-garde and current artistic practices, together with the role played by the digital image in the production of subjectivity in the context of today’s ‘semio-capitalism’, following the ideas of Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi.

2020 RESIDENCIES

Lena Sophie Trüper, Natural Metaphors of Cybernetics. Visual forms of expression in technological ecologies of modernity to the present. January - February 21/02/2020

Lena Trüper is a PhD candidate working on artistic practices between 1960 and 1970 that generated visual nature metaphors like clouds or water and earth surfaces to indicate adaptive systems that include the observer. A main focus of her research is the work of the Centro de Arte y Communicación (Center of Arts and Communication, CAYC), founded by the artist and critic Jorge Glusberg in 1969 in Argentina, that presented exhibitions like «Arte y cibernética» (Art and cybernetics, Galeria Bonino, Buenos Aires, 1969) and «Arte de sistemas» (Systems art, Museo de Arte Moderno, Buenos Aires, 1971). The research centers in the question to what extent the artists of the CAYC developed specific aesthetical practices that were connected to the ecologic discourse developing in the U.S. during that time according to the reception of cybernetics and if these practices contributed to the international reception of some artists, while others gained importance mainly in the local context.

Blanca Jové Alcalde, How are discursive public programmes conceived at contemporary art institutions? January - April 2020

Framed within her PhD Thesis, the study of Blanca Jové is a response to current premises that argue that discursive public programmes can develop spheres of social and political action within the art institutions. She uses ethics of care as a disruptive methodology that seek to critically analyses these practices, especially in relation to their lack of collaboration and biased participation. During her residency, she aims to construct a theoretical body of work proposing alternative forms for thinking about these programmes; addressing the importance to recognise our interdependency with all living beings.

Ricardo Iglesias, Connected bodies. Art, technology, utopia and robotics. January - April 2020

From an initial investigation carried out in 2018 at the MACBA Study Centre, the artist and researcher develops a meta-study, a parallel examination of the historical, aesthetic, social and technological utopian processes. Mainly focused on the human subject, where the body is understood as individuality susceptible to modification, transformation and self-representation; a fundamental element or particle in the construction of societies and utopias.
The project is a critical visualisation of the impact on the current social and artistic environment of the technological ‘explosion’, often referred to as the Fourth Industrial Revolution in the bubble-spheres of information and communication technology (ICT) , robotics and A.I., and the sonic and visual fields.

2019 RESIDENCIES

Peter Freund, Lost Grids. October - January 2019.

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 Love me, Tinder. November - May 2019 

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, Self-management as a ‘magical’ practice.  January - May 2019.

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, Voi c e ssss Ma t t ersss s s s. January - April.

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, Sense and distance. The postproduction of experience in Harun Farocki and Antje Ehmann’s film-installation work. Jenuary - February.

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, Activating photography: beyond the immobilisation of gestures. March - May.

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, Pere Portabella and filmed activism: political and creative radicality. April - May.

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,  Narrative reminiscences of an avant-garde practice: the artist as curator through multimedia installations. May - August.

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, Art, the Body and Post-pornography. June.

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,  The Slightest Movement. June - August.

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, Forms of self-representation. Gender and sexual dissent in photography, poetry (written and sung), performance and the artist’s book. September - December.

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, Resonances, an experimental choir on pleasure and sexual diversity. September - December.

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,  The grieving project: photographic responses of contemporary creation to death and loss. September - December.

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. SaladriguesBehaving Unconventionally in Gallery Settings. Alteration and Strangeness in Cultural Practices as Fruitful Tension for Rearticulating Relations among Makers, Objects, Audiences, and (Virtual) Museums. July 2019 - January 2020.

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’.

 

Group residencies 2019

Lior Zalis, Diego Posada, Ana Luiza Braga, New fascism in Latin America and the contemporary world. May - December.  

In the framework of this research, we will seek to create a meeting place for researchers, artists and activists, to share reflections about the recent growth of right-wing politics in Latin America and other parts of the world, using different tools and study methods in the field of artistic theory and practices. Based on specific cases, situated contexts will be reviewed to build a toolbox and a set of practices with which to address these politics. Approached from the urgency and difficulty in understanding these phenomena, this group will become a space for experimentation from the present.

Researchers 2018

Natalia Giglietti, Active archives: an approach to the group Escombros from here and there. January - February.

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, Corporalities to the limit. January - May.

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, A history of the organs.  January - June.

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, Walking with Laertes. February - September.

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, 3 visual identities / 3 readings around creative processes. March and July.

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, Art and deterritorialisation. An analysis of three Chilean works in the MACBA Collection. May - July.

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, Utopian systems. Constructions of thoughts. May - June and  September - October.

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, Libraries. A project halfway between the exhibition gallery and the reading room. July.

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, The tensed body (during the performance). September - December.

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, The real state of things: a game of illusions. September - December.

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, Where the artworks are: collection and archive in the contemporary art museum. October - November.

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, Lost Grids.  October - January 2019.

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, Love me, Tinder.  November - May 2019.

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.