Fito Conesa and singer Claudia Schneider will perform some excerpts and variations of the Anoxia. A Constant Prelude project soundtrack.
A performative sound action that will traverse the multiple voices and nuances of this opera prima. Greenish glissandos, meandering sea, nitrous subsund, coral naumachia.

To mark the opening of the LOOP Festival, La Niña Jacarandá will showcase her project called Sexpiritual.

Sexpiritual is a transdisciplinary performance that seamlessly blends a DJ set as its heartbeat, accompanied by live vocal performances intertwined with monologues that serve as a visual narrative for her upcoming EP, also named Sexpiritual. “Sexpiritual” is a word/concept that serves as a “portal” for exploring and pondering seemingly contradictory realms, such as the “spiritual dimension” and the “physical space.” It underscores how in Western culture, corporeality is often associated with “the feminine” (body, emotions, subjectivity), juxtaposed with the masculine (rational thought, objectivity, universal and empirical truth). This juxtaposition often results in corporeality being perceived as less authoritative in terms of political, material, and symbolic discourse.

Cruisers traverse the Mediterranean from Barcelona, spinning a web of unpredictable constellations, like someone who spends their free time connecting dots on a piece of paper so frequently that it begins to tear. 

Late capitalist denialism is, in reality, the natural outcome of our fear of not knowing how to manage collapse, change, and bad news. We are incapable of grasping action and movement beyond the guilt that paralyses us. 

Anoxia. A Constant Prelude is an opera that gradually narrates some of the most evident issues that the Mediterranean Sea has been subjected to; a visual song that expands upon our questionable coexistence and recounts in thermal glissandos the darkness that unfolds, yet it does not rely solely on fatalism as the only possible melody. 

It is an audiovisual work created in several phases, with diverse voices, multiple sensitivities, and real alliances; a naumachia in three acts. 

The exhibition in Centre d’Art Tecla Sala is split into two parts: a foreword that serves as an overture to the main piece which the project is named after, followed by the projection of the debut opera on a large screen positioned at the back of the room. In the foreword or prologue space, all the process and preparation materials can be seen and consulted, both from the compositional and conceptual aspects. 

The material comes from various municipal and museum archives and, along with the scores and other elements/objects (plans, texts, small sculptures, newspaper archives that have appeared throughout the research), will place the viewer in a specific conceptual, emotional, and political framework. 

Anoxia, an opera in three acts that offers various approaches to the contemporary issues of the Mediterranean Sea.

*Anoxia is the lack (or almost lack) of breathable oxygen in cells, tissues of an organism or in an aquatic system.

The conceptual and formal universe developed by artist Pedro Torres (Brazil, 1982) is articulated around a notion as abstract and omnipresent as time. Using different media and techniques, Torres’ projects are visually attractive proposals, where the analysis of the representation and perception of the multiple folds of time is interweaved with a marked interest for the possibilities of the image and language.

Making scientific facts the starting point for his lengthy researches (the curvature of space-time, the precession of Mercury’s perihelion, the chemical functioning of a clathrate, NASA’s observation of solar activity or the principle of sedimentation of a fossil are just a few examples), the artist moves away from purely notional or technical interpretations and brings together theory and poetry to appeal directly to the audience and their individual experience. To borrow some words recited by a warm voiceover in his latest project –Uxuwell (2022)– we could say that in Torres’s practice “the process is continuous while it can happen, while cutting through objects and being inherent in relationships and connections, as long as it flows. So that both you and I can be here or there, or here and there, yesterday, today, tomorrow, never or always”.

Made thanks to the “la Caixa” Foundation’s 2020 Production Call, and with the support of Hangar, Uxuwell brings together many of the lines of research that characterise the artist’s practice: the intertwined representation of past, present and future; the essence and weight of memory; the perception of our physical and natural environment; the impact of climate change; the importance and materiality of language.

In fragmenting the story on multiple screens, which in turn evoke different dimensions of space and time, the project proposes a narrated journey that straddles reality and fiction, overlapping images of natural landscapes–which we could recognise as terrestrial–with others of digital, abstract and glitched environments. In this journey through different scales and periods, the public is called upon to be both an observer and an active participant. The multi-channel installation device incites the movement of the gaze and the body, to the point where the visitor is offered the possibility of an immersive virtual reality experience. This specific option of interaction with the environment acquires a specific meaning when the proposed images illustrate irreversible geological and climatic changes: these sequences seem to suggest a direct question to every one of us as responsible for the intense activity on planet Earth.

A possible key to reading the original material recorded by the artist between Spain and Iceland would, in fact, allow us to detect precise eras in the Earth’s evolution and in the process of environmental deterioration: the past, represented by the images of the salt marshes of the Natural Park of Lagunas de La Mata and Torrevieja, at risk of disappearing due to the rise in sea level; the present, evoked by the area of high volcanic and geothermal activity in Hverir, understood by Torres as a metaphor for accelerated human activity; the inevitable future of melting ice and disappearing glaciers, described by microscopic visions inspired by the Vatnajökull glacier and the Jökulsárlón lagoon.

In a constant oscillation between formal and narrative dimensions–mixing real places with virtual landscapes–the journey, thus, begins with the representation of a floating carbon atom–a very abundant element on earth and the essence of all known forms of life–and with the image of a desert territory that shows the limits of digital representation. From here, the visitor can encounter a solar landscape that evokes heat and movement on other scales; float among elementary particles that underlie the constitution of matter; slip through the code of the Unity software used to design the virtual experience; be in the middle of an ocean of rough waters and continuous waves that refer to the passage of time; get lost in the break-up of the fragmented, latent image, in between reality and the virtual world. Finally, the sequence could end with a cosmic tracking shot, a landscape of infinite darkness that, frightening and pacifying at the same time, could refer to the end of the universe. These parallel dimensions may or may not be encountered in the individual journey through virtual reality: it would always result in a partial experience, amplified, moreover, by the circularity and (non)linearity of time.

Taking as a starting point the concept of Umwelt developed by the Estonian biologist, zoologist and philosopher Jakob von Uexküll (1864-1944), the artist, thus, brings to life different representations of our experience of reality. For Uexküll, who was heavily influenced by Kantian thought, the concept of the existence of an objective, regular and univocal world for all would make no sense. We should rather speak of the existence of a subject–or organism–which, from its own perspective, would establish its specific and unrepeatable knowledge of the world. From which would follow the existence of so many possible universes (Umwelten) that would derive, in turn, from the perceptual (Merkwelt) and operational (Wirkwelt) world of a given organism.

In this way, the nocturnal landscape that closes Uxuwell’s narrative and visual journey would be the end of one universe and the beginning of another one, a “primordial glow” that explodes where my vision ends and yours begins. Have a safe trip…

Text by Carolina Ciuti

TERRApolis (2020-21) is a trilogy dedicated to the city of L’Hospitalet de Llobregat that takes form in a journey through the physical, spiritual, human and non-human life of this place.

The film is structured in three parts, corresponding to its geography: Puig d’Ossa, El Samontà and La Marina, three landscapes shaped by immutable natural presences, stories of the signs of the time and actions on the places.

TERRApolis forms part of the European project A-PLACE. Linking places through networked artistic practices and is co-funded by the Creative Europe programme of the European Union. An activity in collaboration with the Centre d’Art Tecla Sala de L’Hospitalet.

There are forms of disorientation that are not so much related to finding or searching for a direction in space or time as to the experience of a more diffuse and profound loss of meaning. Far from dealing with grand epic gestures, Wind Palace [Palau de Vent] is an exploration of the question of disorientation, a vital disorientation that is experienced as individual but is in fact shared, and that derives from the disorientation that comes from the realization that the stories that structure our lives are a kind of contemporary prophecy, outdated but still valid, that never end up being fulfilled. The video project freely adopts the structure of a classical tragedy, where a faceless protagonist walks through a nocturnal landscape, as in a dream, and the narrative seems suspended in time, without a denouement and without a moral lesson. As a chorus, he is accompanied by three dubious and elusive characters, the result of a revision of the figure of the mythological mermaid: voices that represent at once knowledge, attraction and danger, but also the possibility of tracing a meaning and a cardinality of their own.

Eugenio Ampudia. I tu què has fet per l’art? [“Eugenio Ampudia. And you, what have you done for art?”] comprises twenty-one multidisciplinary works produced between 1991 and 2018, as well as a piece produced specifically for this exhibition. Using the language that is typical of advertising and the media, these works trigger a subtle irony and unexpected associations that often reach the absurd.
The work of Eugenio Ampudia (Melgar, Valladolid, 1958) is defined by its strong inquisitive nature, which tries to raise doubts and pose questions to the spectator. With a critical attitude, it explores artistic processes, the political role of artists, the meaning of a work of art, the strategies that allow for it to be built, the production, promotion and consumption mechanisms or the efficiency of the spaces assigned to art, as well as the analysis and the experience of whoever contemplates and interprets it.
I tu què has fet per l’art? allows us to understand how Eugenio Ampudia’s interests have remained almost unchanged throughout twenty-five years of work, recurrently insisting on the issue of the artist’s place in the world, their interests and, above all, the place that history has assigned to them.

This exhibition is the result of the visual arts workshop Alfabet inacabat per a L’Hospitalet [“Unfinished Alphabet for L’Hospitalet”], organised by visual artists Matteo Guidi and Mireia Sallarès. The exhibition shows the video works produced by the workshop participants (Leonardo Esteban Montes, Victoria Ávila Sánchez, Iván Cejalvo Martí, Fabiana Rocio Ortega and Iliane Caparrós Àvila) and their respective ways of formulating local and universal questions about a context, L’Hospitalet, conceived as an alphabet that is available to anyone. At a time of social, political, economic and emotional instability, apparently raw documents can help us understand the problems that surround us and to find artistically powerful ways to read and explain our diverse context.

VIDEOS IN THE EXHIBITION

Iliane Caparrós Àvila, Hogar, 2018 –> link
Victoria Ávila Sánchez, Inmigración, 2018 –> link
Iván Cejalvo Martí, Lacónico, 2018 –> link
Fabiana Rocio Ortega, Peso, 2018 –> link
Leonardo Esteban Montes, Soledad, 2018 –> link

Margarita Andreu (Cercs, 1953 – Barcelona, 2013) carried out a life-long research on perception and understanding of the binomial time-space. Intangible elements such as light, sound and color are present in her multidisciplinary work, where the materials, symbols and themes of urban space are continuously transformed, in a clear reflection of the constant changes in contemporary society. By means of photography, installation, videos, prints, drawings and paintings, Andreu exposed these dynamic elements, illuminating their subtler, less noticeable sides, which, even if silently, also contribute to the configuration of our everyday landscape.

The exhibition reviews and revisits the artistic trajectory of Jaume Pitarch (Barcelona, 1963). His work’s physical and emotional power is presented through an intuitive, organic dialogue between the artworks, which coexist regardless of their chronology. A constant game of conflicting tensions defines Pitarch’s work: fasting is understood as an emboldening belief, as the tenacity to restlessly try. All in all, his work problematizes our condition as individuals through notions such as unproductivity, mistake, non-conformism, excess, loss or self-criticism.