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Cover Story, October 2022: Stray Ornithologies—Laia Estruch

 

October 2022 cover story.


The October 2022 monthly Cover Story “Stray Ornithologies—Laia Estruch” is now up on our homepage: www.lttds.org

“Within the context of PUBLICS’ annual gathering Today Is Our Tomorrow, on 8 October Laia Estruch and Irina Mutt will lead a workshop in Helsinki as part of this year’s programme focusing on the presentness of the voice in its many sonic forms, vocal modes and acoustic modalities. Continue reading 

After October 2022 this story will be archived here.

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


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Workshop with PUBLICS Youth for TODAY IS OUR TOMORROW 2022

(Above and below) Members of PUBLICS Youth with Irina Mutt during their workshop in Lammassaari, 3 August 2022. Photos by Micol Curatolo.


Within the context of PUBLICS’ annual gathering Today Is Our Tomorrow in Helsinki, artist Laia Estruch and curator Irina Mutt will lead a workshop on October 8th, 2022, as part of this year’s programme focusing on the presentness of the voice in its many sonic forms, vocal modes and acoustic modalities. 

This workshop culminates a series of encounters, part of Latitudes’ ongoing Parahosting at PUBLICS, that have taken place over the summer of 2022 in collaboration with PUBLICS Youth, an education initiative for Helsinki-based 18-21-year-olds.

Following a principle of a tour to bodies rather than to space, the sessions have encompassed new embodiments of Estruch’s “Ocells Perduts” (Stray Birds) (2021), a work originally produced for MACBA’s exhibition “Panorama 21. Notes for an Eye Fire”, curated by Latitudes and Hiuwai Chu, and supported by PUBLICS.



Latitudes has been collaborating with Laia Estruch since early 2020 in preparation for a year-long programme to be hosted at the Helsinki-based curatorial and commissioning agency PUBLICS, based around the notion of a partial, distributed, and fragmentary retrospective of her artistic practice. The pandemic altered those plans and in the summer of 2020, the invitation to curate MACBA’s first Panorama triennial (Panorama 21: Apunts per a un incendi dels ulls”) came along, for which Laia presented the new commission Ocells Perduts” (2021). The project was produced with the support of PUBLICS, and for the research phase, Laia received the support of the beca Premis Barcelona 2020 of the Ajuntament de Barcelona.


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"Barcelona / Such a beautiful horizon: Critical social infrastructure to promote art scene health resilience" sessions with BAR Tool 2018–19 participants

Poster produced for the 2015 seminar at the Kadist Art Foundation, San Francisco. Photo: Latitudes.

Latitudes has been invited to lead three closed-door sessions with BAR Tool's 2018–19 participants Milagros Bedoya, Arash Fayez, Adëláide Feriot, Fran Glez, Céline Mathieu, Marina Salvo, Gabriella Torres-Ferrer. The sessions will take place on October 29, 2018; January 22 and March 5, 2019.

Titled "Barcelona / Such a beautiful horizon: Critical social infrastructure to promote art scene health resilience", the three-part seminar will draw on the qualitative analysis of the legacy of three meetings of the "Near Future Artworlds Curatorial Foresight Disruption Group" convened in 2015 (Vessel–MADA International Curatorial Retreat, Bari, Italy; Kadist Art Foundation, San Francisco, USA; Eastside Projects, Birmingham, UK). The invitation is to collectively instigate a collective systematic review of proposed decisive factors that underpin the psychological fitness and physical well-being of a city art scene, with Barcelona as a case study.

With a focus on developing taxonomies and diagnostics, as well as therapies and triage, this strand of BAR Tool will culminate in a series of institutional simulations and operations. Viva! Barcelona! Such a beautiful horizon!

BAR TOOL is a practice-based training program articulated around research, production and presentation processes. Conceived by BAR project in collaboration with Fundació Antoni Tàpies and Fabra i Coats – Art Factory, Barcelona.


RELATED CONTENT:

  • Cover Story—June 2018: Near-Future Artworlds Curatorial Disruption Foresight Group 4 June 2018
  • Sediments of the Geologic Time 4-week residency at the Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity 10 October 2017
  • Documentation of Latitudes' talks at the Athens Biennale summit and Tabakalera, Donostia-San Sebastián, November 2015 19 February 2016
  • 'Near-Future Artworlds Curatorial Disruption Foresight Group' seminar convenes in its third iteration in Birmingham's Eastside Projects, 15 November 2015 11 November 2015
  • Session with first-year participants of the MA Curatorial Practice at the California College of the Arts (CCA), San Francisco, 8 September 15 September 2015
  • Guest Faculty of the Thematic Residency 'Blueprint for Happiness' at The Banff Centre, Canada, 27 July–8 August 2015 16 July 2015 
  • Tutors of the 2015 International Curatorial Retreat, 9–13 May, Bari (Italy) 17 May 2015 
  • Lead Facilitators, Curating Lab 2014–Curatorial Intensive, National University of Singapore (11–14 June), symposium (14 June, 15–17h) and a field trip to Hong Kong (16–20 June) 30 May 2014
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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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More from OMONOIA – Athens Biennale 2015–2017 on our December Cover Story

International Summit Synapse 1 at New Rex of the National Theatre of Greece. 'Session II: Rethinking Institutions': (from left to right) Leo Panitch, Maria Hlavajova, Adam Szymczyk, Amalia Zepou (moderator), Hilary Wainwright, Emily Pethick, Latitudes (Max Andrews & Mariana Cánepa Luna) © Eva Galatsanou.

The above picture by Eva Galatsanou was taken during 'Session II: Rethinking Institutions' one of the
Summit panels that launched OMONOIA, the Athens Biennale 2015–2017. Latitudes participated in this panel on November 18, as one of the speakers. Our current Cover Story on Latitudes' home page features this event at the National Theatre of Greece, New Rex.  

Below some more photos of that day and the working group meetings that took place at the former Bageion Hotel (18 Omonoia Square) on November 19, 2015.

 Omonoia Square. On the left the Bageion Hotel (with the orange banner), HQ of the Athens Biennial 2015–2017.
 
Omonoia Square from the first floor of the Bageion Hotel.

 Artistic Director Massimiliano Mollona, and Athens Biennale directors Xenia Kalpaktsoglou (left) and Poka-Yio (right) welcome guests to the second day of the Summit "Synapse 1: Introducing a laboratory for production post". 

 After the welcoming words, guests joined closed-door working groups sessions around the building on 'Cooperativism', 'Commons & Urban Welfare', 'Alternative Currencies' and 'Solidarity Networks'.

 10am–1pm: Latitudes joined the 'Commons & Urban Welfare' working group which had representatives of Avtonomi Akadimia (GR), Omada Metavasis / Transition (GR), Omikron Project (GR), Sarantaporo (GR), Votanikos Kipos Squat (GR), Athens Wireless Metropolitan Network (TBC) (GR), Green Park (TBC) (GR), Luigi Coppola (Parco Commune dei Frutti Minori, IT), Sylvia de Fanti (Teatro Valle, IT) and Federica Giardini.

2–5pm: During the Open Assembly, artist, activist and Berlin-based curator Margarita Tsomou feeds back to the audience what was discussed during the 'Solidarity Networks' working group which had representatives from Refugees Welcome (GR), Solidarity4all (GR), HYLE[Ύλη]matter (GR), Notara Squat (TBC) (GR), The Other Human (TBC) (GR), Metropolitan Community Clinic at Helliniko (GR), European Village (GR), Ivor Stodolsky (Perpetuum Mobile) (NO).

Potent voices like that of Tsomou raised questions about a proposed 'open' biennale format and the possible (in)adequacy of visual arts to host activism. "I do my activism in the street" – she exclaimed. (Tsomou has recently interviewed Adam Szymczyk (artistic director of documenta 14) for DIE ZEIT – download here.)

 Other speakers were more direct in their pragmatism and asked the forum "What do we have? Do we have a hammer? Do we have chairs?" to which Mollona and Poka-Yio responded the biennial has the Bageion Hotel building and in-kind sponsorship for production, everything else has to be decided and invented collectively for the next two years. 

 End of the Open Assembly at the Bageion Hotel.

 Stairs of the Bageion Hotel.


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'Near-Future Artworlds Curatorial Disruption Foresight Group' seminar convenes in its third iteration in Birmingham's Eastside Projects, 15 November 2015

Façade of Eastside Projects in Birmingham.

Latitudes
will lead a day-long session on November 15, one of the two-day self-reflective evaluation sessions that the Extra Special People (ESP) Associate scheme programme of Eastside Projects is organising under the title "Re-Imagining ESP II".

Taking place during the weekend of the 14–15 November in Birmingham, UK, these two sessions are aimed at stimulating a conversation amongst the current members of the practice-led peer support network ESP in order to explore the possibility of them becoming active participants and even producers instead of receivers of predefined formats and contents.


This will be the third iteration of the “Near-Future Artworlds...” meetings (following those in Bari and San Francisco) – a forum for informal dialogue about megatrends and the future of contemporary art institutions.  

The first meeting in Bari broadly addressed to what degree organisational forms of art institutions are embracing or resisting similar transformations through various curatorial/editorial prototypes and prognosticative use-case scenarios. With an emphasis on cross-pollination between design thinking and curatorial thinking, the second meeting in San Francisco broached, among other things, the notion of the post-disciplinary, and the question of appropriate speeds or periodicities institutions should follow


Poster produced for the seminar by Kadist Art Foundation, San Francisco.

In Birmingham, the session will collectively imagine a ‘What if?’ – a post-apocalyptic scenario in which an art ecology has to be regrown from the ground up. What would be most urgent in terms of organisation, facilities, and tools? The second part of the meeting will involve a practical exercise modelled to prototype initiatives that might be best suited to Birmingham’s real or imagined artistic, economic and social context.

In order to be conducive to freedom of interaction, these meetings are 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 are undertaken, and no policy statements proposed.


Archive photo of ESP activity. Courtesy: Eastside Projects.

Extra Special People (ESP)
is a practice-led peer support network organised by Eastside Projects that "works with artists, designers, curators and writers to support the development of work, ideas, connections and careers through a programme of events, opportunities, and projects. Members become active contributors to a practice-led peer support network and benefit from Eastside Projects’ experience of the contemporary art world and regional, national and international contacts."

Eastside Projects is an "internationally renowned centre of excellence based in a free public gallery imagined and organized by artists, in partnership with Birmingham City University." Eastside Projects is an Arts Council England National Portfolio Organisation, supported by the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Breakthrough Fund 2010-14, and Esmée Fairbairn Foundation.

Eastside Projects
86 Heath Mill Lane
Birmingham B9 4AR
0121-771-1778
www.eastsideprojects.org
www.extraspecialpeople.org


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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.
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LaPublika – Public sphere laboratory for artistic research, consonni, Donostia, 10–11 November 2015


Latitudes has been invited by consonni to give a two-day seminar and a public lecture in the context of LaPublika, a programme of activities concerning the way artistic practices construct the public sphere. The programme will take place over the next two years in the recently opened International Centre for Contemporary Culture Tabakalera in Donostia, on the 10 and 11 November, and is a joint initiative together with Donostia-San Sebastian European Cultural Capital 2016.

"Public sphere here is understood as spaces considered to be public (the street, the square, the city), as well as the internet or the communications media, and the mechanisms with which we participate in managing what is common (language, rites, norms, the aesthetic of collective processes). At a time when new social and civic paradigms are arising, LaPublika seeks to provide a framework of work and reflection upon those processes." (....) "In addition to the presence-based programme, all the activities have their version in podcast format on LaPublika’s radio-web, the central hub of the project, which is also backed up by programming involving interviews, radio spots and sound pieces."


Visitors at Robert Smithson's "Broken Circle" (1971), an event organised by Land Art Contemporary. Picture: Kunstbeeld.
Breaking Ground: Broken Circle/Spiral Hill, by Robert Smithson & Nancy Holt - See more at: http://ajuntament.barcelona.cat/lavirreina/en/activities/breaking-ground-broken-circlespiral-hill-robert-smithson-nancy-holt#sthash.8wxhhHQB.dpuf

Breaking Ground: Broken Circle/Spiral Hill, by Robert Smithson & Nancy Holt - See more at: http://ajuntament.barcelona.cat/lavirreina/en/activities/breaking-ground-broken-circlespiral-hill-robert-smithson-nancy-holt#sthash.8wxhhHQB.dpuf

Breaking Ground: Broken Circle/Spiral Hill, by Robert Smithson & Nancy Holt - See more at: http://ajuntament.barcelona.cat/lavirreina/en/activities/breaking-ground-broken-circlespiral-hill-robert-smithson-nancy-holt#sthash.8wxhhHQB.dpuf
Breaking Ground: Broken Circle/Spiral Hill, by Robert Smithson & Nancy Holt - See more at: http://ajuntament.barcelona.cat/lavirreina/en/activities/breaking-ground-broken-circlespiral-hill-robert-smithson-nancy-holt#sthash.8wxhhHQB.dpuf
Latitudes' workshop titled “Beyond the roundabout, or what’s public about public art?” will take the legacy of Land Art as a starting point – or more specifically, Robert Smithson’s notion of “continual movement” – to address the multiple temporalities which can constitute the form of an artwork in public space. Approaching projects (rather than beholding objects) the workshop will discuss artists who conceptualize or actualize their works against a backdrop of vast stretches of time or topological change. In the context of a networked culture which seems to offer an accelerating and horizontal concept of the public sphere, the workshop will furthermore address what is at stake when “digging deep” and slowing down.

 Production of Jan Dibbets' "6 Hours Tide Object with Correction of Perspective" (1969–2009) on 9 February 2009 the Port of Rotterdam, a beach that has now disappeared to become Maasvlakte 2. Photo: Latitudes.

For the public lecture on November 11, Latitudes will forgo a chronological account of its projects of the last decade, and instead attempt various transects through its curatorial projects determined by the public sphere, raw materials and their transformation. From the zinc which led to an Esperanto micro-nation, to the air of a Beijing shopping centre, or the dead trees of printed news, Latitudes will join some traits and ideas around “human resources”, extractive modernity, obsolescence and the carbon cycle.

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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. 


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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.
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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.


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Guest Faculty of the Thematic Residency ‘Blueprint for Happiness’ at The Banff Centre, Canada, 27 July–8 August 2015

(First) Views from the Vistas restaurant in the Sally Broden Building; (below) View from the Lloyd Hall building.

As Guest Faculty of the Visual + Digital Art thematic residencyBlueprint for Happiness’ – a five week programme starting July 13 led by British artists Heather and Ivan Morison – Latitudes will join the group in the middle two weeks of the programme (27 July–7 August). 

 Participants of the Blueprint for Happiness Thematic Residency.

 Some art-as-research tips for reference on one of the Glyde Hall fridges.

In Banff, Latitudes will lead a series of focused workshops bringing forward a series of case studies of (realised and unrealised) projects they have worked on as well as focusing on a number of artists whose practice has dealt with issues around public space in different geographical contexts. 

Latitudes will also undertake studio visits with each of the 11 resident artists, participate in field trips and organise a closed-door evening film programme with films 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.


Ignasi Aballí, AM-4826 Digital Anemometer from Taking Measures (2009). Installation of 9 measuring devices. Courtesy of the artist and Galería Estrany–De la Mota, Barcelona.

Tuesday 28 July 2015, 16–17:30h: Public Lecture, Presentation of Latitudes’ curatorial practice as part of the Visual Art Lecture Series. Jeanne and Peter Lougheed Building, 204. Free event.
 
For the Public Lecture Latitudes will forgo a chronological account of its projects of the last decade, and instead attempt various transects through its curatorial projects determined by raw materials and their transformation. From the zinc which led to an Esperanto micro-nation, to the air of a Beijing shopping centre, or the dead trees of printed news, Latitudes will try and join some traits and ideas around extractive modernity, obsolescence and the carbon cycle.


 Music huts around campus.
 The creek around The Banff Centre.

RELATED CONTENT:


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