Presentation of 'Amikejo', published by Mousse Publishing in collaboration with MUSAC and edited by Latitudes.

Tuesday 22 May, 20h at Múltiplos (c/ Lleó 6, 08001 Barcelona)

Presentation by Fermín Jiménez Landa, participating artist, and Latitudes, curators and editors of 'Amikejo'

The 216-page publication concludes the 2011 exhibition cycle 'Amikejo', which included exhibitions by Pennacchio Argentato; Iratxe Jaio & Klaas van Gorkum; Uqbar (Irene Kopelman & Mariana Castillo Deball and Fermín Jiménez Landa & Lee Welch at the Laboratorio 987, the project space of the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León (MUSAC).

The volume includes texts on each exhibition by the exhibition curators Latitudes, reprinted texts by Giorgio Agamben ('Notes on Gesture', 1996) and Georges Perec (excerpts from "Species of Spaces and Other Pieces Gesture", 1974), installation views, biographies of the participating artists, as well as specially-commissioned essays by scientists and academics:

Peter Osborne (Professor of Modern European Philosophy and Director of the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University London) text "‘Fragments of the future’: Notes on project space" centres on the idea of ‘project space’ as a peculiar one insofar as it characterizes a type of space wholly by its appropriateness for a particular kind of temporalization: the temporalization of the project. What is the distinctive spatialization corresponding to this? And how is it affected by the specifically artistic coding of a project?; 

Ryszard Żelichowski (Professor and Director for Scientific Research at the Institute of Political Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences) text "Neutral Moresnet and Amikejo – The Forgotten Children of the Congress of Vienna" offers an overview of how Neutral Moresnet (the state 'renamed' Amikejo in 1908) came into existence; 

Theo Beckers (Former Professor of Leisure Studies at Tilburg University and currently faculty member of the Tilburg Sustainability Center and Visiting Professor of the Chinese Academy of Sciences) text "Free time. The rise and fall of a social project" traces western society’s relation to work and time, from Seneca the Younger, through the rise of the factory and Frederick Winslow Taylor's 'The Principles of Scientific Management' (1911), to today's blurring of labour and leisure;

Menno Schilthuizen (Research scientist at NCB Naturalis, an endowed chair for Insect Biodiversity at the University of Groningen and an Associate Professor at Leiden University) text "On Mirror Images in Nature: How Identical Forms Can Be Completely Different" reflects on Uqbar's exhibition centered on chirality: on how in asymmetric animals and plants, sometimes both mirror-image forms exist side by side, but sometimes only one exists, the other being "forbidden"; 

Title: 'Amikejo'
Edited by: Latitudes
Publisher: Mousse Publishing in collaboration with MUSAC
Year: 2012
Format: 22.5 x 15.5cm, 216 pp, hardcover
Language: English/Spanish
Distributed by: Mousse Publishing
ISBN: 9788896501832
Price: 26 Euros

The publication will be available during the presentation. Múltiplos is an independent bookstore that specialises in artists publications.

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION CYCLE 'AMIKEJO'

Amikejo was a series of four exhibitions curated by Latitudes throughout 2011 at the Laboratorio 987 in MUSAC. The series was structured around relational and spatial twinning and presented the work of four collaborative couples, involving various modes of binomial friendships – couples in life, dedicated duos, intermittent work partners, as well as new allies: Pennacchio Argentato (29 January–3 April); Iratxe Jaio & Klaas van Gorkum (9 April–12 June); Uqbar (Irene Kopelman & Mariana Castillo Deball) (25 June–11 September) and Fermín Jiménez Landa & Lee Welch (24 September–15 January 2012).

Amikejo was an anomalous in-between state which never entirely existed, founded on a desire to foster more effective international communication through the synthetic language Esperanto – Amikejo menas 'place of great friendship' in Esperanto. This episode-place between pragmatic and conceptual borders of cartography, language, nationhood, and subjectivity, was entreated as a twin site to Laboratorio 987 and lent its name and symbolic implications to the exhibition series.