Online publications

Domènec. Ni aquí ni enlloc / Not Here, Not Anywhere offers a retrospective of Domènec’s work (Mataró, 1962) from the late nineties to the present. Using certain emblematic buildings or monuments of modernity as referents, Domènec analyses the proposals of the modern movement and its legacy within contemporary practice. Supporting his research are projects in situ, installations, maquettes, photographs, workshops, seminars and videos. Based on various local contexts, his work establishes a dialogue with other international themes to highlight the impact on the present of the utopian ideas that resulted from the Industrial Revolution and as a stand against capitalism.

MACBA re-examines a critical period in the work of Joan Rabascall, which is nonetheless largely unknown to the Catalan public. These works (collages, assemblages, photographs, superpositions) are an invitation to delve into some of his central concerns: the omnipresence of communication, the instrumentalisation of language by the powers that be, the stereotyped image of women, the growing militarisation of society, the transformative power of tourism, and the gradual computerisation of forms of knowledge.

The publication Passió i cartografia per a un incendi dels ulls will mark the closing of the group exhibition Notes for an Eye Fire, the first in a new series of transdisciplinary projects entitled Panorama, focusing on mostly local aesthetics and artistic practices.

I Am All the Selves that I Have Been presents a number of aspects that are central to Fina Miralles’ oeuvre: the relationship between nature and artifice, the language we use to express ourselves and the relations of power in our everyday lives. ‘Being an artist isn’t a vocation, a devotion or a profession; you’re not aware of it, but everything pushes you towards it and drives you to being who you are.’ With these words, Fina Miralles sums up her life.

Although Claramunt is known almost exclusively for his work as a painter, the exhibition Luis Claramunt. El viatge vertical presents a broad selection of works ranging from paintings, drawings and photographs to the self-published books he made from the early seventies to the late nineties. The catalogue includes texts by Nuria Enguita Mayo, curator of the exhibition, Ángel González, Carles Guerra, Teresa Lanceta and Francisco Rivas, and lavishly illustrates each stage of the artist’s work.

The dandy’s monocle, the zoetrope, the fisheye lens, the kaleidoscope, the telescope, the microscope… Paradoxes of the micro and the macro run through the work of Benet Rossell, inventor of an original alphabet of icons, graphisms, and calligrams or ‘benigrams’ as rich and nuanced as any artist’s pallet. This catalogue encompasses two strains of the extremely varied work of this “artor” (artist and actor): his films and calligraphies.

“I take elements from the world, I remove them from their usual context and put them back together according to other orders, so that, thanks to a new and unusual relation of contrast, similarity or assumption, I re-examine that which we call reality.” (Eulàlia Grau)
The photomontages of the artist, which include images taken from the media, denounce the institutions of education and family, gender stereotypes, class differences, worker exploitation and the structures on which power is founded.

Antoni Miralda (Terrassa, Spain, 1942) has turned something as universal as food into a creative universe. Miralda has developed a method based on participation and on the ritual and ceremony related to gastronomy. Employing a non-conformist language, baroque and full of humour, that celebrates the senses and brings art close to life; he undertakes an ethnological exploration of human behaviour in his work. The book includes an essay by the cultural Catalan journalist Josep M. Martí Font, a reissue of the text ‘Miralda’s Mahamastakabhisheka’ (1984) by Vicent Todolí, curator of the project, and testimonial texts by different authors

A maze, ten metres in diameter, with transparent plastic walls, lead into the Àngels Ribé show at MACBA. It is a reconstruction of the work presented by the artist in 1969 at the Château de Verderonne, France, marking the start of her artistic career in the period between the late 1960s and mid-1980s. The catalogue presents Ribé’s body of work from this period and illustrates her untiring interest in playing with space, incorporating the random coming together of ephemeral elements, using unconventional materials and exploring the narrative possibilities of the setting.

In 1968, the young activist Palle Nielsen approached the Moderna Museet in Stockholm with a proposal for turning the museum into an adventure playground. For a month, his ‘Model for a Qualitative Society’ offered a space exclusively for children, without parents or educators. In his essay, Lars Bang Larsen analyses the utopia of a self-organized society that aimed to encourage personal freedom and collaboration between individuals. The documentation of this work forms part of the MACBA Collection.

Nobody who is interested in issues of gender, race or class can ignore the provocative thesis that the Indian thinker Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak formulates in her text “Can the Subaltern Speak?” which sparked a heated debate that still continues today: Manuel Asensi Pérez, who translated the text, provides critical commentaries that make this at times cryptic work accessible to lay readers.

The exhibition Invocable Reality explores possible perspectives on reality from art practices through a selection of works by eleven artists from different backgrounds and generations. The works in Invocable Reality approach reality in a subtle way. They start from the ‘here and now’ of the reality that the artists intend to ‘investigate and conquer’: incorporating fragments in the exhibition space (Roman Ondák), turning the gallery into real space (Antonio Ortega), filming it (Lutz Mommartz, Jeremy Deller and Mireia Sallarès), trying to direct it (John Smith), looking for connections in space and time (Enric Farrés-Duran), influencing it (Núria Güell), showing the devastating effects of a mediated reality (Phil Collins), demonstrating the impossibility of its representation (Rafel G. Bianchi) or showing how we have turned death into something unreal (Jill Magid).

To complement the project Are you Ready for TV?, which offers an unusual reading of the relationship between television as a medium on one hand, and art and philosophy on the other, a new trilingual (Catalan, Spanish and English) digital publication has been launched.
It will be published in instalments that include introductory texts by Chus Martínez and Hans Magnus Enzensberger, and essays by the artists and historians Judith Barry, Ina Blom, Tamara Chaplin, Dora García, Mario García Torres, Johan Grimonprez, Albert Serra and Temporary Services (Brett Bloom, Salem Collo-Julin and Marc Fischer).

Eugeni Bonet (Barcelona, 1954) is undoubtedly one of the main theoretical referents in the fields of cinema, video and digital media in Spain. For forty years his writings have shown the evolution of these disciplines, establishing genealogies, working methods and the links between four different generations of artists. At the same time, his audiovisual programmes introduced subjects and tendencies that were practically unknown at each successive moment, to the point where many of them became authentic and indispensable textbooks. Moreover, Bonet has also followed a notable trajectory as a curator of exhibitions and artist, with various videos and experimental and feature films to his name. This book, published specifically for this project, compiles Bonet’s most important writings, many of which appeared in rare magazines and fanzines, out-of-print catalogues and even unpublished texts.

Before Our Eyes is a project started in 2000 when the Moroccan curator Abdellah Karroum began organising the Expéditions du bout du monde, a travel programme that brought about exchanges between local and international artists in the Rif, a region hitherto devoid of structures for contemporary art. Two years later, the initiative was expanded with the creation of L’appartement 22 in Rabat, a space for production and exhibitions. In 2011, the network incorporated the international residence located in the Rif Mountains, near the Mediterranean, in order to facilitate the research of those artists who need to explore the area.

Since 2004, artist Antoni Abad has developed a series of innovative, geographically diverse, multidisciplinary and socially committed projects designed to fit the needs of different human groups at risk of social exclusion. megafone.net invites these groups to express their experiences and opinions using cell phones to instantly publish them on the web in the form of audio, video, text and photos. Participants thus transform these devices into digital megaphones to amplify their individual and collective voices.

Sigalit Landau, who began her artistic career in the nineties, reinterprets her sculptural works through the use of the body in performances in front of the camera. Here, she works repeatedly with symbols, images, places and narratives as therapeutic representations of the wounds caused by her historical, personal and cultural condition. Phoenician Sand Dance draws its title from the almost constant presence of the sand and sea. The book features and analyses the works exhibited in the Capella MACBA from 21 November 2014 to 15 February 2015. Landau’s video sculptures, where people and objects interact, condense a time in which the actions seem to have no beginning or end. They speak in a hypnotic way of the lack of progress and improvement; they describe the needs of the other, whether in play, survival or conflict.

Osvaldo Lamborghini (Buenos Aires, 1940; Barcelona, 1985) is one of the most unique and fascinating writers of contemporary Argentinean literature. During his lifetime he only published three books – El fiord (1969), Sebregondi retrocede (1973) and Poemas (1980) – and, posthumously, Novelas y cuentos (1988), Tadeys (incomplete, 1994) and Teatro proletario de cámara (Proletarian Chamber Theatre, 2008). However, he has already achieved the status of cult author, joining the equally reductive category of myth.

The biography of Lamborghini certainly fulfils almost all the rigours of the accursed poets, while his career refutes any attempt at classification. However, there is an aspect to Lamborghini’s output – consisting of his work with photographic collages, books with intervened images and texts, as well as posters and drawings – that awaits further investigation. This catalogue presents a selection of this material, drawn from his personal archive and never previously shown in public.

Following the same pedagogic spirit as earlier issues, volume six of the Desacuerdos series looks at the art and education binomial. It starts off with interviews with René Schérer and Jacques Rancière – two key authors in relation to changing approaches to education – and then goes on to explore the peculiarities of the Spanish context and the transformations that came about as a result of Franco’s regime. It thus gradually sheds light on the debates, strengths and weaknesses of education in relation to contemporary art in Spain.