“For some time we have been around the idea of painting a large mural in the neighborhood of La Mina, to give color to the streets and visibility to the community.”

Zosen grew up in Sant Adrià del Besós and there he started making his first graffiti pieces and murals. Over the years he managed to travel the world and leave his mark on different cities in North and South America, Europe and Asia. Many of these murals in collaboration with the Japanese artist Mina Hamada, which upon arriving in Barcelona in 2009, caught the attention of a neighborhood with its name and from that point that idea began to be forged.

In the summer of 2018 Zosen and Mina began to do workshops with some collectives that work with young people from the neighborhood to bring them their mural art and the proposal to create a participative mural with the ideas of all. The first workshop was held at the Casal Infantil Association of La Mina, where the children painted their ideas and dreams of how they imagined La Mina of the future. In the autumn, the workshops with the Salesians Sant Jordi entities (Grupo Unión) and the Casal dels Infants were continued. The workshops involved young people of different nationalities and cultures, who are neighbors of La Mina and Besòs and demonstrate the multicultural variety of the neighborhood.  The artists Zosen and Mina collected the ideas drawn and painted by all the participants of the workshops, and from there they began to create the proposal for the mural sketch.

The neighborhood was cultural diversity is present, flamenco, the sea and the planets that are part of the names of the streets and make up the galaxy of La Mina.

The children participating in the workshops when asked what they wanted or how they imagined their neighborhood of the future coincided in values such as: coexistence,  respect between different cultures, give visibility within society to people living in the neighborhood, peace, nature, green spaces, friendship, love, family and culture.

Zosen and Mina painted this mural during the month of January of 2019 in the neighbors building of Estrellas Street in front of the Municipal Sports court and the Gypsy Cultural Center; creating the first large format mural in La Mina and now can be seen from several points such as the Ronda del Litoral, the suburban train or walking from the street.

 

This project has been possible thanks to the collaboration between the City Council of Sant Adrià del Besós, the association El Generador, the collectives that work with the youth of the neighborhood and the artists Zosen and Mina Hamada.

 

In appreciation for:

Associació Casal Infantil de La Mina

Salesians Sant Jordi (Grupo Unión)

Casal dels Infants

Centro Cultural Gitano

Profesora Chuchu

Rafael Perona

Manuel Fernández

Karulo Abellán

Sra. Carmen

Juan Carlos Ramos

 

Direction: Germán Rigol

Original music: Falete Perona

Sound and interviews: Germán Rigol y Zosen

Edition and photography: Germán Rigol

According to French philosopher Michel Foucault, heterotopias are worlds within worlds, mirroring yet disturbing what is outside. They are spaces that are somehow transgressive, or ‘other’: intense, contradictory, or transforming. Foucault provides examples: ships, cemeteries, prisons, gardens of antiquity, fairs, Turkish baths, and many more.

Within the Academy of Fine Arts of Venice offers a forty-meter-long exhibition space, where Peter Halley has created a sequence of varyingly thematized rooms that progress to a final vaulted sanctum. This videogame-like labyrinth unfolds from room to room, combining classical architectural elements such as fluted columns, cenotaphs, and a broken pediment, with wall-size digital prints, arrays of color-changing LEDs, and a large-scale laser-cut sculpture.

To further enrich the language of this narrative, Halley invited American artists Lauren Clay, R.M. Fisher, and Andrew Kuo to contribute to the installation. Working with digitally printed wall-to-wall murals, Lauren Clay and Andrew Kuo created separate chambers realizing their own individual visions. R.M. Fischer produced the totemic illuminated sculpture in the sanctum that culminates the installation. Additionally, Paris-based writer Elena Sorokina has contributed the original walls texts.

The exhibition Hurricane/Time/Image reroutes a new line of understanding around Francis Ruyter’s painting practice. Curated by Mohammad Salemy, it will consist of drawings, paintings and objects, dated from 1990–94 and 2015–19 as well as new display treatments including projections and reproductions of the archival source material. The project takes place at FRANZ JOSEFS KAI 3, an exhibition space programmed parallel to the Angewandte Innovation Lab, a program of the University of the Applied Arts in Vienna Austria. The project was inaugurated 10 April until 9 May.

Hurricane/Time/Image is meant to disrupt narratives of artistic, aesthetic and career developments as well as social conditions surrounding the production of art and subjectivity specific to Ruyter. It suggests that the chaotic force of technology is always at work throughout an artist’s oeuvre, rearranging the relationship of past, present and future into new constellations. Rather than using the recent works to make a new sense out of Ruyter’s earlier practice, it brings to light embedded concerns, themes and motifs which have been resonating in the artist’s practice since the early stages of his career.

Since 2009, Ruyter has been focusing his work on photographs he has found in the digital archive at the Library of Congress of Unated States, using the search keyword “machine”. This particular filtering of the archive highlights how the artist’s thoughts on machines have informed his oeuvre since his drawings and paintings from the early 1990s. While the older works signal the transformation of the analog media to digital and the persistence of older technologies of presentation and modeling embedded in digital technologies. On the other hand the newer works go even further by investigating the abstract, geometric and, essentially, inhuman essence of representation. The exhibition showcases Ruyter’s visionary outlook towards the connections between art and media technologies, insisting on the primary role of painting in meditating their similarities and differences.

The exhibition’s abstract indexing of the analog, the digital and the algorithmic, parallels an equally important transformation in the artist’s own life. Starting in 2016, Ruyter began a gender transition. In this respect, Ruyter’s work, past and present, can be considered a plea to set aside the question of human identity in order to understand the storm-like qualities of gender. Approached from this angle, the strongest thread binding the artist’s earlier works to his latest practice is the struggle to sequester the “natural” appearances of analog representation, from its inhuman, cybernetic reality. The exhibition deemphasizes human experience in favor of chaotic and cosmic shifts which are at the heart of the evolution of language, reason, and logic amongst animals, humans and machines alike.

Mohammad Salemy is a Berlin-based artist, critic and curator from Canada. He holds an MA in critical curatorial studies from the University of British Columbia. He has shown his works in Ashkal Alwan’s Home Works 7 (Beirut, 2015), Witte de With (Rotterdam, 2015) and Robot Love (Eindhoven, 2018). His writings have been published in e-flux journal, Flash Art, Third Rail, and Brooklyn Rail, Ocula and Spike. He has curated exhibitions at Tranzit Display (2016) in Prague. Salemy’s curatorial experiment “For Machine Use Only” was included in the 11th edition of Gwangju Biennale (2016). In 2018, Salemy cocurated Sofia Queer Forum with Patrick Schabus at the Sofia City Art Gallery’s Vaska Emanouilova branch.

 

The artist is presenting in the framework of the XIII edition of the Havana Biennial, Cuba. Her magnificent installation entitled “Natural Mechanics” (from April 12 to May 12).

 

Glenda León transforms small details into powerful questions about our existences. Her practice touches upon the sensible qualities of human life by focusing on seemingly minor things, which she turns into forceful echo chambers of the issues of our time. Through sensuous metaphors, the artist opens empathic fissures in our everyday experience, examining the relationships between the cosmos and all living beings.

Mecánica Natural articulates Glenda’s artistic strategy in a quintessential way, as it embodies a far- reaching vision in apparently petty objects. In the installation, the trees materialize as a familiar encounter, recurring multiple times across the space. Such familiarity makes the work appear open  to immediate reading, only then to unfold a thought-provoking maze of cross-references. On closer inspection, it becomes clear that we are not always gazing at the same kind of tree. This ancestral symbol of ecological life doubles here as victim and executioner: in a perplexing duality, we see one slashing a life-size car while the others lie as silent freeways for a myriad of miniature vehicles.

As our senses navigate this apocalyptic enigma, we become aware of the mechanics of our comprehension. By shifting between macro- and micro-scale, the artist has induced a glitch in our expectations, allowing us to observe the pre-constructed forms of interpretation that guide our thinking.

Here exposed is the tension between the potency of natural occurrences—the hurricanes, for instance, so familiar to Cuba— and humans’ constructed idea of nature. This friction, inherent in the title of the installation, opens a wound: if mechanics is an expression of human ingenuity and consequential¬¬ity, how can this coexist with nature and its alleged unpredictability? Are our constructed epistemologies of nature adequate to establish a well-articulated relationship with it?

The dead trees at the center of the installation guide the eye through their sumptuous curves. During this process, more questions arise: where are the toy-sized cars heading, like disciplined ants advancing in an orderly manner into the void? Is it the same direction in which we, as human societies, are rushing?

Ants thrive in eusocial communities with collective rules that shape their relationships with other living beings. By learning how to beneficially coexist with their environment, they develop vital collaborations with other forms of life. At the heart of this stands what Andean Indigenous communities nurture as vincularidad: the awareness that all living things are interconnected, that one’s well-being is deeply related to that of others. It is a form of ecological empathy crucial to all biotic systems.

Mecánica Natural is a memento of such interconnectedness, which in turn is central to Glenda León’s practice at large. It manifests in artworks such as Cada Respiro (2003), a video piece in which the gentle and simple act of breathing synchronizes the artist and the viewer with the universe, or Las Formas del Instante (2001), a photographic series where expended, imperfect soap bars stand as fragile monuments to the fleeting moments of everyday life.

While speaking of planetary ecology, Mecánica Natural also articulates an in-situ relationship with  the space in which it is presented, evoking the history of Nave Línea y 18, a tramway deposit fallen into disuse as transport on wheels gained prominence. Ultimately, the installation materializes the logic of ecological exploitation rooted at the center of our petro-neoliberalist societies. The wreckage is in front of us. But it is simply the mirror of our flawed conception of nature.

Ilaria Conti