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

Cover Story—January 2018: I'll be there for you

Latitudes' home page www.lttds.org

The January 2018 Monthly Cover Story "I'll be there for you" is now up on www.lttds.org – after this month it will be archived here.
 

"Camille Orny and Magda Vaz’s exhibition for the Sala Petita of Barcelona’s La Capella will open on 23 January—it is the last of three projects that Latitudes is mentoring during the current season of the Barcelona Producció grants." 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. 


(Above and below) View from "Artengo2000", exhibition by Camille Orny and Magda Vaz at the Sala Petita in La Capella. Photo: Pep Herrero / La Capella.

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

"Bringing the format of the miniseries into the Sala Petita, Camille Orny & Magda Vaz have created a drama-documentary for six screens premised on the story of a group of five flatmates—including semi-fictionalized versions of themselves—who have struck a sponsorship deal with a corporation known as Artengo. In one reality Artengo is a sub-brand of the sporting goods retailer Decathlon dedicated to racket sports, yet in another reality, it is an arcane Russian-American multinational corporation. The series begins with a dream in which a flatmate is haunted by the Artengo-branded socks that the flatmates have agreed to wear at all times as part of the sponsorship deal that in return sees them receive occasional deliveries of unbranded food and a discount on their gas bill. Artengo2000 is a cumulative narrative: each installment is comprehensive and distinct, while each is grafted onto the body of the series, with certain elements and plot lines that link across.

Artengo2000 hinges on possible spiritual advancements and psychic disorders caused by shared living and by being obedient brand ambassadors. We witness the transformation of a communal flat into a laboratory-like space governed by the unwritten transactions entailed in lifestyle sponsorship and company patronage. Although the drama takes us to Montjuïc, the W Barcelona hotel, and to the Arenas shopping centre, and other branded flats, the Artengo apartment itself is the core psychological location. Yet in contrast to the breezy comedic and romantic adventures of the flat-sharing television series Friends (1994–2004), the Artengo apartment fills with irrational drama, distrust, deranged dreams, and doppelgängers. The flatmates become more like guinea pigs in a pioneering space station, afloat in a void at the limits of corporate ethics, loyalties and interpersonal relations. Characters include Camille and Magda’s flatmates Manu and Laura, a washed-up professional tennis player, and a supposed Danish-Catalan man named Borja with an academic interest in the introduction to Barcelona of novel and more covert forms of whole-life sponsorship.


Artengo2000 takes place in a familiar but twisted world in which gig economies, collaborative work and service sharing appear to have developed in even more perverse ways. A brand called Little Bits makes an appearance—a sort of mutant Deliveroo based on micro-tapas. As Orny and Vaz have suggested, their shared flat drama imagines the bizarre incompatibility of a kommunalka (kommunalki were multi-family communal apartments encouraged by Lenin as a response to the housing crisis after the Russian revolution of 1917) set in a near-future where neoliberal and Silicon-Valley logic wields even greater power. Here the so-called ‘sharing economy’ of coworking, or online platforms such as BlaBlaCar and Airbnb, is evidently not representative of an altruistic fantasy of entrepreneurship or dynamic community cohesion, but is a symptom of evermore precarious socioeconomic circumstances. Giving up some personal space is part of the experience of sharing a flat, yet it allows a lower cost of living. However, the sponsorship deal that the flatmates are signed up to exacerbates their sacrifices to extremes. The work-life balance has not been blurred, but completely collapsed, as the flatmates renounce their intimacy and subjectivity in commodifying themselves for the Artengo brand.

Where the vast majority of television narrators strive for neutrality and self-effacement, as if viewers are supposed to ignore the fact that the story is coming through a mediator, Orny and Vaz’s storytelling, and the Artengo2000 world of homemade myth-making, is far from straightforward. It incorporates numerous doubtful narratives, both onscreen and offscreen. Film genres such as the Western, or the film noir, routinely passed through a kind of four-stage metamorphosis, media scholars have suggested.1 In the first stage, conventions were established and isolated. In the second ‘classic’ stage these conventions reached equilibrium and were mutually understood by makers and audiences; the third stage saw formal and stylistic embellishments. Finally in a ‘baroque’ stage, the embellishments were accented to the point where they themselves became the substance of the work. Yet whether television series have followed the same logic is moot, particularly in an age where gathering in the living room to watch the latest hit show at the scheduled time has long been a thing of the past, usurped by viewers binge-streaming multiple episodes. Moreover, is it not the case that Artengo2000, much like David Lynch’s surreal crime drama Twin Peaks (1990–91), was already born congenitally baroque?

While Artengo2000 is steeped in cinematic theory and the study of genre, more plausible still is that it comes at us not only through a filter of American television, and series that have experimented with the medium of the episodic drama in often darkly-comic and self-referential ways, such as Seinfeld (1989–1998), Curb Your Enthusiasm (2000–present), and Louie (2010–15). Artengo2000 has also filtered through many diverse influences related to what critic Jordi Costa has identified as ‘post-humor’ in Spain, including YouTube channels and self-made web series from the likes of Canódromo Abandonado, Pioneros Siglo XXI, and Venga Monjas.2 Yet why does a series ‘happen’ when it does? Was the fanatical following that built around the supernatural detective series The X-Files (1993–2002), for example, in some way a Bill-Clinton-era phenomenon, a result of psychohistorical factors at work in 1990s America? And why do we now see a return of Twin Peaks (2017–) just at the same time as we see Artengo2000 emerge in Barcelona? Appropriately, asking more questions that providing answers, we offer no more closure than a typical episode of either." 

Latitudes 

Mentors of the project. Text written for the exhibition and available in English, Catalan and Spanish.


1 See Thomas Schatz, ‘Hollywood Genres: Formulas, Filmmaking, and The Studio System’, McGraw-Hill, 1981.

2 See Miguel Iríbar, ‘El posthumor, la tortilla deconstruida de la risa’, http://www.jotdown.es/2014/12/el-posthumor-la-tortilla-deconstruida-de-la-risa/



RELATED CONTENT:
  • Archive of Monthly Cover Stories
  • Cover Story – December 2017: "Tabet's Tapline trajectory", 4 December 2017
  • Cover Story – November 2017: "Mining negative monuments: Ângela Ferreira, Stone Free, and The Return of the Earth", 1 November 2017
  • Cover Story – October 2017: Geologic Time at Stanley Glacier 11 October 2017
  • Cover Story – September 2017: Dark Disruption. David Mutiloa's 'Synthesis' 1 September 2017
  • Cover Story – August 2017: Walden 7; or, life in Sant Just Desvern 1 August 2017
  • Cover Story – July 2017: 4.543 billion 3 July 2017
  • Cover Story – June 2017: Month Light–Absent Forms 1 June 2017
  • Cover Story – May 2017: S is for Shale, or Stuart; W is for Waterfall, or Whipps 1 May 2017
  • Cover Story – April 2017: Banff Geologic Time 3 April 2017
  • Cover Story – March 2017: Time travel with Jordan Wolfson 1 March 2017
  • Cover Story February 2017: The Dutch Assembly, five years on 1 February 2017
  • Cover Story January 2017: How open are open calls? 4 January 2017

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2017 in 12 monthly Cover Stories

Another year has gone by!

Revisit some of Latitudespast–present–future–ongoing projects through our online archive of Monthly Cover Stories, a chance to focus on an artwork, article, event, film, exhibition, excursion or ongoing train of thoughts. 


Cover Story January 2017: "How open are open calls?", 4 January 2017

Cover Story February 2017: "The Dutch Assembly, five years on", 1 February 2017

Cover Story – March 2017: "Time travel with Jordan Wolfson", 1 March 2017

Cover Story – April 2017: "Banff Geologic Time", 3 April 2017

Cover Story – May 2017: "S is for Shale or Stuart; W is for Waterfall, or Whipps", 1 May 2017 

Cover Story – June 2017: "Moth light—Absent Forms", 1 June 2017
Cover Story – July 2017: "4.543 billion", 3 July 2017 


Cover Story – August 2017: "Walden 7; or, life in Sant Just Desvern", 1 August 2017  


Cover Story – September 2017: "Dark Disruption. David Mutiloa's 'Synthesis'", 1 September 2017

Cover Story – October 2017: "Geologic Time at Stanley Glacier", 11 October 2017

Cover Story—November 2017: "Mining negative monuments: Ângela Ferreira, Stone Free, and The Return of the Earth", 1 November 2017
Cover Story—December 2017: "Tabet’s Tapline trajectory", 4 December 2017

RELATED CONTENT:
Latitudes' Cover Story archive,
Latitudes' writing archive,
Latitudes' newsletters.
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Public programme of the exhibition "4.543 billion. The Matter of Matter" at the CAPC musée d'art contemporain de Bordeaux

First public event on 30 June to the Salle des Collections de l'Unité de Formation de Biologie, Université de Bordeaux. This and following photos: Latitudes.


On December 14 at 2pm, the mediation department of the CAPC will lead a guided visit to Ilana Halperin’s "The Rock Cycle" (2017) intervention at the Salle des Collections de l'Unité de Formation de Biologie, Université de Bordeaux. 

The event is the third visit (earlier ones took place on October 19 and November 16) programmed in the context of her participation in the exhibition ‘4.543 billion. The matter of matter’ on view at the CAPC musée d'art contemporain de BordeauxThe next (and final one) will be taking place on January 4, three days before the exhibition closes on January 7, 2018. 

These events are free. Booking is recommended via Léo Correa [email protected] T. (+33) 05 56 00 81 60.


Ilana Halperin’s new project for the exhibition '4.543 billion' deals with geological intimacy and vivacity, and the uncanny fact that something as apparently inert and certain as the stone walls of the CAPC building were once marine life from a tropical ocean of the Oligocene epoch, around 32 million-years-ago. This Calcaire à Astéries (asteriated limestone) characteristic of Bordeaux takes its name from the countless tiny fossil organisms of the genus asterias (a type of sea star) that can be found in the stone alongside fossil mollusks and coral.

Halperin addresses stone, not as dead matter or a mere resource, but as a story-laden substance that both surpasses and partners in humans’ view of the world. 'The Rock Cycle' incorporates the reading of a letter and the hosting of a number of the artist’s geological sculptures within the displays of the zoology collection of the University of Bordeaux. These ‘curios’ originated as fragments of sea-weathered brick from the Isle of Bute in western Scotland, as well as waterjet-cut sandstone, that the artist left for three months in Fontaines Pétrifiantes in Saint-Nectaire. For generations, the mineral-rich waters that percolate through the rock at this site in central France have been used to create sculptures using the same process by which stalactites form, only one hundred times faster. Objects become rapidly encrusted with new layers of stone. 


—Latitudes 
[Excerpt from the exhibition guide]


Three other events have been programmed in the context of the exhibition.

Visit with Terence Gower (participating artist) and Prof. Bruno Cahuzac. Photo: CAPC musée/Département des publics.

8 November 2017, 5:30–7pm
Jam Session #1—Guided tour by Terence Gower (participating artist) and Prof. Bruno Cahuzac (UFR Sciences de la Terre et de la Mer, Université de Bordeaux Montaigne).

Guests during “The Return of the Earth: Ecologising art history in the Anthropocene” event. Photo: Latitudes.

15 November 2017, 4:30–8pm
The Return of the Earth: Ecologising art history in the Anthropocene”—Lecture by Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, a conversation between Xavier Ribas and Ângela Ferreira, debate convened by Latitudes. Free access. Simultaneous translation English-French.



During Jam Session #2 event. Photo: CAPC musée/Département des publics.

6 December 2017, 5:30–7pm
Jam Session #2—Guided tour by Isabelle Kanor (Head association "Le Labo de Lettres” dealing with cultural issues in the Antilles and colonization), and Charlotte Bouvier and Rémi Cazamajour (Inélia, company that supplied the solar panels feeding the video installation "Ancient Lights" (2015) by Nicholas Mangan). Sign up: Stéphane Mallet, [email protected]


Photo: Latitudes/RK.

The exhibition ‘4.543 billion’ is the contribution of the CAPC musée to the cultural season Paysages Bordeaux 2017. Between September 11–October 6, 2017, and within the exhibition framework, Latitudes led the month-long residency programme ‘Geologic Time’ at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, Alberta, Canada.

Share:
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#4543milliards
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RELATED CONTENT:
  • 4.543 billion. The Matter of Matter” exhibition
  • Archive of social networks posts related to "4.543 billion"
  • Photo gallery of the exhibition 
  • CAPC website (French, English, Spanish) http://www.capc-bordeaux.fr/programme/4543-milliards
  • Cover Story—December 2017: "Tabet's Tapline trajectory" 4 December 2017
  • Alfred Roll's 1878 "The Old Quarryman" exchanged with Alfred Smith's "The Grave Docks" (1884) in the exhibition "4.543 billion" at the CAPC musée 3 November 2017
  • Cover Story—November 2017: "Mining negative monuments: Ângela Ferreira, Stone Free, and The Return of the Earth" 1 November 2017 
  • 15 November 2017, 4:30–8pm: 'The Return of the Earth. Ecologising art history in the Anthropocene' study day at the CAPC musée, Bordeaux 24 October 201
  • Cover Story – July 2017: 4.543 billion 3 July 2017
  • Cover Story – May 2017: S is for Shale or Stuart; W is for Waterfall, or Whipps 1 May 2017
  • 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 30 May 2017
  • 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—December 2017: Tabet’s Tapline trajectory

Monthly Cover Story on http://www.lttds.org

The December 2017 Monthly Cover Story "Tabet’s Tapline trajectory" is now up on www.lttds.org – after this month it will be archived here.
 

"Rayyane Tabet’sSteel Rings and the mobile Three Logos (both 2013) slice through and loom over the web of natural histories and human natures, mineral agency and political ecology that comprises the exhibition 4.543 billion. The matter of matter. Rayyane was one of the first artists to come on board what would become this Latitudes-curated exhibition at CAPC Bordeaux. And as the show approaches the end of its journey—it finishes on 7 January 2018—it seems appropriate that this month’s cover story creates a bookend of sorts. Moreover, it gives a perfect reason to mention Rayyane’s stunning exhibition Fragments that has recently opened at Hamburg Kunstverein." 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:
  • Archive of Monthly Cover Stories
  • Cover Story – November 2017: "Mining negative monuments: Ângela Ferreira, Stone Free, and The Return of the Earth", 1 November 2017
  • Cover Story – October 2017: Geologic Time at Stanley Glacier 11 October 2017
  • Cover Story – September 2017: Dark Disruption. David Mutiloa's 'Synthesis' 1 September 2017
  • Cover Story – August 2017: Walden 7; or, life in Sant Just Desvern 1 August 2017
  • Cover Story – July 2017: 4.543 billion 3 July 2017
  • Cover Story – June 2017: Month Light–Absent Forms 1 June 2017
  • Cover Story – May 2017: S is for Shale, or Stuart; W is for Waterfall, or Whipps 1 May 2017
  • Cover Story – April 2017: Banff Geologic Time 3 April 2017
  • Cover Story – March 2017: Time travel with Jordan Wolfson 1 March 2017
  • Cover Story February 2017: The Dutch Assembly, five years on 1 February 2017
  • Cover Story January 2017: How open are open calls? 4 January 2017
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1 Diciembre, 20:30h: Latitudes introducirá el documental italiano "Harald Szeemann. Appunti sulla vita di un sognatore" (2016)


El 1 de diciembre 2017 a las 20:30h Latitudes introducirá el documental italiano "Harald Szeemann. Appunti sulla vita di un sognatore" (2016, 61 minutos) antes de su proyección. El documental, que se estrena en España, se aproxima a la figura del conocido comisario suizo fallecido en el 2005, que a lo largo de cinco décadas de actividad profesional organizó más de 150 exposiciones.

La proyección es parte de la primera edición del Dart Festival 2017, el Festival de Cine Documental sobre Arte Contemporáneo que proyectará 10 documentales entre el 30 de noviembre y el 3 de diciembre en los Cinemes Girona (c/ Girona 175, 08037 Barcelona).


Toda la programación del Dart Festival 2017 en www.dart-festival.com

Szeemann definió y perpetuó la figura del “comisario freelance permanente”, aunque como ha comentado en varias ocasiones el también comisario Hans Ulrich Obrist, la particularidad de Szeemann es que dió continuidad al legado de Alexander Dorner, director del Museo de Hannover en los años veinte, quien definió el museo como una central eléctrica, un “museo en movimiento” en el que:
  • La exposición es un estado de transformación permanente. 
  • La exposición como algo oscilante entre el objeto y el proceso, afirmando que “la noción de proceso ha penetrado en nuestro sistema de certidumbres”.
  • La exposición de identidades múltiples.
  • La exposición como algo pionero, activo y que no se guarda nada.
  • La exposición como verdad relativa.
  • La exposición basada en una concepción dinámica de la historia del arte.
  • La exposición “elástica”: presentaciones flexibles en un edificio adaptable.
  • La exposición como puente entre los artistas y las diversas disciplinas científicas.
El Getty Research Institute adquirió el archivo que Szeemann acumuló a lo largo de su vida en la Fabbrica Rossa, en Maggia, una pequeña localidad en su Suiza natal. El Harald Szeemann Archive and Library es una de las adquisiciones más completas jamás realizadas por el museo de Los Ángeles y lo ha convirtido en una de las fuentes más importantes para entender el arte producido a partir de 1950. 

CONTENIDO RELACIONADO:
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22 de noviembre, 19h: Presentación de la publicació “The Drowned Giant” a cargo de Anna Moreno y Lluís A. Casanovas Blanco

Póster del evento. Cortesía: Anna Moreno.

22 de noviembre, 19h
Presentación de la publicación “The Drowned Giant” de Anna Moreno
A cargo de la artista Anna Moreno y el arquitecto e investigador Lluís A. Casanovas

Col·legi d’Arquitectes de Catalunya (COAC)
Sala de actos, 1r piso
Plaça Nova 5, 08002 Barcelona
 
En 1970 se organizó un happening en Moratalaz (Madrid) para promocionar el proyecto de vivienda utópica La Ciudad en el Espacio, del arquitecto Ricardo Bofill. Un evento que nunca se llegó a documentar, un proyecto que nunca se llegó a construir. El pasado 7 de junio, la artista
Anna Moreno repitió aquel happening en el mismo lugar.

El 22 de noviembre, en la Sala de Actos del
Col·legi d’Arquitectes de Catalunya (COAC), se presentará un LP con el registro sonoro del proceso de restitución, la única documentación existente del evento. 

 (Arriba y abajo) The Drowned Giant. Fotos: Anna Moreno.
 
El disco contiene los testimonios de Gila Dohle, The Downton Alligators, Enrique Doza, Peter Hodgkinson, Anna Moreno, JC Ramone, Toti Soler y Ramón Del Solo, entre otros. La edición incluye un libreto con relatos de ficción escritos por los arquitectos Paula Currás & Havi Navarro, la comisaria María Montero, el experto en blues Ramón del Solo y la artista Anna Moreno.

Lluís A. Casanovas Blanco es arquitecto y comisario afincado entre Nueva York y Barcelona. Actualmente es investigador en Princeton University (NY, EEUU). Junto con la agencia After Belonging fue uno de los comisarios en jefe de la Trienal de Arquitectura de Oslo (2016).


Anna Moreno (Barcelona, 1984) vive y trabaja entre Barcelona y La Haya (Países Bajos). Su práctica artística se desarrolla a través de acontecimientos expandidos y exposiciones individuales, como ‘D’ahir d’abans d’ahir de l’altre abans d’ahir i més d’abans encara’ (Blueproject Foundation, Barcelona, 2016), ‘The Whole World Was Singing¸ (HIAP Project Space, Helsinki, 2016) o ‘An Awkward Game’ (1646, La Haya, 2015). Entre las exposiciones colectivas en las que ha participado cabe destacar: ‘En los cantos nos diluimos’ (Sala de Arte Joven, Madrid, 2017), ‘Distopía General’ (Reales Atarazanas, Valencia, 2017), ‘CAPITALOCEAN’ (W139, ÁmBerdam, 2016), ‘Lo que ha de venir ya ha llegado’ (CAAC, Sevilla; MUSAC, León, y Koldo Mitxelena, Sebastián, todas en 2015) y ‘Generaciones’ (La Casa Encendida, Madrid, 2014). Su obra se ha incluido en el marco de simposios como ‘Visual Activism’¸ (SFMOMA, San Francisco, 2014) o ‘United We Organize’ (Stroom Den Haag, La Haya, 2013). Ha participado en residencias como ‘Artistas en residencia’ (CA2M y La Casa Encendida, MóBoles y Madrid, 2017), Seoul Art Space Geumcheon (Seúl, 2012) o Atelierhaus Salzamt (Linz, 2011), entre otros. Es profesora de investigación artística en la Royal Academy of Art de La Haya, donde es miembro fundador de Helicopter, una iniciativa dirigida por artistas enfocada a la experimentación y al intercambio de conocimientos. 

Fotos: Laura San Segundo. Cortesía: Anna Moreno.

Publicación producida con el apoyo de Barcelona Producció 2017, La Capella / Institut de Cultura de Barcelona. 

Proyecto tutorizado por Latitudes.

CONTENIDO RELACIONADO:

  • Cover Story—August 2017: Walden 7; or, life in Sant Just Desvern (web archive);
  • Tutores: Barcelona Producció, La Capella, Barcelona, julio 2017–junio 2018 (web);
  • Web de La Capella;
  • Jurado y tutores de Barcelona Producció – Anuncio de los proyectos ganadores temporada 2017–2018 (25 Mayo 2017).
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Alfred Roll's 1878 "The Old Quarryman" exchanged with Alfred Smith's "The Grave Docks" (1884) in the exhibition "4.543 billion" at the CAPC musée

“Le Vieux Carrier” [The Old Quarryman] (1878) by Alfred Roll (Paris, 1846–1919). Collection of the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Bordeaux.
Following the conclusion of its four-month loan period, we wave goodbye to “Le Vieux Carrier” [The Old Quarryman] (1878) portrait by Alfred Roll (Paris, 1846–1919) on November 6, 2017. Roll's portrait has been on display since June 29 as part of the exhibition "4.543 billion" at the CAPC musée d'art contemporain de Bordeaux. In its place we welcome Alfred Smith's (Bordeaux, 1854–Paris, 1936) “Le Quai de la Grave” [The Grave Docks] (1884).

Alfred Smith's (Bordeaux, 1854–Paris, 1936) “Le Quai de la Grave” [The Grave Docks] (1884). Collection of the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Bordeaux.

We are very grateful to the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Bordeaux for agreeing to these wonderful loans. In turn, and in companion to three artworks from 2012–3 exhibited at the CAPC, Birmingham-based artist Stuart Whipps is presenting a new off-site work entitled "Thin Section: Scottish Shale" (2017) in the galleries of the Musée des Beaux-Arts.


(Above and below) Views of Stuart Whipps' "Thin Section: Scottish Shale" (2017) at the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Bordeaux. Photo: Latitudes.
Photo: Latitudes.
(Left, floor) Stuart Whipps' "Thin Section: Scottish Shale" (2017) and (right, above) “Le Quai de la Grave” [The Grave Docks] (1884) by Alfred Smith (Bordeaux, 1854–Paris, 1936), painting that will be exchanged on November 6, 2017, with Alfred Roll's “Le Vieux Carrier” [The Old Quarryman] (1878). Photo: Latitudes.

A 0.5mm thick sliver of Scottish Shale rock (a gas-harbouring rock similar to schist) cut from a sample with a diamond saw is treated as if it were a photographic slide by being displayed on a Reflecta AFM 2000 slide projector, a model that has an in-built display monitor. The luminous minerals contained within the shale rock—quartz, calcite, dolomite, feldspars, mica, pyrite...—appear in 1:1 scale.


(Above and below) Views of the exhibition room at the CAPC musée that includes Alfred Roll's portrait. The room includes works by Maria Thereza Alves, Ângela Ferreira, Antoine J. Aalders and Stuart Whipps. Photo: Latitudes/RK. 

Photo: Latitudes/RK.

Photo: Latitudes.

Between 1878 and 1894, Alfred Roll (Paris, 1846–1919) painted a series of Realist works depicting the world of industry, and more pointedly, comprising statements of solidarity with the harsh circumstances of the worker at a time of great social unrest. Representing an elderly quarryman in his smock, “Le Vieux Carrier” [The Old Quarryman] (1878) began this sequence when it was first exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1879. It is one of the few Roll portraits whose subject remains anonymous, yet the man depicted was undoubtedly a genuine labourer rather than a model—the artist was later known to welcome miners and their families to sit for portraits in his studio. Is it not known where the man would have been working. Yet given Roll’s later depiction of stonemasons on a quayside in Suresnes, near Paris, (“Le Travail, chantier de Suresnes (Seine)”, 1885), one might speculate that “Le Vieux Carrier” represents both the large-scale infrastructural projects taking place around the capital at the time, as well as the increasing reorganization of the French workforce in the extractive industries through retiring older workers and cutting wages. 

Roll would go on to spend several months living and working in the coal mines of Charleroi, Belgium, and Anzin, in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais region of northern France, and he presented the celebrated painting “Grève des mineurs” [Miners’ strike] at the 1880 Salon. Roll seems to have painted from the perspective that exhaustion unfolds through human labour systems as much as through the depletion of raw materials.

(Unframed) Alfred Smith's (Bordeaux, 1854–Paris, 1936) “Le Quai de la Grave” [The Grave Docks] (1884). Collection of the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Bordeaux.
   
“Le Quai de la Grave” [The Grave Docks] (1884) is one of a number of Bordeaux cityscapes by the painter Alfred Smith (Bordeaux, 1854–Paris, 1936) in which the effects of the weather and the time of the day are treated with great fidelity. A mason appears to be sizing-up a large limestone block that has been brought downriver by boat. Other workers take a rest in the shade of the water tank and the sentry box during what appears to be a scorching hot summer afternoon in Bordeaux. The seasonal movement of migrant stonemasons from central France, especially the Creuse département, was an established and widespread feature of the construction industry by the late eighteenth century. Migrants had travelled by foot for centuries, but with the introduction of railways to central France in the 1850s, this began to change. Paris was the main magnet, but many young men also departed every March to look for work in Lyon, Bordeaux, and other cities. 

Until at least the beginning of the twentieth century, construction in France was defined by the cutting, dressing, and placing of stone and the industry would have encompassed a wide range of specialist and physically demanding jobs—from quarrymen to masons, roofers, and pavers. By the time of Smith’s depiction, much of the precision of stone cutting would have been done at the quarry site itself. Finishing, polishing and decoration would have been carried out on site. Building work had started to organize trade unions in the early 1880s and a national building trades’ federation was founded in Bordeaux in 1892.

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‘4.543 billion’ is the contribution of the CAPC musée to the cultural season Paysages Bordeaux 2017

RELATED CONTENT:
  • Archive of social networks related to "4.543 billion"
  • Photo gallery of the exhibition 
  • CAPC website (French, English, Spanish) http://www.capc-bordeaux.fr/programme/4543-milliards
  • 15 November 2017, 4:30–8pm: 'The Return of the Earth. Ecologising art history in the Anthropocene' study day at the CAPC musée, Bordeaux 24 October 2017
  • Cover Story—November 2017: "Mining negative monuments: Ângela Ferreira, Stone Free, and The Return of the Earth" 1 November 2017
  • Cover Story – July 2017: 4.543 billion 3 July 2017
  • Cover Story – May 2017: S is for Shale, or Stuart; W is for Waterfall, or Whipps 1 May 2017
  • 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 30 May 2017
  • 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—November 2017: "Mining negative monuments: Ângela Ferreira, Stone Free, and The Return of the Earth"

Monthly Cover Story on http://www.lttds.org/blog/


The November 2017 Monthly Cover Story "Mining negative monuments: Ângela Ferreira, Stone Free, and The Return of the Earth" is now up on www.lttds.org – after this month it will be archived here

"On 15 November the study day The Return of the Earth: Ecologising art history in the Anthropocene takes place at the CAPC musée d’art contemporain Bordeaux in conjunction with the Latitudes-curated exhibition 4.543 billion. The matter of matter. With a keynote by science historian Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, and a conversation between artists Xavier Ribas and Ângela Ferreira—the latter both featured in the exhibition—the event will intertwine discussions of art practice and historical research, with environmental and geological narratives, and vice versa." 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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15 November 2017, 4:30–8pm: 'The Return of the Earth. Ecologising art history in the Anthropocene' study day at the CAPC musée, Bordeaux

Xavier Ribas, detail of diptych num 7 'Caliche Fields' (2010), 22 Pigment prints on Harman Baryta paper 33 x 50 cm. Courtesy the artist and ProjecteSD, Barcelona.

'The Return of the Earth. Ecologising art history in the Anthropocene'
Study day
Wednesday, 15 November 2017  
4:30—8:00pm
Auditorium
CAPC musée d’art contemporain Bordeaux 
7, rue Ferrère, 33000 Bordeaux, France 


PROGRAMME

4:30—5:30 pm

Keynote by science historian Jean-Baptiste Fressoz (Paris) 
5:30—5:45 pm
Break
5:45—6:45
pm
Conversation between artists Xavier Ribas (London) and Ângela Ferreira (Lisbon)
6:45—7:45
pm
Roundtable discussion moderated by Latitudes (Barcelona)


Free event. Simultaneous translation French/English. 

Conference programmed in the context of the exhibition '4.543 billion. The matter of matter', CAPC musée d’art contemporain Bordeaux, 29 June 2017–7 January 2018. Curated by Latitudes.



The work of many of the artists in the exhibition '4.543 billion. The matter of matter' explores the shared history of human activities and Earth systems. Yet this comes with a critical and political inflexion of the universalizing notion of the Anthropocene, the proposed geological ‘epoch of humanity’ that would cast all of the mankind as being responsible for the alarming damage caused by modernizing and capitalizing nature.

With a keynote by science historian Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, and a conversation between artists
Xavier Ribas and Ângela Ferreira—the latter both featured in the exhibition—this event hosted by Latitudes ('4.543 billion' curators Max Andrews and Mariana Cánepa Luna), sees art practice and historical research intertwining with environmental and geological narratives, and vice versa. Both Ribas and Ferreira make art that resists the generalising story of the Anthropocene that Fressoz unmasks in his book 'The Shock of the Anthropocene. The Earth, History and Us' (co-authored with Christophe Bonneuil, Verso Books, 2016). Echoing the meticulous historical approach of Fressoz, both Ribas’s and Ferreira’s projects in the exhibition deal with case studies with a very specific place and politics. Addressing mineral agency and colonial extraction, the artists will discuss their approaches to work that has sprung from diamonds in South Africa (Ferreira) to nitrate in Chile (Ribas).

As Fressoz & Bonneuil have written, the Anthropocene “signals the return of the Earth into a world that Western industrial modernity, on the whole, represented to itself as above earthly foundation … Environmental history, natural anthropology, environmental law and ethics, human ecology, environmental sociology, political ecology, green political theory, ecological economics, etc., are among the new disciplines that have recently begun to renew the human and social sciences, in a dialogue with the sciences of nature.” The dialogue during the event will seek to discover what might happen when artists, curators, exhibitions and museums come into the mix of such emerging practices. What is at stake when artists venture beyond the conventional separation of humanities from sciences, and into environmental art history, cultural ecology, decolonial activism, and so on?


Entrance to the exhibition at the CAPC. Photo: Latitudes/RK.

GUESTS

Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, formerly a lecturer at Imperial College, London, is a historian of science, technology and environment. He is based at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique, Paris, the largest governmental research organisation in France and the largest fundamental science agency in Europe. He is the author, with Christophe Bonneuil, of 'The Shock of the Anthropocene' (Verso, 2016). “This bold, brilliantly argued history of the Anthropocene epoch is a corrective to cosy thinking about humanity’s grave disruptions to Earth systems. Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz draw on climate science, economics and technological history to reveal how, starting in eighteenth-century France, imperial narratives that saw people and planet as a ‘totality to be governed’ laid the conceptual basis for the crisis. They call for a ‘new environmental humanities’, and a shift away from market-based approaches that feed the beast.” – Barbara Kiser, Nature.

Ângela Ferreira’s works in the exhibition form part of a series titled “Stone Free” (2012) in reference to the 1966 hit song performed by Jimi Hendrix (1942–70). “Stone Free” creates correspondences between two voids below the ground, two ‘negative monuments’ as the artist has termed them: Chislehurst Caves, in southeast London, and Cullinan Diamond Mine in Gauteng Province, South Africa. 


Chislehurst Caves is a man-made network of underground tunnels mainly worked in the late 1700s yet dating back to as early as 1250. The tunnels were excavated in order to mine chalk and flint. Following their use as an air-raid shelter during the second world war, the tunnels were transformed into a venue for rock concerts in the 1960s and 1970s. The Jimi Hendrix Experience played there in 1966 and again the following year, bringing Hendrix’s unique countercultural synthesis of social realism and psychedelic spiritualism based on African and indigenous-American imagery into the literal underground.

Cullinan Diamond Mine (known as Premier Mine from its establishment in 1902 until 2003) is famed for being the source of the largest gem-quality rough diamond ever discovered, in 1905. Most of the gems cut-and-polished from this stone were used to adorn the Crown Jewels of the United Kingdom. The recent history of the diamond industry is inextricable from that of settler colonialism in southern Africa and a commodity cartel established by the De Beers corporation founded in 1888 by British imperialist Cecil Rhodes (1853–1902), two years before he became Prime Minister of the Cape Colony. De Beers owned all of the major mines in South Africa, as well as controlling global distribution until it began a recent sell-off of its less productive mines to the Petra Diamonds group, including divesting itself of Cullinan in 2008. 


Ferreira was born in Maputo, Mozambique, in 1958, and lives in Lisbon, where she teaches Fine Art at the Lisbon University.
http://angelaferreira.info

“A History of Detonations” (2014) is a glimpse at an extensive body of work by Xavier Ribas devoted to exploring the legacy of the mining of sodium nitrate in northern Chile, which boomed from the 1870s until the early-twentieth century when it was discovered how to make the compound synthetically. Comprised of photographs taken by the artist during research visits, alongside vintage postcards and press prints bought on the internet, Ribas’s poster sequence takes us from Chile to London to the surface of Mars. The mining and trade of Chilean sodium nitrate was led by a class of British ‘gentleman capitalists’—aristocrats, bankers and merchants. The extraction of the resource not only industrialized the arid Atacama Desert at one end of the commodity chain, and enriched country estates at the other, but through its use as a chemical fertilizer and a component of explosives, it would radically alter a whole series of seemingly disparate geographies, bodies and institutions.

Ribas was born in Barcelona, 1960, and lives in London.  He is a lecturer at the University of Brighton and associate lecturer at the Universitat Politècnica de València. http://www.xavierribas.com/

Latitudes is a Barcelona-based curatorial office initiated in 2005 by Max Andrews (1975, Bath, United Kingdom) and Mariana Cánepa Luna (1977, Montevideo, Uruguay). They are the curators of the CAPC exhibition ‘4.543 billion. The matter of matter’, and led the related month-long residency programme ‘Geologic Time’ that took place in September 2017 at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. During 2009 Latitudes developed ‘Portscapes’, a series of ten public commissions in the Port of Rotterdam, the Netherlands (2009); in 2010–11 it was a partner organisation in the exhibition ‘The Last Newspaper’ (New Museum, New York) and in 2011 was the guest curator of the project space of the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León (MUSAC) in León, Spain. More recent curatorial projects include the solo exhibition ‘José Antonio Hernández-Díez. I will fear no evil’, Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA), Barcelona (2016); ‘Compositions’, site-specific commissions for two editions of the Barcelona Gallery Weekend (2015 & 2016); and editing the online curatorial reportage initiative ‘Incidents (of Travel)’ developed in partnership with Kadist (initiated in 2016).  
www.LTTDS.org

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‘4.543 billion’ is the contribution of the CAPC musée to the cultural season Paysages Bordeaux 2017

Views of the exhibition at the CAPC musée. Photos: Latitudes / RK.

RELATED CONTENT:
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Cover Story—October 2017: Geologic Time at Stanley Glacier

October 2017 Monthly Cover Story on http://www.lttds.org


The October 2017 Monthly Cover Story "Geologic Time at Stanley Glacier" is now up on www.lttds.org – after this month it will be archived here

"We are looking for glimpses of life as it was over half a billion years ago. In sight of the snout of the Stanley Glacier in Kootenay National Park, lie deposits of Burgess Shale, a rock famous for its exceptional preservation of hitherto unknown, and frankly bizarre, soft-bodied marine creatures." 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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