Longitudes

Longitudes cuts across Latitudes’ projects and research with news, updates, and reportage.

“Thinking with” geology at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity


Greetings from the Banff Centre in the Canadian Rockies!

For the next four weeks, Latitudes will be Lead Faculty of the residency programme "Geologic Time" organised by the Banff International Curatorial Institute (BICI) at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity

Curators, artists and writers Justy Phillips & Margaret Woodward (A Published Event) based in Hobart; Sema Bekirovic, based in Amsterdam; Caitlin Chaisson based in Vancouver; Becky Forsythe, based in Reykjavik; Chloe Hodge, based in London; Shane Krepakevich, based in Toronto; Caroline Loewen, based in Calgary; Penelope Smart, based in St. John's, Newfoundland; and Camila Sposati, based in Sao Paulo, are here for a month to discuss geological formations and timescales, while speculating about a more expansive and longer-term view of art, exhibitions, and their institutions. 

Through fieldwork, seminars, and independent study, 'Geologic Time' we will be thinking with geology as a potential way to consider non-conventional, deep-time perspectives on curating, exhibition making, programming, and fieldwork within contemporary art.


Programme on Banff's website.

On September 12, 4 pm, Latitudes will give a lecture presenting their practice at the Jeanne & Peter Lougheed Building 204. Everyone is welcome!

"Geologic Time" is a thematic residency programme of the Banff International Curatorial Institute (BICI), Visual + Digital Arts organised by the Banff Centre for Art and Creativity in Alberta, Canada. Within the framework of the residency, Latitudes curated the group exhibition "4.543 billion. The matter of matter" at the CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux, France, on view until January 7, 2018.  


Entrance to one of the two wings of the exhibition "4.543 billion. The matter of matter" at the CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux, France, on view until January 7, 2018. Photo: Latitudes / RK.

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Cover Story—September 2017: Dark disruption: David Mutiloa’s "Synthesis"

Photo: Roberto Ruiz. Cortesía: David Mutiloa.


The September 2017 Monthly Cover Story "Dark disruption: David Mutiloa’s "Synthesis" is now up on www.lttds.org – after this month it will be archived here.

"Human worker-performers move sluggishly around a modular platform in a permanently gloomy La Capella; they are employed to apparently do nothing much at all, embodying an uncanny kind of work–life balance. It’s the gig economy, stupid. David Mutiloa’s melancholy Barcelona exhibition Synthesis shadows how changes in the modern office workplace have heeded novel notions of management and business efficiency, abiding by a labour market that progressively favours flexibility and adaptability." Continue reading 

Cover Stories' are published on a monthly basis on Latitudes' homepage and feature past, present or forthcoming projects, research, writing, artworks, exhibitions, films, objects or field trips related to our curatorial activities. 

 Photo: Pep Herrero / La Capella/ Barcelona Producció 2017.

Below the text written by Latitudes, mentors of the project:

"In the modern office workplace, spatial design and brand communication have evolved in step with novel notions of management, business efficiency and a labour market that progressively favours flexibility and adaptability. The typical Western office worker – their physiology as well as their psychology – has also been overhauled. Twentieth-century time-and-motion studies first standardised and rationalised the salaried worker’s time and space. And today the twenty-first-century worker is increasingly a co-working independent contractor who navigates an entirely dissolved working-week structure, continuous competitive ‘disruption’ and the so-called ‘gig economy’. 

Using sculpture, video projections and human presence, David Mutiloa’s exhibition Synthesis proposes that this condition has led to the appearance of pharmacologically managed depression, “an illness of responsibility”. It has also induced a terrible form of boredom – the spectre of both the boundless outsourcing of undesirable labour to the developing world, and automation leading to a world without work. Synthesis shadows these ideas through two video projections, live action by human worker-performers and the display of a series of sculptures made from steel, silicon, resin, computer components, pharmaceutical drugs and other materials. These sculptures derive from human anatomy and iconic industrial design forms conceived for the office environment from the 1960s to the 1990s. These decades saw a transition from the typewriter to the personal computer, and from rooms with regimented rows of desks to spaces with customisable cubicles, ‘neighbourhoods’ and flexible work ‘nests’. Arranged on and around a modular platform like industrial still lifes, the sculptural elements are sometimes juxtaposed with office-systems brochures. They often represent variations based on an individual element that Mutiloa has abstracted, augmented or made into its inverse form through moulding and casting – furniture, desk accessories and structural systems, for example, that were designed with both high style and ergonomics in mind. Prominent among the sculptural forms are those based on the classic Pop-era Valentine typewriter, first produced in 1969 for the Italian brand Olivetti. Large metal forms are derived from wall connectors from the revolutionary Action Office systems, introduced by the Herman Miller company in the 1960s. Modular ‘workstations’ for the ‘human performer’ were comprised of angled and movable fabric-wrapped walls, which an office worker could supposedly arrange to create his or her own ideal work space. Other sculptures adopt the form of articulated arms with support for screens or are taken from the Aeron chair, also produced by Herman Miller. 


 Photo: Pep Herrero / La Capella/ Barcelona Producció 2017.

The latter, a seat with exaggerated lumbar support, become so popular with Web startup companies in the late 1990s that it was nicknamed the ‘Dot-Com Throne’. Other forms recall the frame of the 543 Broadway chair, and a metal grid evokes the Shopping Cart desk; both of the earlier pieces were designed by Gaetano Pesce in the 1990s for the notoriously open-plan, multicoloured offices of the advertising agency TBWA/Chiat/Day New York. A large suspended video projection will present a series of highly composed shots of the installation itself, and will be filmed and edited during the exhibition and later inserted into the composition as if following a just-in-time production methodology. The second video projection of Synthesis also gives the whole exhibition space its uncanny soundtrack – a relentless, evolving, aural collage that seems to evoke the hum of a post-industrial factory floor, or the placeless drone of the knowledge economy. The screen shows a virtual camera moving over and around a spatial environment that Mutiloa derived from the 1970s office system produced by Olivetti, from which the exhibition also takes its title. Continuously generated from a 3D digital model, the visualisation comprises a looped animation that is screened throughout the exhibition. Human work-performers move listlessly around the exhibition; they are employed by Mutiloa’s exhibition, yet are apparently doing nothing at all. In a widely cited study published in 2013, experts predicted that almost half of the jobs in the US were at risk of being automated in the next two decades.  Driverless technology, cheap computers, deep learning and big data are leading to increasingly sophisticated tasks being done by ever-smarter machines across a whole range of sectors – from translation to logistics, but especially in office and administrative work. A pessimist would argue that wherever office work can be broken down into a series of routine tasks, no job is safe. If new technologies are not yet replacing workers, they may
nevertheless be putting them under increased surveillance in order to monitor their activity and productivity minute by minute.  


As automation rises, does the value of the tasks that can be done only by humans therefore increase? What is at stake when affective faculties such as creativity – the supposed domain of the artist – are more than ever part of a productive and evaluative logic? Does the notion that one must project one’s own personal brand through the splintered attention spans of social media point to a future marked by a total synthesis of individual fulfilment, freelancers’ anxiety and corporate competitiveness for all?
 

— Latitudes
 

[1] http://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/downloads/academic/The_Future_of_Employment.
 

Photo: Pep Herrero / La Capella/ Barcelona Producció 2017. 

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Latitudes' "out of office" 2016–2017 season

 Downtime for physical and mental "reparations" begins. 
Photos: Latitudes (except where noted otherwise).

It's the end of the 2016–17 season, at last. Following a Latitudes' tradition we mark the summer downtime with an "out of office" post (see the 2008-9, 2009-10, 2010-11, 2011-12, 2012–13, 2013–14, 2014–15, 2015–16 ones) with a series of "behind the scenes" and "making of" moments from the year gone by. Here are some glimpses of the past season, from September 2016 to July 2017.

We'll be back in September 2017, when we'll be leading a residency programme at Banff Centre in the Canadian Rockies!

 
15 September
2016: The 2016–17 season started with glitter and sparkle as Antoni Hervàs' "The Mystery of Caviria" exhibition opened in La Capella. The eight chapters of his complex scenario revolved around the legend of Jason and the Argonauts’ expedition in search of the Golden Fleece. The spectacular scenography took as its point of origin the section of the tale in which the expedition led by Jason stops for a few months in Lemnos, the island of fire, in the northern part of the Aegean Sea. Taking this fragment, Hervàs explored the transformist and genre-bending possibilities of drawing, a medium that enabled him to unite two mythologies: the Cabeirian rites of Classical Greece and figures from Barcelona’s dwindling cabaret scene. Photos of the exhibition here.

Toni's exhibition was the focus of the September and November Cover Story series on our home page, archived here.



Photos above: Latitudes and Toni Hervàs.

18 September 2016: More sparkle awaited on the former site of the Copacabana club and nearby frontón court. The former is currently a parking lot used by the Department of Culture of the Catalan Government. The lone castanets master Juan de la Cruz el Rosillo interpreted a moving repertoire of popular Spanish coplas. For the second part of the event, the audience walked a few meters up Las Ramblas towards the frontón, where Gerard López, Senior Spanish Champion in male rhythmic gymnastics, interpreted newly-commissioned choreography with specially-produced music by Norman Bambi, while wearing a Hervàs-designed garment (exhibited as part of his exhibition).


20 September 2016: Just as we are catching our breath from the memorable exhibition opening and the first event related to Toni's exhibition, street banners popped up around the city announcing the second Barcelona Gallery Weekend.


26–28 September 2016: Installation of "Composiciones" projects, five site-specific commissions for the second iteration of the Barcelona Gallery Weekend. Three days of intense preparations! Curated by Latitudes for the second time (see 2015 edition), the project further explored Barcelona as a rich fabric of the historic and the contemporary, the unfamiliar and the conspicuous.

 Above and below: Lola Lasurt at the Biblioteca Pública Arús. 
(Above) Lúa and Mariana admiring the serendipitous finding of "El espejo equivocado" painting at the Club Billar Barcelona. An almost spooky, yet incredibly fitting find. 

(Above) With Rafel Bianchi and Gina Giménez unpacking Gina's works and spreading them around the former textile factory Can Trinxet, L’Hospitalet de Llobregat. 

Silkscreened outfits for the runners finally ready to be worn throughout the weekend. Photos: Robert Llimós.

Runners pass by Galeria dels Àngels. Photo: Gabriela Moragas.
 Testing the resistance of a pair of Levi's jeans in preparation for Wilfredo Prieto "Pantalones Rotos" at the Mounted Unit of the Barcelona City Police.


29 September–2 October 2016: Opening and guided visits around the five "Composiciones" interventions by Lúa Coderch (at the Club Billar Barcelona); Regina Giménez (at the former textile factory Can Trinxet, L’Hospitalet de Llobregat); Lola Lasurt (at the Biblioteca Pública Arús); Robert Llimós (connecting all the participating galleries) and Wilfredo Prieto (at the Mounted Unit of the Barcelona City Police) in unique sites across the neighbourhoods of the city. Their projects offered moments of intermission, intimacy and bewilderment throughout the weekend, highlighting some lesser-known aspects of the city’s cultural heritage and municipal life.

Archive of social networks posts. Photographs here.

Guided tour by Lúa Coderch in her intervention at the Club Billar Barcelona.

Guided tour by Gina Giménez to ARCOwalks group in Can Trinxet. 

 Interviewed for the radio at the Mounted Unit of the Barcelona City Police.

 
 TV presenter Josep Paris modelled Robert Llimós' 1972 updated runners design during the weekly cultural TV programme Àrtic. Photo: Àrtic.

 Double spread on "Composiciones" in the cultural supplement "Tendències" by the national newspaper El Mundo. Photo: Vanessa Graell.

26 October 2016: Launch of Rasmus Nilausen book "Soups & Symptoms" at Múltiplos, which includes an essay by Max Andrews. For the event, Rasmus and Max served up a carrot soup (potage crécy) and requested questions from friends, family and collaborators which would be accepted as long as they fitted onto Jacob's Cream cracker.

The catalogue was produced thanks to the funding from Premi Art Nou 2015, Art Barcelona, Associació de Galeries d’Art Contemporani in collaboration with the Institut de Cultura de Barcelona, García Galeria (Madrid) and Estrany de la Mota (Barcelona). It can be purchased in La Central.

Max and Rasmus prepare the carrots for a large pot of Potage Crécy, questions are written on Jacob's Cream crackers (that will later accompany the soup) and book launch at Múltiplos.


3 November 2016: Runway show at La Capella with some costumes from the 1980s and 90s designed by actor and impresario Victor Guerrero. Part of the activities programmed on the occasion of the exhibition.

Photos: Latitudes.

8 November 2016: Mariana Cánepa Luna's review on Ana Jotta's exhibition published on art-agenda, focused on "her ongoing series 'Notas de rodapé' [Footnotes] [which] provide a key to understanding the semantic complexity of her work. It comprises a selection of the eclectic bits and pieces which Jotta has gathered for decades and that coexist in her studio alongside works that she has fabricated." Continue reading


18–20 November 2016: Attended the CIMAM 2016 Annual Conference hosted in several venues in Barcelona, and hosted by the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) and CaixaForum, focusing on ‘The Museum and its Responsibilities’.

Mariana holding the CIMAM 2016 Annual Conference programme.
CIMAM 2016 Annual Conference speakers and delegates at the Fundació Tàpies, Barcelona. Photo: CIMAM.
 Selfie from Museum Nacional d'Art de Catalunya with Portuguese curator Miguel Amado.

23-24 November 2016: Latitudes participated in a two-day summit "You are such a curator!" organised by the Curatorial Programme of De Appel, Amsterdam. With contributions by Mira Asriningtyas, Lucrezia Calabro Visconti, Renata Cervetto, Mateo Chacon-Pino, Galerie (Adriano Wilfert Jensen and Simon Asencio), Natasha Hoare, Kati Ilves, Prem Krishnamurthy, Inga Lace, Latitudes (Max Andrews and Mariana Cánepa Luna), Ariane Loze, Shona Mei Findlay, Fadwa Naamna, Kim Nguyen, Emma Ines Panza, Aneta Rostkowska and Kuba Woynarowski, Chris Sharp, Niels Van Tomme, Huib Haye van der Werf, and others. We took the opportunity to extend our stay on the occasion of the Amsterdam Art Weekend 2016, which included the opening of Jordan Wolfson's at the Stedelijk and the Open Studios at the Rijksakademie.

Latitudes' presentation "Following the Holy Greyhound" reflected "on the disinterment of a sculpture from 1991 – part of an exhibition by the Venezuelan artist José Antonio Hernández-Díez curated by Latitudes at MACBA, Barcelona, earlier this year – and their approach to a group exhibition in preparation for CAPC Musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux in Summer 2017.  

→ Full report here.

  Photos: Carina Erdmann/De Appel.

November-December 2016: Two of Latitudes' projects ("Composiciones" commissions for the Barcelona Gallery Weekend and "El misterio de Caviria" by Antoni Hervàs) are shortlisted for the best exhibition of the year by the TV culture programme Tria33. The audience casts their votes online until January. Antoni Hervàs won with 40% of the audience votes. "Composiciones" ends in the third position with 17% of the votes.



January 2017: Issue of frieze magazines includes Max Andrews' "Salon Selectives" text in the Opinion section, discussing "How open are open calls?":

"While competition organizers typically trumpet the volume and cosmopolitanism of applications received an ebullient endorsement, others may rue the sheer amount of collectively wasted effort made by the also-rans. (In Spain, Bilbao-based studio Taller de Casquería estimated that the hours involved in the 1,715 submissions received for the Guggenheim Helsinki open call for designs represented over €18 million worth of speculative work.) In Gary Hustwit’s 2011 documentary film, Urbanized, Rem Koolhaas stated that such competitions were a ‘complete drain of intelligence’, inviting mass creative thinking with the guarantee that the vast majority of it will be discarded. This addiction in the field of architecture appears to be gaining traction in contemporary art as a means not only of generating exhibitions but of programming institutions."

The text was the January Cover Story on our website.


25 January 2017: Presentation of Antoni Hervàs' La Capella publication at the Antic Teatre in the background of one of his scenographic drawings dedicated to Gilda Love (this was the second time this had been displayed in this space, following the recording in May last year of Gilda performing, a video later included in the exhibition). The evening was followed by the "Desplume" monthly cabaret show.




16 February 2017: A moving evening seeing Toni Hervàs receive the Premi Ciutat de Barcelona for visual arts exhibition of the year at the Sala de Consell de Cent in the Barcelona City Hall. The jury recognised "the artist's research in linking Greek mythology with the Barcelona cabaret scene from the 1960s–80s and for the recuperation of its vitality."

Toni receiving the award from Barcelona mayor Ada Colau. Photos: Latitudes.

1 March 2017: Launch of the fourth 'Incidents (of Travel)' episode, in which Galician curator Pedro de Llano met Lisboeta artist Luisa Cunha in Lisbon. Their offline day took place in early December and went through key locations in the artist's life – from Ar.Co, the School of Visual Arts in Almada where she enrolled at age thirty-seven, to the Largo da Academia de Belas Artes in Chiado, where she conceived a public project that never materialised. 

Project website.
Above: captures from the project website.

2 March 2017: Opening of Joana Hurtado Matheu's "Nostalgic Dissidence" exhibition mentored by Latitudes as part of the Barcelona Producció 2016 season. Repairs and conservation work in the Baroque cupola had delayed the opening by three months, so we were all pleased the day finally arrived. 

  Working on the exhibition layout.

Francesco Arena's "Mare della tranquillità" (2013) is activated by a performer. "An old wooden table, taken from the family dining room, has been cut into four pieces to form the corners of a much bigger new table. Enlarged with inserts of metal, its size evokes the table on which, on May 7, 1945, the signing of the German surrender ended World War II in Europe. The work is the support for a participative action which consists of walking back and forth on the five-metre table a total of 155 km, the length of the Berlin Wall. Every day during the two months of the exhibition someone will get up on the table and, wearing shoes that have never touched the ground and holding a tally counter, walk from one end to the other 596 times." (exhibition wall label by the curator)

Photos: Pep Herrero/La Capella and Marc Llibre Roig.

January 2017: The artist Alexandra Navratil pots an image of the work she will present in the forthcoming exhibition "4.543 billion" due to open June 29 at the CAPC musée in Bordeaux.



22–24 March 2017: Third trip to Bordeaux. Packed with meetings. Three months to go to the opening of "4.543 billion" exhibition. In two weeks deadline to submit the texts for the gallery guide. 

 Running through each work through our sketch up exhibition rendering with the curatorial, collections, registrar, press and installation teams.

23 March 2017: Meanwhile in Barcelona, Toni Hervàs wins yet another award – for the best exhibition of the year, and given by the Catalan Association of Art Critics. 

Hervàs during the award ceremony. Photo: ACCA.

April 2017: A bit of a website refresh – these things are so darn tedious yet they feel so good when they are done and dusted!

26 April 2017: Fifth 'Incidents (of Travel)' episode online narrating the encounter between curator Simon Soon and artist Chi Too. Their offline day took place in April 2016, when they visited the Malaysian state of Terengganu, where chi spent some time in 2013, surrounded by "men and women who work(ed) multiple jobs as a fishermen, housebuilders, boat builders, farmers, coconut pickers, food producers, and everything else that matters."

'Incidents (of Travel)' is a chartered day-long itinerary as an alternative to the standard studio-visit, inviting an extended conversation between a curator and an artist. Previous destinations have included Chicago, US; Jinja, Uganda; Suzhou, China; and Lisbon, Portugal. Produced by Kadist; photographs and video by Awang Ketut; site built by The Present Group.



Above: captures from the project website.

3 May 2017: Conversation with Korean-born, Berlin-based artist Haegue Yang at the Fundació Tàpies, Barcelona. The evening discussion analysed Yang's practice from the perspective of historical development and cyclic fluctuations, asked, as phrased by sociologist and economist Giovanni Arrighi – what is accumulative, what is cyclical, what is new? 

Photos: Fundació Han Nefkens.

May 2017: After three intense weeks of the jury process, eighteen selected projects of Barcelona Producció 2017 grant scheme are announced. We begin the year-long mentoring process of three projects out of the seventeen selected projects this year as part of the Barcelona Producció 2017 production grants. David Mutiloa's SYNTHESIS (18 July–25 September 2017) is first to occupy La Capella's 15th-century exhibition space. The other two projects mentored by Latitudes are a publication by Anna Moreno and an exhibition "Artengo2000" at the small exhibition space by Camille Orny and Magda Vaz.

 Jury searching for a solid wifi spot to watch video documentation sent by an applicant.

12 June 2017, in Basel: Max Andrews of Latitudes contributed the essay "C-H-R-I-S-T-O-P-H-E-R-K-N-O-W-L-E-S. SO LISTEN UP" about the spoken-word works, "typings", poetry and paintings of Christopher Knowles. The publication is made to accompany his solo presentation in the stand of NoguerasBlanchard gallery at Liste art fair in Basel. The exquisite short-run publication is designed and printed by Barcelona-based independent publishers and Riso printers Do The Print. Read on.

Photos: Latitudes
Photo via @gal_NB


12 June, in Barcelona: Following the announcement of the awardees of the 2017–18 season of Barcelona Producció production grants, we visit David Mutiloa's temporary studio in Hangar. Mutiloa is the first artist to open the season and his exhibition "SYNTHESIS" will take place in the central nave of La Capella from July 18. 

"Using sculpture, video projections and human presence, David Mutiloa’s exhibition Synthesis proposes that this condition has led to the appearance of pharmacologically managed depression, “an illness of responsibility”. It has also induced a terrible form of boredom – the spectre of both the boundless outsourcing of undesirable labour to the developing world and automation leading to a world without work. – Text from the gallery guide, written by Latitudes (pdf here). 

Short video of the exhibition.

 Photos: Latitudes
 
19 June–2 July: We're off to Bordeaux for the installation and opening of "4.543 billion. The matter of matter" exhibition in ten days. After two years of preparation, it's a truly exciting moment to see it all coming together.  

→ Press release here
Archive of social media posts

Lucy Skaer's 26 coal and resin sculptures after Brancusi's 26 different editions of "Bird in Space".
Deciding the layout of Félix Arnaudin's incredible suite of photographs kindly lent by the Musée d'Aquitaine Bordeaux.
Photovoltaic panels charging the batteries that power Nicholas Mangan's double video projection "Ancient Lights" (2015).
 Anne Garde's photos documenting Richard Serra's "Threats of Hell" (1990) production from Dillinger Hütter (Germany) to its exhibition at the CAPC nave, to its current location at a private collector home on the banks of the Garonne, where it changed its name to a happier "Hopes of Paradise".
 Part of the CAPC installation team having a coffee break enjoying Stéphane's awesome chocolate cake.
 Rayyane Tabet's mobile pieces arriving from Hamburg at the CAPC.
Registrar thick checklist file.
 François measuring Lara Almarcegui's works before placing them on the wall.
 Construction of the warehouse and jetty. Statements of works by engineer and architect Claude Deschamps.
 Christophe moving the 600kg rock by Hubert Duprat to the entrance.
 Pascal lighting the exhibition.
Christina Hemauer and Roman Keller stretching their new work "Untitled (Blue)" (2017), a work focused on indigo and colonial trade.
Christina Hemauer and Terence Gower listening to Pep Vidal explaining his sculpture work "19-metre tree cut in 7 equal volumes" (2015).
 One of the many guided visits for press, staff, friends of the museum during the opening days. Photo: Latitudes/RK.

11–14 July 2017: Installation of "SYNTHESIS" in La Capella. David Mutiloa's solo exhibition is the first of the 2017–18 season of Barcelona Producció. Opening on July 18, on view until September 25.

"In the modern office workplace, spatial design and brand communication have evolved in step with novel notions of management, business efficiency and a labour market that progressively favours flexibility and adaptability. The typical Western office worker – their physiology as well as their psychology – has also been overhauled. Twentieth-century time-and-motion studies first standardised and rationalised the salaried worker’s time and space. And today the twenty-first-century worker is increasingly a co-working independent contractor who navigates an entirely dissolved working-week structure, continuous competitive ‘disruption’ and the so-called ‘gig economy’." – Text by Latitudes from the exhibition sheet.

Scheme to help assemble the platform.
 Artist at work.


24–26 July 2017: Trip to Copenhagen to visit the impressive solo exhibition by John Kørner, "Altid Mange Problemer" at Kunsthal Charlottenborg, curated by Marie Nipper—the largest exhibition of his works to date. Max Andrews of Latitudes has been invited to contribute an essay for his forthcoming monograph published by Roulette Russe which is due to come out in November 2017. Max has previously written on John's work for his 2006 exhibition "Problems" at Victoria Miro Gallery in London. Our first visit to Copenhagen to see John's work was precisely the subject of our first blog post in September 2006!

Everything in Copenhagen seemed to have turned yellow – we knew John's love for the colour (first image below), but also Mark Leckey's exhibition at the x-room of the Statens Museum fur Kunst, seemed to have been inspired by "the Nyboder yellow" hue – the historic row house district of former Naval barracks in Copenhagen. 

(Above) Mark Leckey's exhibition ‘He Thrusts his fists against the posts but still insists he sees the ghosts’ recreated the ramps underneath the M53 motorway bridge in Ellesmere Port. 

Example of the "Nyboder yellow" hue – the historic row house district of former Naval barracks in Copenhagen. 

27 July 2017: Visit Ricardo Bofill's Walden7 and his nearby studio Taller de Arquitectura with Anna Moreno. Moreno was awarded a grant of Barcelona Producció 2017 to produce the publication "The Drowned Giant", a project focusing on a performance–happening staged by Bofill in 1970 to promote his unrealised architectural project La Ciudad en el Espacio in Moratalaz (Madrid). The publication will be launched in late November 2017 and is mentored by Latitudes. As part of Moreno's ongoing research on Bofill's practice, she has been living in Walden7 for the past month in order to carry research for a forthcoming commission for the Spring 2018 exhibition "Beehave" at the Fundació Miró. 


 (Above) Taller de Arquitectura studio. (Below) Walden7 in Sant Just Desvern (Barcelona).
Anna Moreno walking around Walden7 in Sant Just Desvern (Barcelona).

At the time of writing, we are frantically preparing for what will be an intense September. On September 10 we'll travel to Banff, where Latitudes will be Lead Faculty of the month-long residency programme "Geologic Time" at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity which will bring together 10 curators/artists/writers from around the world to discuss geological formations and timescales while speculating about a more expansive and longer-term view of art, exhibitions, and their institutions. We will be “thinking with” geology (beyond the depiction of the landscape) as a potential way to consider non-conventional, deep-time perspectives on curating, exhibition making, programming, and fieldwork within contemporary art. 

 Julius Schoppe (1795–1868), “Illustration of giant stone near the Rauenschen Mountains near Fürstenwalde”, c. 1827. Public domain – Wikimedia Commons.

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Cover Story – August 2017: Walden 7; or, life in Sant Just Desvern


The August 2017 Monthly Cover Story "Walden 7; or, life in Sant Just Desvern" is now up on www.lttds.org after this month it will be archived here

"Anna Moreno is waving from the roof of Walden 7, the vertiginous sixteen-storey apartment complex designed by architect Ricardo Bofill in 1975. Hola Anna, què fas!? Looming out of the greenery far below is another extraordinary building that we visited earlier in the day. La Fábrica is a former cement works whose silos and cavernous “cathedral” are home to Bofill’s Taller de Arquitectura. It is 29°C and the humidity is at 62% in Sant Just Desvern, west of Barcelona. Two rooftop swimming pools provide a refreshing respite. We don’t complain." Continue reading 

Cover Stories' are published on a monthly basis on Latitudes' homepage and feature past, present or forthcoming projects, research, writing, artworks, exhibitions, films, objects or field trips related to our curatorial activities. 

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Max Andrews essay on Christopher Knowles for NoguerasBlanchard at Liste 2017

 
Max Andrews of Latitudes contributed the essay "C-H-R-I-S-T-O-P-H-E-R-K-N-O-W-L-E-S. SO LISTEN UP" about the spoken-word works, "typings", poetry and paintings by Christopher Knowles. The publication was made to accompany his recent solo presentation in the stand of NoguerasBlanchard gallery at Liste art fair in Basel. 

Max reviewed Knowles’ exhibition at Gavin Brown's enterprise for frieze magazine back in October 2004, and his work "Untitled (Alert Paintings)" (2004) depicting the Department of Homeland Security’s Threat Advisory System, was the linchpin of the Latitudes-curated 2007 exhibition "Extraordinary Rendition" at NoguerasBlanchard.  

The exquisite short-run publication (500 copies) was designed and printed by Barcelona-based independent publishers and Riso printers Do The Print.


All photos: Latitudes.

Christopher Knowles was born in New York City, USA, in 1959. Lives and works in New York. He has taken part in several exhibitions, among which: 'In a Word', Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, USA, curated by Anthony Elms and Hilton Als (2015); 'Secret Codes', Galeria Luisa Strina, São Paulo (2014); 'The Sundance Kid is Beautiful', The Louvre Museum, Paris, France, 2013; 'Merci Mercy', 980 Madison Avenue, New York (2013); 'Ecstatic Alphabets/Heaps of Language', MoMA, New York (2012); 'En el primer cercle', Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona (2011); 'Poor. Old. Tired. Horse', Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (2009); 'Visions of the Frontier', curated by Robert Wilson, Institut Valencia d’Art Modern (2009); 'Glossolalia: Languages of Drawing', Museum of Modern Art, New York (2008); 'Get Lost: Artists Map Downtown New York', New Museum Project, New York (2007); 'Learn to Read', Tate Modern, London (2007); 'Extraordinary Rendition', NoguerasBlanchard, Barcelona (2007).

Knowles' is represented by NoguerasBlanchard, Barcelona / Madrid; Gavin Brown's enterprise, New York / Rome; and Office Baroque in Brussels.


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Cover Story – July 2017: "4.543 billion"


The July 2017 Monthly Cover Story "4.543 billion" is now up on www.lttds.org after July it will be archived here

"4.543 billion. The matter of matter recently opened at the CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux, and features the work of more than thirty artists. Curated by Latitudes, the exhibition looks at histories of art as fragments in geological time. The portentous mood of this gallery hinges on combustion and history violently formed through the fundamental reordering of the relations between humans and the rest of nature." Continue reading

Social media archive related to the exhibition.
Photo gallery of the exhibition.

Cover Stories' are published on a monthly basis on Latitudes' homepage and feature past, present or forthcoming projects, research, writing, artworks, exhibitions, films, objects or field trips related to our curatorial activities. 

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"Geologic Time" thematic residency programme at the Banff Centre for Art and Creativity in Alberta, Canada

Julius von Schoppe (1795–1868), Illustration of giant stone near the Rauenschen Mountains near Furstenwalde, 1827, Lithograph, von Tempeltey.

Between September 11 and October 6, 2017, ten artists, researchers, writers and curators from around the world will ponder geological formations and stratigraphy, minerals, and resource extraction to speculate about a more expansive, slower and longer-term view of art, exhibitions, and institutions. The spectacular Rocky Mountains will not only be the backdrop, but the active participants.

Through
fieldwork, seminars, and independent study, 'Geologic Time' participants will be “thinking with” geology (beyond the depiction of landscape) as a potential way to consider non-conventional, deep-time perspectives on curating, exhibition making, programming, and fieldwork within contemporary art. 

Lead faculty: Latitudes  
Guest Faculty: Sean Lynch

"Geologic Time" is a thematic residency programme of the Banff International Curatorial Institute, Visual + Digital Arts organised by the Banff Centre for Art and Creativity in Alberta, Canada. Within the framework of the residency Latitudes curated the group exhibition "4.543 billion. The matter of matter" at the CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux, France, on view until January 7, 2018.   


View of the Banff Centre campus. Photo: Latitudes.

RELATED CONTENT:

  • "4.543 billion. The matter of matter" in pictures.
  • Guest Faculty of the Thematic Residency 'Blueprint for Happiness' at The Banff Centre, Canada, 27 July–8 August 2015 16 July 2015
  • Cover Story – April 2017: Banff Geologic Time 3 April 2017
  • Cover Story December 2016: Ten years ago – Land, Art: A Cultural Ecology Handbook 5 December 2016 
  • Cover Story – May 2016: Material histories – spilling the beans at the CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux 10 May 2016.
  • Second research trip to Bordeaux 16 July 2016 
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Cover Story – June 2017: "Moth light—Absent Forms"


The June 2017 Monthly Cover Story ""Moth light—Absent Forms"" is now up on www.lttds.org after June it will be archived here

"The Latitudes-curated Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes & des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne opened at Meessen De Clercq, Brussels, in February 2011. More a series of five interlinked solo presentations than a conventional thematic group exhibition, it featured the work of Kasper Akhøj, Martí Anson, Maria Loboda, Charlotte Moth and Sarah Ortmeyer." Continue reading

Cover Stories' are published on a monthly basis on Latitudes' homepage and feature past, present or forthcoming projects, research, writing, artworks, exhibitions, films, objects or field trips related to our curatorial activities. 

RELATED CONTENT:
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SAVE THE DATE: 29 June, 19h. Private view of the exhibition "4.543 billion. The matter of matter" at the CAPC musée d'art contemporain de Bordeaux

Xavier Ribas, Chilean Nitrate publicity postcard, c. 1920 from "A History of Detonations", 2013. Courtesy the artist and ProjecteSD, Barcelona; and Lucas Ihlein, "Under Ground", 2010. Courtesy of the artist.


SAVE THE DATE

Exhibition ‘4.543 billion. The matter of matter’, CAPC musée d'art contemporain de Bordeaux, June 29, 2017–January 7, 2018.  

Opening: June 29, 2017 (6 pm)

With: A.J. Aalders, Lara Almarcegui, Maria Thereza Alves, Félix Arnaudin, Amy Balkin, Alessandro Balteo-Yazbeck in collaboration with Media Farzin, Bernd Becher and Hilla Becher, Étienne Denisse, Hubert Duprat, Giulio Ferrario, Ângela Ferreira, Anne Garde, Ambroise-Louis Garneray, Terence Gower, Rodney Graham, Ilana Halperin (also at the Université de Bordeaux’s zoology department), Marianne Heier, Christina Hemauer and Roman Keller, Lucas Ihlein and Louise Kate Anderson, Jannis Kounellis, Martín Llavaneras, Erlea Maneros Zabala, Nicholas Mangan, Fiona Marron, Alexandra Navratil, Xavier Ribas, Alfred Roll, Amie Siegel, Lucy Skaer, Alfred Smith, Rayyane Tabet, Pierre Théron, Pep Vidal, Alexander Whalley Light, Stuart Whipps (also at the Musée des Beaux-Arts) as well as documents and objects lent by the archives of the CAPC, the Archives Bordeaux Métropole, the Archives départementales de la Gironde, and the geology collection of the UFR Sciences de la Terre et de la Mer, Université de Bordeaux.

Curated by Latitudes

With contributions from more than 30 artists, “4.543 billion. The matter of matter” is a major exhibition that addresses works of art, collections and cultural histories in relation to ecological processes and a geological scale of time. It presents a continuum of materials and temporal landscapes – films, works on paper, photographs, sculptures, documents, and other meaningful things – and springs from the CAPC building’s former life as a warehouse for colonial commodities whose limestone walls were once deep in the ground and whose wooden beams were once part of a forest.


A central proposal of the exhibition is that works of art are part of geophysical history as much as art history. 4.543 billion attempts to take into account both a micro-local and a planetary perspective, and to rethink some of the histories of art as fragments of broader narratives about the Earth and how our place in it has been represented. What is at stake when art and museums take on greater temporal and material awareness? How might they move beyond a spatial framework of “think globally, act locally”, to “think historically, act geologically”? 

Collections are accumulations of real physical matter in time as well as of ideas, decisions, fashions, knowledge, and use. Likewise minerals and organic matter might be regarded as both cultural evidence and archival storage media. This exhibition takes a situated view of the past that resists an undifferentiated narrative in which modernity in general is at fault for global ecological disarray, or humanity in an invariably abstract sense must take responsibility.


Accordingly, the artists included instead often address the specific roles and purposeful effects of individuals, practices, states or corporations in an account of how mineral agents and organic processes have intertwined with and underpinned culture. Marianne Heier’s contribution, for example, documents a project addressing the decisive roll North Sea oil has played in shaping art and culture in Norway. Rayyane Tabet’s works deal sculpturally with the legacy of the Trans-Arabian Pipe Line, a joint venture by three American oil companies that came together in 1946 to construct an pipeline from Saudi Arabia to the Mediterranean. Incorporating a fragment of Breccia Pernice marble from the lobby of Trump Tower, Dynasty (2017) by Amie Siegel weaves Italian geology into the political turmoil of the present. 

Several of the more documentary projects on display (including those by Alessandro Balteo Yazbeck and Terence Gower) trace the relationships between Modern art, the museum, and wealth created through extractive industry, combining approaches framed by Earth sciences with colonial history, sociology and political reportage. Yet other works take a more atmospheric, filmic, sculptural or graphic approach to extraction, economy, energy and global exchange, whether orbiting around sunlight, forests, synthetic materials derived from fossil fuels (a subject addressed by Alexandra Navratil), or the services and substances entailed in buildings that display art (as seen through the work of Lucas Ihlein and Lara Almarcegui).
In addition to two new projects in development for the occasion (by Christina Hemauer & Roman Keller and Ilana Halperin), the exhibition will include many works kindly lent by the artists and international galleries, as well as those from the CAPC collection and its archives. Loans from Bordeaux institutions include those from the Archives Bordeaux Métropole, the Archives départementales de la Gironde, the Musée des Beaux-Arts, the Musée d’Aquitaine and the geology collection of the UFR Sciences de la Terre et de la Mer, Université de Bordeaux.


Located at opposite ends of the galleries will be two imposing works that bookend the exhibition conceptually as well as physically. Originally made for CAPC in 1985, Jannis Kounellis’s nine-metre-long Sans titre is a slab of steel draped with coffee sacks that spits flames. On the other side, Ancient Lights (2015) is a two-screen video installation by Nicholas Mangan that is powered by an off-grid solar system with panels on the roof of the CAPC building. With sections filmed at the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research, University of Arizona, and a salt-storage solar plant near Seville, Mangan’s looped videos speculates on the ideology and politics of energy. 


Several works by Ângela Ferreira also link diverse histories: those of the Cullinan Diamond Mine in South Africa, the source of one of the largest gems ever found, and the Chislehurst Caves in South East London, a crucible of counter-culture in the 1960s. In terms of an exploration of the underground – in this case with a sociological dimension – one could also mention All surface expectations disappear with depth (2010) a three-screen video work by Fiona Marron that juxtaposes text from a 1954 field report on working conditions in an American gypsum mine with footage from present-day excavation in Ireland.


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‘4.543 billion’ is the contribution of the CAPC musée to the cultural season Paysages Bordeaux 2017. Within the exhibition framework, Latitudes will lead the month-long residency programme ‘Geologic Time’ at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, Alberta, Canada, in September–October 2017.


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Jurado y tutores de Barcelona Producció – Anuncio de los proyectos ganadores temporada 2017–2018

Fotos de Pep Herrero para Barcelona Producció/La Capella.

Después de una intensísima semana de lectura de las 230 solicitudes recibidas, otra semana de debate entre los miembros del jurado y una tercera semana entrevistando a los 31 candidatos pre-seleccionados, el jurado de la temporada 2017–2018 de Barcelona Producció formado por David Armengol, Alexandra Laudo, Mónica Bello, Joan Caselles, Mireia Sallarès y Latitudes junto a Oriol Gual, director de La Capella (con voz, sin voto), ha decidido seleccionar los siguientes 17 proyectos para su producción y presentación a lo largo de la temporada:

Sala Grande – Exposición individual

  • "Synthesis" de David Mutiloa
  • "Talk trouble" de Claudia Pagès
  • "El Gafe i la Revolució" de Dani Montlleó
Sala pequeña – Exposición individual
  • "Remover con una vara de madera" de Matteo Guidi
  • "ARTENGO2000" de Camille Orny y Magda Vaz
  • "SSSSSSSilex" de Paco Chanivet
Sala Gran – Comisariado
  • "A break can be what we are aiming for" de Irina Mutt
Sala pequeña – Comisariado
(Modalidad desierta)

Proyectos deslocalizados

  • "Són els microorganismes els que tindran l’última paraula" de la Associació Cultural Nyamnyam
  • "En frontera" de Marco Noris
Investigación
  • "El Peso de mis Vecinas - La Poesía y el Cante como Dispositivos Estratégicos" de Christina Schultz
  • "El mal alumne. Pedagogia crítica per a intel·ligències artificials" de Taller Estampa
Publicación
  • "The Drowned Giant" de Anna Moreno
Acción en vivo
  • "Chroma" de Quim Pujol
  • "The Reading Room #3 presenta: Aparatos del habla – Materialismo histórico" de Eliana Beltrán
  • "Fine Cherry" de Victoria Macarte
Entornos digitales
  • "Eixams" de Alex Muñoz
  • "Notes on a novel (that I am not going to write), or the swimming pool, or the hair, the herb and the bread or the tomato plant" de Irene Solà
Latitudes tutorizará los proyectos de David Mutiloa (Sala Grande, 18 julio– 25 septiembre 2017), Anna Moreno (Proyecto de publicación, noviembre 2017) y Magda Vaz y Camille Orny (Sala pequeña, 23 enero–1 abril 2018).

La undécima convocatoria introduce varias novedades: se han doblado el número de categorías pasando de nueve a dieciocho y se suman tres nuevos tutores (las comisarias Alexandra Laudo y Mónica Bello, y el artista Joan Casellas). La otra novedad es que el "Espai Cub" desaparece para transformarse en una sala más amplia con paredes blancas de 4×8m situado a la entrada de La Capella ("sala pequeña"). 

Las nuevas líneas que se han introducido se destinan a la producción de un proyecto curatorial para la sala pequeña para formatos reducidos o de archivo (1 proyecto), edición de una publicación (1 proyecto), proyectos en entornos digitales (2 proyectos), proyectos en vivo (3 proyectos), y se ha recuperado la añorada beca de investigación (2 proyectos).

El calendario preliminar de exhibición será en siguiente:

18 de julio–25 de septiembre 2017
Sala Gran (individual 1) + Sala Petita (individual 1)

11 de octubre–7 de enero 2017
Sala Gran (individual 2) + Sala Petita (individual 2)

23 de enero 2017–1 de abril 2018
Sala Gran (individual 3) + Sala Petita (individual 3)

27 de abril–24 de junio 2018
Sala Gran (comisariado) + Sala Petita (comisariado)

Los proyectos deslocalizados, de edición, de acción en vivo, digitales y de investigación se producirán y presentarán a lo largo de la temporada.

Barcelona producció es una convocatoria anual dirigida a la comunidad artística de Barcelona y su área de influencia. Es una iniciativa del Institut de Cultura de Barcelona (ICUB) del Ajuntament de Barcelona.
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