PUBLICS Parahosting began in the Autumn of 2018 and has grown into a key method of decentering its own curatorial authorship, and as an essential means of working together without boundaries or containment. Through Parahosting PUBLICS supports its para-sites, para-institutions, and para-guests, and has grown into a flexible, evolving, expanding, and sometimes messy, programme. In 2020–2021 PUBLICS Parahosted curatorial studio Shimmer (Eloise Sweetman and Jason Hendrik Hansma) with a year-long project ACROSS THE WAY WITH… where artists, poets, philosophers, and curators from around the world were invited to explore the notion of intimacy through online readings. 

Latitudes collaborated with PUBLICS in September 2019 as a partner organisation in the first edition of the multidisciplinary arts festival Today is Our Tomorrow initiated by PUBLICS, presenting the performance “Yegua-Yeta-Yuta” (2015-ongoing) by Argentina-born, Amsterdam-based artist Mercedes Azpilicueta. 

In 2021, PUBLICS supported the production of Laia Estruch’s “Ocells Perduts” (Stray Birds, 2021), a new work commissioned for the exhibition “Panorama 21. Notes for an Eye Fire” at MACBA Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona, October 2021–February 2022.

About PUBLICS

PUBLICS is a curatorial agency with a dedicated library, event space and reading room in Helsinki, Finland. As such PUBLICS is an educational resource where critical learning, knowledge production and discursive programming are integral to its curatorial approach. Under the artistic direction of curator Paul O’Neill, with program manager Eliisa Suvanto, PUBLICS explores a “work together” institutional model with multiple overlapping objectives, thematic strands and collaborations. 

https://www.publics.fi

About Laia Estruch

Laia Estruch’s practice hinges on the voice as a material reality—an expressive force and a medium that is expelled from the body. Over the last decade, her work has broached the fields of sculpture and contemporary art, spoken word, and experimental theatre, undertaking a kind of no-frills exploration of the voice’s communicative and emotive grammar while probing the conventions of staging it. Her interest focuses on the extremities and porosity of the spoken word in its relationship with song and raw sound. The articulation of noises and meanings often encompasses and exceeds human vocal language: breathing, exclamation, mumbling, ululation, cries and whispers. The voice is recast as an extraordinary, supra-human object. Estruch’s recent performances have involved scenes and routines in which her body is suspended above the ground, be it via the playground-like structures and inflatables of “Moat” (2016–2018), the swimming pool setting of “Crol” (2019), the hanging stage of “Ganivet” (2020–2021) or the monumental bird trap of “Ocells Perduts” (2021–2022).

Laia Estruch has a Bachelor’s Degree in Fine Arts from the Universitat de Barcelona (2010) and also studied at The Cooper Union, New York (2010). She has had solo exhibitions at the Fundació Joan Brossa, Barcelona (2020–2021); Capella de Sant Roc, Valls (2019); and Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona (2019). Her group exhibitions include “Panorama 21: Apunts per a un incendi dels ulls” MACBA Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (2021–2022), “La cuestión es ir tirando”, Centro Cultural de España, Mexico City (2020), and “Back to School”, Fundación Rafael Botí, Córdoba (2018). In 2022 she won the 6th Premio Cervezas Alhambra de Arte Emergente (Alhambra Beer Award for Emerging Art) and in 2021 she was awarded the Premi Ciutat de Barcelona (City of Barcelona Prize) in the category of Visual Arts.

https://laiaestruch.com

About Latitudes 

Find out more on https://www.lttds.org/about/

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