Latitudes

Beyond the roundabout, or what’s public about public art?

Workshop
November 9-11. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday.
Day 0. Warm-ups*: Monday, November 9, 2015. 3 pm - 6 pm
Day 1. Tuesday, November 10, 2015. 10:30 am - 1:30 pm & 3 pm - 6 pm
Day 2. Wednesday, November 11, 2015. 10:30 am - 1:30 pm
Languages: English and Spanish.

Talk
Wednesday, November 11, 2015. 6 pm.
Language: Spanish.
Free transportation from Bilbao: departures at 2.30pm from UPV Fine Arts Faculty (old building) and 3pm from calle Luis Briñas with Alameda de Urquijo. For reservations, please send an email to info@lapublika.org.

Taking the legacy of Land Art as a starting point – or more specifically, Robert Smithson’s notion of “continual movement” – Latitudes’s curatorial workshop will 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.

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 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.

Founded in 2005 by Max Andrews and Mariana Cánepa Luna, Latitudes is an independent curatorial office based in Barcelona, Spain, that works internationally within the field of contemporary art. Informed by an initial focus on ecology, Latitudes is especially interested in site, process and context. Exhibitions have formed an important but irregular part of Latitudes’s practice. Other projects have deliberately taken a transdisciplinary approach to visibility and publicness while maintaining a broader bandwidth of working and thinking with art and artists. Latitudes has curated solo exhibitions by artists including Lawrence Weiner (Fundació Suñol, Barcelona, 2008) and Ignasi Aballí (Suitcase Art Projects, Today Art Museum, Beijing, 2009); group shows and exhibition series have addressed risk (Extraordinary Rendition, NoguerasBlanchard, 2007), post-environmentalism (‘Greenwashing’, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, 2008) and been inspired by overlooked histories (‘Amikejo’, MUSAC, León, 2011). Informed by its public art collaboration with Tue Greenfort (RSA Arts & Ecology, London, 2005–8), Latitudes later developed a year-long series of commissions in the Port of Rotterdam (‘Portscapes’, 2009–10). Likewise, the experience of editing a weekly newspaper in an exhibition (‘The Last Newspaper’, New Museum, New York, 2010) sparked the interview series ‘#OpenCurating’ (2012–13), while aligning with projects that have similarly questioned the site and sequence of research, production and presentation (‘No Soul For Sale’, X Initiative, New York, 2009 and Tate Modern, London, 2010; ‘Incidents of Travel’, Mexico City, 2012, and Hong Kong, 2013). An engagement with curating as convening, alongside formats of discussion and learning, links the Sharjah Biennial 8 Symposium (2007), the art school pilot ‘Campus’ (Espai Cultural Caja Madrid, Barcelona, 2011) as well as ‘The Dutch Assembly’, (ARCOmadrid, 2012). In addition, participation in research residencies and fieldwork has also formed a part of Latitudes’s activities (Frankfurt Kunstverein, 2008; Spring, Hong Kong, 2013; Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne, 2014; Kadist Art Foundation, San Francisco, 2015). Editorial projects have resulted in publications including ‘Land, Art: A Cultural Ecology Handbook’ (RSA/Arts Council England, 2006) as well as the monograph ‘Lara Almarcegui: Projects 1995–2010’ (Archive Books, 2011). Recently they have curated ‘Compositions’, a series of five new artists’ commissions on the occasion of the first Barcelona Gallery Weekend (1–4 October 2015).

Sign-up
Free sign-up while places are available. Assistants to all 3 workshops that are part of the LaPublika program will be given priority. Limited places: 15 people.Sign-up for the Latitudes: http://cort.as/YReZ

Warm-up
Assistance to warm-up sessions is required for each workshop. Warm-ups are coordinated by one of the work groups in collaboration with LaPublika (the one formed by Juan Pablo Ordúñez Martínez ‘MawatreS’, Andrea Estankona and Josefina Roco Sanfilippo). Each warm-up proposes a specific dialogue regarding the work of the workshop lecturer, starting from references he/she himself/herself has provided (texts, videos, accounts, etc.), which will help contextualize his/her work into the broader project. 

Jan Dibbets, “6 Hours Tide Object with Correction of Perspective” (1969–2009), production still. Photo: Freek van Arkel/Port of Rotterdam Authority.