5 contents
Artistic practice as work: how to collectively organise or give up in the attempt
This selection of podcasts from the Radio Web MACBA archive collects conversations with local artists, curators, mediators and cultural workers who, aside from detailing their respective practices, lay out their material working conditions. Self-exploitation, project-based work, intermittent employment, precariousness and all kinds of strategies for resilience and subsistence recur again and again in these interviews as an integral part of everyday life and conditions of possibility. Their stories not only denounce structural barriers and systematic inequalities, they also inspire debates about alternative models that could guarantee a fairer and more sustainable working environment for creative communities.
![Son[i]a #382](https://img.macba.cat/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/kali_7.jpeg)
The work of artist Itxaso Corral (b. Bilbao, 1979) calls on an extensive glossary of concepts, media, and practices that explore beyond the bounds of closed definitions, in a gesture that simultaneously expands the scope of possibility of so-called live arts. In her creative space, physiology, language and magic mobilise times and spaces from which to vibrate in interconnection with different organisms, while trying to come closer to the feeling of—not just resolve—her main concern: what does it mean to be alive?
![Son[i]a #348](https://img.macba.cat/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/vives-08.jpeg)
Marc constructs situations, although he generally takes the role of an observer of processes rather than an architect. He puts forward and activates proposals with various ramifications, which are not meticulously calculated stagings but mappings of relations and their scope of power. Sometimes he is like someone who leaves a handful of lentils to sprout without knowing what will happen. Other times, like someone who sticks two packets of Menthos in a bottle of Coca-Cola and sits down to see what happens after shaking it vigorously.
![Son[i]a #380](https://img.macba.cat/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/veronika2.jpeg)
In Núria Güell’s practice, the museum-institution becomes the actual medium of her art: she manipulates, squeezes and expands it, questions its rationale, blind spots and contradictions, and seeks to transcend its boundaries. Her works always spring from social conflicts that directly affect her, and she uses the strategies of art as platforms to dismantle the logic of power. In a gesture that aims her semantic arrows at the social reality in question and at the art institution itself, Núria Güell embarks on long-distance processes. Collaborative endeavours in which listening, conversation, legal investigation, negotiation, confrontation and connection are top-level creative tools. Hers is a disobedient practice that fills the spaces of art with stories that are usually neither seen nor heard. And it is also a political practice: a life practice, in the sense that she inserts herself into each of her projects, accepting the legal, ethical and emotional challenges that they entail.
![Son[i]a #367](https://img.macba.cat/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/publi_1.jpeg)
Marc Larré works with video, photography, sculpture and objects, giving free rein to a dilettante practice that entails attentive listening to the materials he handles, and also to the context—to his surroundings. In his thinking-by-doing, Marc generates countless unexpected connections between temporary situations, objects, and people, in order to question notions of progress and modernity. He does so through myriad gestures and frictions, such as flattening the axis mundi to the ground in a bid for horizontality that challenges the hegemony of the gaze in favour of the sensuality of touch and contact. And his predilection for minor, ephemeral materials, such as plaster, clay, and paper, with which he forms and deforms objects. Other strategies include the defence of craft and artisanship—through interaction and doing-with others—to activate something that we could describe as an archaeology of the present, which appeals to what he calls “the hospitality of things”.
Artist Lucía C. Pino approaches her sculptural work as a conversation with the materials, the media and the surroundings—in relation to where they come from as well as the place they will occupy—, emphasising their performative aspect and their interdependence with her every move. It is a practice that is not easily defined, permeated by a wide range of interests, influences and concerns, among which Lucía includes the rituals of reading, writing, and doing-with-others. Imbued with a transfeminist spirit, her assemblages allow her to speculate on a complex but also intimate reality, creating a dialogue between the materiality, the space, and the relationships that can emerge from the art device.
[contra]panorama is a collective research process taking place at MACBA from February 2024 to April 2025, with different rhythms, speeds and formats. [contra]panorama attempts to leave behind the illusory panoramic vantage point of the biennial format to look elsewhere, from in-between spaces, which are oriented towards the transition between the inside and the outside, and between various scales of action and thought. One of the focuses of attention in its different phases has been the working conditions of artists today: the cost of surviving as an artist or giving up in the attempt, but also reflecting on the series of economies, technologies, times, forms of redistribution and infrastructures that we need to collectively imagine.
