Longitudes

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

Photodocumentation of the five commissions 'Composiciones' now on flickr

'Composiciones', five new commissions for the Barcelona Gallery Weekend, 1–4 October 2015.

We just uploaded photos of the five new commissions "Composiciones" on Latitudes' flickr. These projects by artists active in the Barcelona art scene complemented the first Barcelona Gallery Weekend (1–4 October 2015) programme of exhibitions and events

Each intervention responded to site and context-specific private and public location outside the contemporary art circuit – a private psychoanalytic library, the former home of the director of a ceramics factory, a public botanical collection, the home of a former priest and an invertebrate fossile collection.

Pinpointing some lesser-known aspects of the city's cultural history and municipal life, Composiciones offered moments of interruption, intimacy and immersion throughout the weekend.


 Map of the five locations for the temporary projects. 

Commissions by David Bestué (at the Factory complex Cosme Toda, L'Hospitalet); Dora García (at the Biblioteca del Campo Freudiano); Jordi Mitjà (at the Museu Geològic del Seminari de Barcelona); Rasmus Nilausen in collaboration with Pere Llobera (at the gardens of La Central bookstore, Raval); and Daniel Steegmann Magrané (at the Umbracle, Parc de la Ciutadella). Details of each project and locations.

Also on our website (highlighted in yellow where to locate it) you'll find the links to the audio and video documentation of the three talks led by Dora García as part of her intervention at the Biblioteca del Campo Freudiano. We recommend you read a nicely written account of these three sessions (in Spanish) by two of its participants.



On the same page and under 'Related content' you will find links to the press coverage related to 'Composiciones'. The most extensive and in depth review so far has been this considered and detailed blog entry by Barcelona-based art critic and curator Fede Montornés, which of course made us really happy

And last but not least, we gathered the many tweets, instagram, press links, etc. that appeared in the last few weeks in Storify.






#BarcelonaGalleryWeekend
#Composiciones

Related content:


Storify – Social media archive 

Details of the Barcelona Gallery Weekend programme

Instagram of the Barcelona Gallery Weekend
 
PRESS RELEASE: Latitudes curates "Composiciones", a series of five artists' commissions for the first Barcelona Gallery Weekend, 1–4 October 2015 


NOTA DE PRENSA: Comisariado de "Composiciones", cinco intervenciones artísticas para el primer Barcelona Gallery Weekend, 1–4 Octubre 2015



This is the blog of the independent curatorial office Latitudes. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter.
All photos: Latitudes | www.lttds.org (except when noted otherwise in the photo caption).

Work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Stacks Image 39


'Compositions' a programme of five artists' interventions for the first Barcelona Gallery Weekend, 1–4 October 2015

'Save the date' cards of the Barcelona Gallery Weekend. Graphic design: Hey Studio.

Latitudes is curating Compositions a programme of five newly commissioned temporary interventions specially produced for the first Barcelona Gallery Weekend (1–4 October 2015).

With the aim of distinguishing the Barcelona gallery weekend from similar initiatives, Latitudes' project Compositions compliments the existing calendar of exhibitions in galleries and museums by commissioning six artists active in the Barcelona art scene, to develop a series of public interventions responding to singular locations – sites significant for their architecture or their history. Here's a map of the five locations.

Latitudes has invited artists David Bestué (Barcelona, 1980. Lives in Barcelona); Dora García (Valladolid, 1965. Lives in Barcelona), Jordi Mitjà (Figueres, 1970. Lives between Lladó and Banyoles); Rasmus Nilausen (Copenhagen, 1980. Lives in Barcelona) & Pere Llobera (Barcelona, 1970. Lives in Barcelona) and Daniel Steegmann Mangrané (Barcelona, 1977. Lives in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) to produce site-specific temporary installations and one-off performances. Pinpointing some lesser-known aspects of the city's cultural history and municipal life, Compositions offers moments of interruption, intimacy and immersion throughout the weekend. 



Cosme Toda factory complex. 
Home of the former director of the ceramic factory Cosme Toda. c/Enric Prat de la Riba 60, L'Hospitalet de Llobregat.
Opening hours: Thursday 1 October, 5–9pm;  
Friday 2, Saturday 3 and Sunday 4: 11am–8pm.

David Bestué is primarily a sculptor who is fascinated by architecture – not with its hubristic icons or celebrity heroism, but by the very normality with which architectonic tropes underpin an emotional understanding of form.

For Compositions Bestué is producing a new installation in the form of a sculptural timeline defined by ignition and invention, fat and oil, obsolescence, fluorescence, luminescence and incandescence – a history of humanity from antiquity to the present day told through the evolution and refinement of lighting technology. Sited in the domestic setting of the Director’s house within the former Cosme Toda ceramics and tile factory, the installation is companioned by a sculptural intervention recuperating pieces found in the factory, linking to Bestué's ongoing interest in the evolution of architectural materials and building techniques.



Freudian Field Library in Barcelona located at Avinguda Diagonal 333, 3º 1ª. Opening hours: Thursday 1 and Friday 2 October 5–9pm; Saturday 3 October 10am–2pm. Sunday 4 October closed.

Dora García's collaborations and performances engage with radicalism, inadequacy and the marginal. Her contribution to Compositions consists in pointing out the wealth of information and the activites programmed by the Freudian Field Library in Barcelona, an organisation founded in 1977 by Argentinean Oscar Masotta (1930–1979). García's intervention considers the library as a knot which ties together art, psychoanalysis and literature.

A display of publications drawn from the library shelves and three conversations will activate the space over consecutive days. The first talk (1 October, 7pm), a "solo" by García, will focus on the library's holdings of literary fiction. The second talk on October 2nd, at 7pm will be a group conversation moderated by García, amongst Miquel Bassols, Enric Berenguer, Rosa Calvet, Estela Paskvan and Montserrat Rodríguez, who will discuss the founding of the library and its ongoing role in Barcelona, and the final event on October 3 at 10am will be a conversation around the work of Irish novelist James Joyce and French psychiatrist and psichologist Jacques Lacan, between García and psychoanalyst Xavier Esqué and Patrick Bohan, who has worked at the James Joyce Center in Dublin. 


Former priest house, Gardens of La Central del Raval, located at Carrer d'Elisabets 8. Opening hours: Thursday 1 October, 5–9pm; Friday 2, Saturday 3 and Sunday 4: 11am–8pm.

Rasmus Nilausen and Pere Llobera are painters that approach painting with a respect – at times melancholic, sometimes parodic – for its traditional genres and its ancient integrity as a craft. Nilausen’s canvases have often taken on ‘minor’ or anecdotal subjects such as candles or vegetables. Llobera frequently addresses the perils virtuosity and painterly heroism in his paradoxical, restless works. Nilausen and Llobera share a workspace in the Salamina studios in L’Hospitalet de Llobregat – which they cofounded – yet the invitation to collaborate in a presentation for Compositions is the first time they are exhibiting together.

In the Gardens of La Central del Raval their works occupy a former priest's house and explore "acheiropoietic" images – those that have supposedly come into being not by human hand, but miraculously. The Veil of Veronica, for example, refers to various Catholic relics and icons which tell of a piece of cloth said to have been imprinted with the image of the face of Jesus.


 

 Geological Museum of the Seminary of Barcelona is in Carrer de la Diputació, 231.
Opening hours: Thursday 1 October, 5–9pm; 
Friday 2, Saturday 3 and Sunday 4: 11am–8pm.

Jordi Mitjà’s recent “povera” approach to sculpture, has comprised works utilizing discarded wood, metal, burned paper and clay. His contribution to Compositions takes place in the Geological Museum of the Seminary of Barcelona – an institution dedicated to paleontology and the study of fossils since 1874.


Mitjà considers the borders between evolutionary biology and the ancient geology of Catalonia in an installation which focusses on a primitive relationship between materials and morphology. A series of overheard projectors illuminate the central space of the museum with a panoply of images, shadows and geometries – layers that are unearthed by Mitjà’s exploration of the geospatial taxonomy of this unique collection of 70,000 specimens.


 
Opening hours: Thursday 1 October, 5–9pm;
Friday 2, Saturday 3 and Sunday 4: 11am–8pm.

The art of Daniel Steegmann Mangrané hinges on the natural and the geometric, often splicing the unfathomable dimension of the forests of his adopted home Brazil with the clear lines of abstraction and man-made order.

His contribution to Compositions takes place amongst the subtropical plants of the 1887 Umbracle (shade house) in the Parc de la Ciutadella and centres on the acoustic installation “Surucuá, Teque-teque, Arara” (2012). We hear sounds that were recorded along a 60 metre transect through a section of the Atlantic Rainforest of Brazil, the tropical forest that Portuguese colonists would have encountered on their arrival in the year 1500. The sound loop reproduces the disembodied calls of colourful birds such as trogons and macaws which merge with the ambient sounds of the city. As if a 1:1 scale collage, the artifice of an urban botanical collection becomes intertwined with an acoustic slice of the authentically wild.

Follow + Share:
#Composiciones
#BarcelonaGalleryWeekend
@Barcelona_Gallery_Weekend


Calendar of Related Events and Guided Visits

Thursday 1 October, 5pm:
Guided tour of the intervention by Jordi Mitjà at the Museu Geològic del Seminari de Barcelona by the artist and Latitudes.
c/ Diputació, 231

Thursday 1 October, 7pm:
Guided tour of the intervention and talk by Dora García on the library holdings of literary fiction, Biblioteca del Campo Freudiano de Barcelona (Library of the Freudian Field).
Avda. Diagonal 333, 3º 1ª
Limited seating. Reservations: [email protected]

Friday 2 October, noon:
Guided tour of the intervention by Daniel Steegmann Mangrané at the Umbracle del Parc de la Ciutadella by the artist and Latitudes.
Passeig Picasso, 13

Friday 2 October, 7pm:
Conversation moderated by Dora García with Miquel Bassols, Enric Berenguer, Rosa Calvet, Estela Paskvan and Montserrat Rodríguez, on the origins of the Biblioteca del Campo Freudiano de Barcelona, its founder Óscar Masotta and the Barcelona of 1977.
Avda. Diagonal 333, 3º 1ª
Limited seating. Reservations:
[email protected]

Friday 2 October, 7:30pm:
Guided tour of the intervention by David Bestué at the house of the former director of the Cosme Toda factory by the artist and Latitudes.
c/ Enric Prat de la Riba, 60
L’Hospitalet de Llobregat

Saturday 3 October, 10am:
Conversation between Dora García and the psychoanalyst and psychologist Xavier Esqué at the Biblioteca del Campo Freudiano around James Joyce and Jacques Lacan.
Avda. Diagonal 333, 3º 1ª
Limited seating. Reservations:
[email protected]

Sunday 4 October, noon:
Guided tour of the intervention by Rasmus Nilausen and Pere Llobera at the Jardines de La Central del Raval by the artists and Latitudes.
c/ Elisabets, 8

Additionally, ARCO Foundation offers ARCO Gallery Walks, five free guided tours around the galleries throughout the weekend. Limited places. Pre-registration required: [email protected]

Thursday 1 October
Route Eixample South
Meeting place: Galería Joan Prats at 5pm

Friday 2 October
Route Ciutat Vella – Born
Meeting place: Galería Senda at 11am

Route Montjuïc – L’Hospitalet
Meeting place: Galería Carles Taché at 5pm

Saturday 3 October
Route Ciutat Vella – Raval
Meeting place: etHALL at 11am

Route Eixample North
Meeting place: ADN Galería at 5pm

The Barcelona Gallery Weekend is an initiative of the Asociación de Galerías de Arte Contemporáneo Art Barcelona and is supported by the Ajuntament de Barcelona (ICUB), the Generalitat de Catalunya (ICEC), the Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte; and the Ajuntament de L’Hospitalet de Llobregat.

http://www.barcelonagalleryweekend.com/
Stacks Image 39


Symposium participation, "The Shock of Victory", Glasgow, 25 September 2015


Symposium participants: In the Shadow of the Hand, Sacha Kahir, Caleb Waldorf, Max Andrews of Latitudes, Angeliki Roussou, WHW (What, How and For Whom?). 

9.30am | Arrival and coffee
10am - 10.15am | Introduction by CCA Curator Remco de Blaaij and Dr Deborah Jackson
10.15am - 11am | In the Shadow of the Hand
11am - 11.45am | Angelika Roussou
11.45am - 12.30pm | Caleb Waldorf
1pm - 2pm | Lunch (provided)
2pm - 2.45pm | Sacha Kahir
3pm - 3.45pm | Sabina Sabolovic, WHW
3.45pm - 4.15pm | Break
4.15pm - 5pm | Max Andrews, Latitudes

The Shock of Victory is a programme consisting of an exhibition, a symposium organised in partnership with the University of Edinburgh and digital publication. Taking place exactly one year after the Scottish Independence Referendum of 18 September 2014, the programme proposes artistic approaches, techniques, provocations and motivations in a post-referendum reality departing from Scotland, but certainly not constrained by it.

The programme takes its title from the pivotal essay ‘The Shock of Victory’ from 2007, by anarchist and scholar David Graeber, in which he argues that protesters often have difficulty in recognising their moments of success. Accompanying the exhibition the symposium allows for a timely re-consideration of the complexities of the relations between alternative and established (art) institutions that might have been sparked by political moments such as the Scottish Independence Referendum of 2014.

The underpinning emphasis is on the ‘organisational turn’, a shift from hierarchical to self-organised models of organisation. In particular the focus is on the potency of radical (artistic) practices and ideas, which propose imaginative ways of organising – collectivism, anarchism, activism, networks, and self-organising. Can we think of a new artistic landscape that might have been formed? How do we organise ourselves in such times?


 Article by Max Andrews published in Frieze, October 2013.

Max Andrews from Latitudes will offer a perspective on recent cultural politics in Barcelona. Looking in particular at visual art institutions, the 'open submission' format has become a pervasive tool. As an extraction of a democratic process, such an apparently accountable mechansim can nevertheless be complicit in a neo-liberal agenda, undermining institutional robustness and advocating continual 'present-ness'.

Other independent and self-organised realities do of course exist, and following recent municipal elections the political tide offers the promise of change. With reference to art practices that have connected with specific moments of Catalan social history, some contemporary case studies show a thinking around site, scale, longevity and depth – and perhaps reveal a connection with Scotland.
 

Organised in partnership with the University of Edinburgh.
Co-convened by Dr Deborah Jackson.
Funded by The University of Edinburgh’s Innovation Initiative Grant.


CCA, 350 Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow G2 3JD, UK


Related content:

Two texts by Manuel Segade and Max Andrews analyse the current Spanish art scene 16 October 2013

This is the blog of the independent curatorial office Latitudes. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter.
All photos:
Latitudes | www.lttds.org (except when noted otherwise in the photo caption)
Work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Stacks Image 39


Session with first year participants of the MA Curatorial Practice at the California College of the Arts (CCA), San Francisco, 8 September

Photo: Arash Fayez.  

On September 8, 2015, Latitudes led a 3h session with the participants of the first year of the MA in Curatorial Practice at the California College of the Arts (CCA) in San Francisco. This was our last day as residents at the Kadist Art Foundation.

As a mode of introduction, we presented a range of projects we have worked on and referred to the closed-door seminar ‘The Near-Future Artworlds Curatorial Disruption Foresight Group’, we had led a week earlier with the participation of colleagues and art professionals – an informal dialogue about the future of contemporary art institutions, and more particularly concerned with programming speeds, institutional scale, and periodicity. 

For the second part of the evening, we split the group in three and asked them to prepare descriptions of hypothetical art organisations and to reflect on urban/ non-urban contexts and mission statements. 


RELATED CONTENT:


This is the blog of the independent curatorial office Latitudes. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter.
All photos: 
Latitudes | www.lttds.org (except when noted otherwise in the photo caption)
Work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Stacks Image 39


Latitudes contribution to Kadist Art Foundation's 'One Sentence Exhibition'


To visit the exhibition,
please check ose.kadist.org

Recognizing that not everyone can visit Kadist Art Foundation venues in Paris or San Francisco, Kadist recently inaugurated a series of online projects with artists and curators around the world.

First of these initiatives is the One Sentence Exhibition (OSE), for which the foundation invites curators to write or choose a single sentence, making each word in the sentence a hyperlink to an image, video, text or website. As a result, the One Sentence Exhibition becomes a compact architecture, accompanying the reader as they explore far-reaching corners of the internet. 

Following on from the contributions by Rudolf Frieling (Media Arts Curator at SFMOMA) and Nato Thompson (Chief Curator at Creative Time) to OSE series, Latitudes has chosen the statement "A CLOTH OF COTTON WRAPPED AROUND A HORSESHOE OF IRON TOSSED UPON THE CREST OF A WAVE" by Lawrence Weiner in English, Spanish and Catalan, commissioned for his 2008 solo exhibition THE CREST OF A WAVE at the Fundació Suñol in Barcelona.

Sugar packets where freely distributed during the duration of the exhibition around Barcelona. Photo: Pierre-Jean Moulis.

Originally distributed as a free ephemeral sculpture on 300,000 sugar sachets and presented on the wall of the exhibition space, Weiner’s striking typographic rendition of the statement triggers a chronicle of mercantile, maritime and equestrian power, of trade and occupation, of spheres of influence and change, a memory of matter and of language.
 
Lawrence Weiner tote bag. Available from http://www.lttds.org/totes/weiner/

The statement is also silkscreened on the commemorative limited edition tote bag that celebrated Latitudes' 10th anniversary in Spring 2015.

As elaborated by Latitudes in the exhibition guide, "A CLOTH OF COTTON WRAPPED AROUND A HORSESHOE OF IRON TOSSED UPON THE CREST OF A WAVE indicates an object record of early human technologies (woven textiles, reusable protection for the hooves of working animals) and a marine setting. Weiner’s phrase facilitates a richly ambiguous material and symbolic universe. Why is the horseshoe wrapped? What story, personal or historical, might account for the event that is described? The artist’s statement leaves such questions open for us to consider. It is known that muslin and calico was brought to Spain by the Arab traders in the 1st Century. After the Conquest of Hispania during the 7th Century, facilitated by the Muslim cavalry’s more agile horses, cotton was cultivated by the Moors in Spain. Barcelona’s industrialization in the late 1700s and early 1800s was driven by the printing of calico and later the spinning and weaving of cotton. [1]


Poster of the exhibition at Fundació Suñol's Nivell Zero space, Barcelona.

In the manner of a biography of substances, such as Mark Kurlansky’s books Cod and Salt, A CLOTH OF COTTON... thus triggers a chronicle of mercantile, maritime and equestrian power, of trade and occupation, of spheres of influence and change, a memory of matter and of language. [2]" (...) 

(...) The statement is distributed on a sugar packet throughout a selection of Barcelona bars and cafés during the city's Mercè Festival and for the duration of the exhibition – a sweet gift to accompany one’s café con leche,
cortado, carajillo, or conversation. Printed on hundreds of thousands of standard 7 gram white sugar sachets – sugar production technology too was spread into Spain by Moorish occupation – Weiner’s striking typographic rendition of the phrase in red and yellow (the colours of both the Catalan and the Spanish flag) is accompanied by an emblem which evokes the trajectory of a certain horseshoe over a wave in diagrammatic form.


View of Lawrence Weiner's piece at the patio space of Fundació Suñol, Barcelona.

(...) On the five metre-high wall of the exterior space [of  Fundació Suñol’s Nivell Zero] we read A CLOTH OF COTTON WRAPPED AROUND A HORSESHOE OF IRON TOSSED UPON THE CREST OF A WAVE painted in Catalan, Spanish and English. The use of the same stencil font as the sugar packet layout suggests a method of functional and clear application which reinforces the fact that Weiner is dealing with the language in terms of modification and use. [3] The word for a company which produces typefaces – a foundry – neatly preserves a link to a time when type was cast from metal, in much the same way as horseshoes are made from iron."

Ceremony of the 2008 ACCA (Art Critics Association) awards which granted Fundació Suñol the best art programme of the year – a season that included two projects curated by Latitudes.

[1] See J.K.J. Thomson, A Distinctive Industrialization: Cotton in Barcelona 1728-1832, Cambridge University
Press, 2003.

[2] Salt: A World History, Walker and Co., 2001; Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World, Walker
and Co., 1997.

[3] The font is FF Offline Regular, designed by Roelof Mulder in 1988.

This is the blog of the independent curatorial office Latitudes. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter.
All photos:
Latitudes | www.lttds.org (except when noted otherwise in the photo caption)
Work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Stacks Image 39


Instagram takeover of Kadist Art Foundation in San Francisco


As part of Latitudes' residency at Kadist Art Foundation's instagram, we are taking over their instagram [@kadistfoundation] for the next 10 days. 

You can follow the hashtags #‎artistnotatthestudiocuratornotattheoffice‬ ‪#‎LatitudesBarcelona‬ ‪#‎IncidentsOfTravel‬ 

Today we've posted pictures of the first Incidents Of Travel artist-led day tour, a day spent with Megan and Rick Prelinger, founders of the Prelinger Library, "An appropriation-friendly collection of books, periodicals and print ephemera, open to the public in downtown San Francisco". The library "is a free-offering, an installation, a workshop, an extension of our living-room" and holds some 30,000 bound objects, 60,000 loose sheets and 10,000 zines following a unique home-made "geospatial arrangement scheme". Megan and Rick have described the project as never static and compared it to "a long-cooking pot of stew, [that] continuously takes in new ingredients while also reducing down, becoming richer and more concentrated with time".

Posts will be progressively archived in this storify.

Forthcoming events: 

29 August: Closed-door seminar 'Near-Future Artworlds Curatorial Disruption Foresight Group' #NFACDFG;

1 September: Launch of Latitudes' contribution to the One Sentence Exhibition online initiative;

3 September: #‎IncidentsOfTravel‬ with Amy Balkin;

4 September: #‎IncidentsOfTravel‬ with Will Brown.

This is the blog of the independent curatorial office Latitudes. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter.
All photos:
Latitudes | www.lttds.org (except when noted otherwise in the photo caption)
Work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Stacks Image 39


Residency at the Kadist Art Foundation, San Francisco, 26 August–9 September 2015

 Kadist Art Foundation, San Francisco, 2014 (exterior view). Photo: Arash Fayez, Courtesy Kadist Art Foundation.

Between 26 August–9 September 2015 Latitudes will be in residency at Kadist Art Foundation in San Francisco. During this time, and following its two previous iterations in Mexico City (Casa del Lago, 2012) and Hong Kong (Spring Workshop, 2013), Latitudes will do a new iteration of 'Incidents of Travel' exploring San Francisco. Three specially-commissioned tours by artists Amy Balkin, the artist collective Will Brown (a collaborative project of David Kasprzak, Jordan Stein, and Lindsey White) and outsider librarians Megan and Rick Prelinger as expanded studio visits will focus on the Bay Area and link to Latitudes's current research around the carbon cycle

You can follow the tours via Kadist's Instagram as part of the 'Artist not at the Studio, Curator not at the Office' Latitudes' takeover, and as a series of posts that will be published on this channel.
 

In the afternoon of August 29, Latitudes will co-host a 'Near-Future Artworlds Curatorial Disruption Foresight Group', a workshop which extends the seminar recently developed in May for the International Curatorial Retreat in Bari, Italy. 

The 'Near-Future Artworlds Curatorial Disruption Foresight Group' is a forum for informal dialogue about megatrends and the future of contemporary art institutions

In the same way that the Internet has untethered television from fixed schedules and newspapers from print deadlines, the first meeting broadly addressed to what degree the organizational forms of art institutions are embracing or resisting similar transformations through various curatorial/editorial prototypes and prognosticative use-case scenarios.

Convened by the Barcelona-based curatorial office Latitudes together with
Kadist Art Foundation, this second meeting will bring together individuals and expertise in the Bay Area with an active interest in institutional prototyping and emergent usership. With an emphasis on cross-pollination between design thinking and curatorial thinking, the meeting will discuss, among other things, the notion of the post-disciplinary, and the question of appropriate speeds or periodicities of institutions.

In order to be conducive to freedom of interaction, the meeting is held under the Chatham House Rule. This allows participants to express personal views, to listen, reflect and gather insights with a clear distinction from the position of their employers and/or the policies of any associated organization. Participation is expected, but there will be no resolutions issued, no votes undertaken, and no policy statements proposed.


Stacks Image 39


Latitudes' limited edition tote bags presented in the Asia Art Archive's exhibition "A short history of the art book bag (and the things that go in them)"


We are delighted that from August 24 (and until October 24), Latitudes' limited edition tote bags by Lawrence Weiner, Haegue Yang, Ignasi Aballí and Mariana Castillo Deball, will be presented in Hong Kong as part of Asia Art Archive (AAA)'s exhibition 15th anniversary programme "15 Invitations | a short history of the art book bag".

Organised by AAA Public Programmes Curator Ingrid Chu, the show explores the international phenomenon of the 'art book bag' in "a short history of the art book bag (and the things that go in them)". The exhibition features 'the things that go in them'—art publications, magazines, and related ephemera—alongside a vast array of these popular totes in the AAA Library. Chu has invited artists, curators, art book fair organisers, and print and online publishers to provide insight into the changing modes of knowledge production and circulation, and their influence on the recent art of Asia through Field Notes.

Latitudes' totes are presented under 'Sites for Art', the first of five categories that structure the show – others being 'Carriers of Knowledge', 'Markers of Access', 'Badges of Dissent', 'Goods of Desire'). Courtesy of Asia Art Archive.
 
Each Latitudes' tote is accompanied by a publication that relates to each artist: Lawrence Weiner will contain the leaflet of his 2008 exhibition at Fundació Suñol, Haegue Yang will include the publication which features an essay by Max Andrews' of Latitudes; Ignasi Aballí's tote will include his 2009 publication 'Nothing, Or Something' inside and Mariana Castillo Deball will have 'Amikejo', the exhibition catalogue of the 2011 cycle one of which presented works by Castillo Deball and Irene Kopelman.

Installation view of a short history of the art book bag (and the things that go in them) exhibition at Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong, 24 August–24 October 2015. Courtesy of Asia Art Archive.

Zine for "a short history of the art book bag (and the things that go in them)" exhibition at Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong, 24 August–24 October 2015. Courtesy of Asia Art Archive.
 
 Installation view of 'Carriers of Knowledge' section in "a short history of the art book bag (and the things that go in them)" exhibition at Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong, 24 August–24 October 2015. Courtesy of Asia Art Archive.
 
 Installation view of 'Badges of Dissent' section in "a short history of the art book bag (and the things that go in them)" exhibition at Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong, 24 August–24 October 2015. Courtesy of Asia Art Archive.

 Installation view of 'Goods of Desire' section in "a short history of the art book bag (and the things that go in them)" exhibition at Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong, 24 August–24 October 2015. Courtesy of Asia Art Archive.



RELATED CONTENT:

Lead Facilitators, Curating Lab 2014–Curatorial Intensive, National University of Singapore (11–14 June), symposium (14 June, 15–17h) and field trip to Hong Kong (16–20 June)
30 May 2014

A day at Hong Kong's Asia Art Archive, 31 January 2013, 8 July 2013

"Archive as Method: An Interview with Chantal Wong, Hammad Nasar and Lydia Ngai" of the Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong. Final #OpenCurating interview 1 May 2013
 
Latitudes' Open Day at Spring Workshop on 2 February 2013 9 February 2013

 
Archive of social media posts related to "Incidents of Travel" tours and photo-documentation. 



This is the blog of the independent curatorial office Latitudes. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter.
All photos:
Latitudes | www.lttds.org 

Stacks Image 39


Latitudes' "out of office" 2014–2015 season

It's that end-of-the-season time of the year again. It has become a tradition for Latitudes (see the 2008-9, 2009-10, 2010-11, 2011-12, 2012–13, 2013–14 posts) to mark the summer break, not by presenting a written memo of activities or a financial statement, but with a 'behind the scenes' post filled with photos revisiting moments from the year gone by. So here are some glimpses from September 2014 to August 2015.

Slowing down is rather relative this Summer, as at the end of July we embarked on a two-week trip to The Banff Centre in Canada to be Guest Faculty of one of its thematic residencies, 'Blueprint for Happiness' led by British artists Heather & Ivan Morison. At the end of August, we will be in residency at Kadist Art Foundation in San Francisco for another two weeks. 

Milestones during the first part of 2015 were two-fold: after months of technical tweaking and editorial wrangling, we launched our newly designed website in February and secondly, this Spring Latitudes celebrated its 10th anniversary.

Have a great holiday, más en septiembre! 

7 October 2014: Latitudes hosted the second year students of the MA Curating Contemporary Art at the Royal College of Art, London, and took the opportunity of presenting and reflecting on our collaborations with three Catalan artists – Martí Anson, Ignasi Aballí and Francesc Ruiz

 Francesc Ruiz presenting his work to the RCA students.

Trip reporting: We reported from the field including at Madrid's Apertura in September, London's Frieze week in October, David Jablonowski's "Hype Cycle" at Fons Welters during Amsterdam's Art Weekend in November, and from Bordeaux in January, to Bari in May.

Writing: This year Max Andrews has joined frieze as Contributing Editor – where he has been writing since 2004. His writing has been more frequent in recent months as frieze have published reviews on Maria Thereza Alves at CAAC in Sevilla, the group show "What cannot be used is forgotten" at CAPC Bordeaux, a profile of Nicholas Mangan and a review of the Spanish and Latin American Pavilions at the Venice Biennale. Mariana Cánepa Luna also published an interview with Mangan in Mousse Magazine last February.

New website: Our homemade website finally saw the light of day in February. As explained in this post, the website features new elements such as the 'Cover Story' (more on that in the next paragraph), sliding photo galleries, a tidied-up sidebar with a calendar of events, tags to filter projects by 'year' or 'exhibition', etc.

'Cover Story': More writing has emerged through the new monthly section "Cover Story" on our home page (check out the archive of this section):

March 2015: Focused on a single artwork: Wilfredo Prieto's ‘Grasa, jabón y plátano’ (2006); 

April 2015: Revisited a peculiar site: the Connaught Road West flyover, in Hong Kong;


April 2015 Cover Story.

May 2015: Honoured two artistazos: Lawrence Weiner and Sergi Aguilar and a whisky-enhanced chat on the Barcelona shore in October 2008; 


June 2015: Visited Ignasi Aballí at his Raval studio.

Summer 2015: Orbited around Australian artist Nicholas Mangan, an artist with whom Latitudes just did an in conversation in the context of his solo exhibition "Ancient Lights" at Chisenhale, London and whose work has been the focus in Max Andrews' Frieze text as well as in Mariana Cánepa Luna's interview in the February-March issue of Mousse Magazine


 Summer 2015 Cover Story (plus the archive here).

26 February, ARCOmadrid: On jury duty visiting the galleries participating in the #Opening section of the art fair, in order to select its best stand. The award was given to Barcelona-based gallery etHALL which presented works by Martin Vitaliti and Sergio Prego.

 

Spring, celebration time! Later in May we celebrated our 10th anniversary (well, officially it was in April!) launching a series of limited editions in the form of tote bags by four artists that have a special place in our hearts and with whom we have collaborated with in the past: Lawrence Weiner (New York, 1942), Haegue Yang (Seoul, 1971), Ignasi Aballí (Barcelona, 1958) and Mariana Castillo Deball (Mexico City, 1975). Below is a glimpse from the making of the tote bags at Print Workers Barcelona, and here's where you can place your order.

 Photolith design for the tote bag by Haegue Yang – realised in collaboration with OK-RM. 
 Silkscreen process of Lawrence Weiner's design. Photo: Print Workers.
 Silkscreening Ignasi Aballí's tote. Photo: Print Workers.
 Silkscreening Mariana Castillo Deball tote. Photo: Print Workers.
 Silkscreening the credit for each bag in the inside pocket. Photo: Print Workers.
Homemade photo studio documenting the totes. Results of the photo shoot here.

9–13 May 2015: After an intense week of Biennale overdose in Venice, we traveled to Bari to join Vessel and MADA's 2015 International Curatorial Retreat as two of its tutors. The week was far from being a retreat, it was more like an "intensive" – though it certainly was a "treat". Highly interesting debates and conversations on-and-off the scheduled activities of lectures and break-out sessions emerged in places such as a cave or in the nearby town Monopoli – no direct link to the property trading board game. Here a report from fellow tutor Dr. Alexandra Ross
  
 Visiting the market. Photo: Piero Percoco.
Market stall selling tomatoes of all kinds and origins.
 Chef Boris Portnoy doing some dinner prep at Doppelgaenger gallery/home.
 Due to a fire in Rome's airport, our flight was cancelled and we had to rearrange our travel, spending another day in Bari. We therefore visited (we were in fact their only visitors) the Palazzo dell'Acquedotto Pugliese di Bari, decorated by roman designer Duilio Cambellotti
A food detour to purchase delightful spicy rucola in the Mercato ex Manifattura Bari, in the Quartiere Libertà.


3–5 June 2015: Max Andrews participated in the annual 'Invest Conference 2015' organised by Stroom den Haag, in The Hague, consisting of "an incentive for the artistic development of recently graduated artists who have received the PRO Invest subsidy in the year before. A group of ten international curators is asked to visit these artists in their studios and meet with the art scene of The Hague." 

  Above (visiting Machteld Rullens) and following photographs by Myung Feyen. Courtesy Stroom den Haag.

7 July 2015: For our last public event of the year we joined Melbourne artist Nicholas Mangan for an in conversation in the context of his solo show 'Ancient Lights' that opened a few days earlier at Chisenhale Gallery in London. Mint and Lime Films video documented the talk – watch it from Chisenhale's website / Vimeo.

Vinyl listing the exhibition events.


 (Above) Photos by Manuela Barczewski.


27 July–7 August 2015: Guest Faculty of the Thematic Residency 'Blueprint for Happiness' at The Banff Centre, Canada. We joined the group in the middle two weeks of the six week programme led by British artists Heather and Ivan Morison

View of The Banff Centre from our bedroom in Lloyd Hall.
Banff TV announcing Latitudes' talk on 28 July, 4pm. 

 Blueprint for Happiness' participants.
 Views from Latitudes' studio in the Jeanne & Peter Lougheed Building.
 Studio visit with "Blueprint for Happiness" participant Vanessa Kwan.
 Studio visit with "Blueprint for Happiness" participant Robert Cram.
Inevitable photo of a deer walking around Banff.
Stunning evening sunset over the Bow River after a storm with a double rainbow.

While in Banff, Latitudes led three seminars bringing forward a series of case studies as well as focussing on a number of artists whose practice has dealt with public space in different geographical contexts. We also undertook studio visits with each of the 11 resident artists, and participated in a field trip to Calgary to visit the HQ of art construction company Heavy Industries and the Esker Foundation Contemporary Art Gallery


 (School) Field trip to Calgary to visit Heavy Industries fabricators and the Esker Foundation. 
 Even though the school bus seats were no longer in scale to our adult bodies, interesting chats happened over the 2 hours of each trajectory.

On Sunday 2 August, Latitudes hosted a closed-door evening film programme screening works by Spanish artist Emilio Moreno, Irish artist Sean Lynch and Australian artist Nicholas Mangan. The three films share a focus on public sculptures, monuments or buildings that have been displaced from their original context. 

 Flicking through some of the 4,000 artist books at Banff library.


Most of this past months' activity has been invested in preparing for 2015–16 projects: Firstly, 'Compositions' a series of five artistic interventions by six artists active in the Barcelona art scene: David Bestué (Barcelona, 1980. Lives in Barcelona); Dora García (Valladolid, 1965. Lives in Barcelona), Jordi Mitjà (Figueres, 1970. Lives between Lladó and Banyoles); Rasmus Nilausen (Copenhagen, 1980. Lives in Barcelona) & Pere Llobera (Barcelona, 1970. Lives in Barcelona) and Daniel Steegmann Mangrané (Barcelona, 1977. Lives in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil), which will take place in the context of the first Barcelona Gallery Weekend (1–4 October 2015). 

Façade of Cosme Toda in L'Hospitalet municipality (Barcelona) part of a 1920s factory complex where David Bestué will present his intervention in the context of the first Barcelona Gallery Weekend, 1–4 October 2015.
Site visit to the Umbracle with Daniel Steegmann Mangrané.


Secondly, we've been working on the forthcoming solo exhibition of Venezuelan-born, Barcelona-based artist José Antonio Hernández-Díez which will be on view at La Capella MACBA from March 2016. Onwards!


Digging through documentation in MACBA library in preparation for José Antonio Hernández-Díez exhibition.

RELATED CONTENT:

Latitudes 'Out of office' 2013–14, 31 July 2014;
Latitudes' "out of office" photo album, 2012–2013 season, 31 July 2013;
Latitudes' "out of office" photo album 2011–2012, 31 July 2012;
Latitudes 'out of office' photo album 2010–11 season, 1 August 2011;
Latitudes 'out of office' photo album 2009–10 season, 30 July 2010;
Latitudes' "out of office" photo album 2008-9, 30 July 2009.


This is the blog of the independent curatorial office Latitudes. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter.
All photos:
Latitudes | www.lttds.org (except when noted otherwise in the photo caption)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Stacks Image 39


Latitudes publications acquired by the Paul D. Fleck Library & Archives, The Banff Centre

The Paul D. Fleck Library & Archives is on the second floor of the Kinnear Centre building at The Banff Centre.
Views from the Paul D. Fleck Library & Archives.

We are delighted that a large selection of Latitudes'-edited publications is now available for public consultation at the Paul D. Fleck Library and Archives in The Banff Centre, Banff, Canada. Banff becomes the second location to host the set of Latitudes’s publications, which are also available for reference at the Library of the MACBA Study Centre, Barcelona.



Latitudes publications and others from the reading list of the 'Blueprint for Happiness' Thematic Residency, featured shelf at the Banff Library.


The following publications can be found in Banff's library online catalogue:

Amikejo
Catalogue of the exhibition series, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León (MUSAC), León
April 2012

United Alternative Energies
Christina Hemauer & Roman Keller
Catalogue of the exhibition, Aarhus Art Building, Centre for Contemporary Art, Århus
January 2012

Campus
Catalogue of the project, Espai Cultural Caja Madrid, Barcelona
July 2011


Martí Anson, Mataró Chauffeur Service
Catalogue of the project, 'No Soul For Sale', Tate Modern, London
January 2011


Portscapes
Catalogue of the commission series and exhibition 'Portscapes', Port of Rotterdam / Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam
February 2010

The Last Newspaper
Catalogue of the exhibition 'The Last Newspaper', New Museum, New York
October–December 2010

Simon Fujiwara: The Incest Museum–A Guide
Artist book published in the context of the exhibition 'Provenances', Umberto di Marino Arte Contemporaneo, Naples
May 2009

Ignasi Aballí: 没有,有 Nothing, or Something
Catalogue of the exhibition, Suitcase Art Projects, Beijing
July 2009


Greenwashing. Ambiente: Pericoli, Promesse e Perplessità (Greenwashing. Environment: Perils, Promises and Perplexities)
Catalogue of the exhibition, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin
February 2008


Lawrence Weiner: THE CREST OF A WAVE
Booklet of the exhibition, Fundació Suñol, Barcelona
October 2008


Ecology, Luxury & Degradation
UOVO #14
Summer 2007

  
LAND, ART: A Cultural Ecology Handbook

RSA and Arts Council England
December 2006


Book shelves at the Paul D. Fleck Library & Archives.

RELATED CONTENT:

Where to find the publications edited by Latitudes? 22 April 2012



This is the blog of the independent curatorial office Latitudes. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter.
All photos:
Latitudes | www.lttds.org 

Stacks Image 39



Cookies Advice: We use cookies. If you continue browsing, we consider that you accept their use. Aviso de Cookies: Utilizamos cookies. Si continua navegando, consideramos que acepta su uso.