Barcelona Producció 2019–2020

As in 2016 and 2017, Latitudes served in 2019–2020 as one of five jury members and mentors for Barcelona Producció, the annual open call supporting the production of artistic projects funded by the Barcelona Culture Institute (ICUB). Through this programme, La Capella provides financial and production support to the artistic community of Barcelona and its wider area of influence. Working alongside curators Alexandra Laudo and Antònia Folguera, and artists Mireia Sallarès and Joan Casellas, Latitudes selected 15 projects from a pool of 259 proposals and supported the artists throughout the development, production, and presentation of their work.

Latitudes mentored projects by Lola Lasurt (solo exhibition), Consol Llupià (offsite project) and Agustín Ortiz Herrera (research project).

Lola Lasurt's solo exhibition ‘Children's Game’ looks back at the 1968 retrospective exhibition ‘Miró. Barcelona 1968-69’ with which La Capella was inaugurated as a venue dedicated to contemporary art. The exhibition included 396 works distributed throughout the former hospital; the space of La Capella corresponded to room #4 where Joan Miró presented "current painting, sculpture and ceramics". Through a new series of paintings, photos, videos, and ceramics, Lasurt addresses the socio-political turmoil at the end of the 1960s. She depicts imagery related to childhood published in the national press during the two-month state of emergency declared in Spain just a few days after the Miró exhibition had ended. Lasurt therefore relates two forms of transition: a period of emergency from the perspective of both political and personal development. The project title refers to ‘Jeux d'enfants’, the Russian ballet scripted by Boris Kokhno whose set and costumes were designed by Miró, and that opened at the Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona in May 1933.

The offsite project ‘The El Prat Whale to El Prat / Return’ by Consol Llupià began when the artist learnt the story of a 19-metre-long whale that was stranded on the beach of El Prat de Llobregat, near Barcelona airport, on 12 May 1983. Until the Spring of 2018, the skeleton was on display at Barcelona Zoo. Llupià’s proposal was to return the whale’s bones back to the sea. What followed has involved a concerted collective effort to broker an agreement with the Zoo authorities and to overcome the technical and logistical hurdles involved. Yet with the COVID-19 pandemic casting a long shadow over all forms of social gathering, Llupià decided to adapt her project. On 22 May 2020, on the 37th anniversary of the beaching of the whale, Llupià invites us to join her in ‘Vibraera’, “an energetic rebellion, a call for a collective immaterial action”, as she has described it, consisting of an energetic gathering intended to activate the vibrational capacity of humans to generate interspecies connections. A growing archive of images, sounds, videos, and spoken word from collaborators across the fields of energy, the environment, science, law, social and sporting activities, humanitarianism and art, will be gathered in the website www.vibraera.net and shared using the hashtags #labalenadelpratalprat and #Vibraera.

In ‘To name, to own. Critique of taxonomic practice’ Agustín Ortiz Herrera focuses his research project on taxonomy and the classification system for species developed in the context of the Enlightenment by Carl Linnaeus (Sweden, 1707-1778). Ortiz is interested in the different practices of taxonomy in specialised study centres, such as those dedicated to Linnaeus in Uppsala and London, where the naturalist’s collection of over 55,000 specimens of plants, animals, and minerals – sent by his disciples from all corners of the world – is located. Ortiz intends to expand his research to Catalonia with the idea of creating synergies and liaising with authors who have developed discourses around post-humanism, queer theory, feminism and decolonialism, such as Donna Haraway, Judith Butler and Ariella Azoulay.

The 2019–2020 edition edition introduced several changes. The “small gallery” exhibitions were discontinued, while a year-long education and mediation programme was introduced at La Capella. Production grants continued to be structured around exhibition and non-exhibition formats: exhibition projects were presented in La Capella’s 380 m² main space (including three solo exhibitions and one curatorial project), while non-exhibition grants supported two off-site projects, two research projects, one publication, three live art projects, and two transdisciplinary or digital media projects.