Toma de corriente 2

This exhibition project is initiated following the objectives set by Es Baluard museum of researching and disseminating the creative practices that use video as their medium, emphasizing the importance of audiovisual heritage and disseminating it, from our own collection, in different contexts and situations.

Thus, this exhibition represents the transnational contact taken up by the collection of Es Baluard, based on a selection of video works as a presentation of the latest tendencies arising in our immediate surroundings, the Balearic Islands, not only on the level of artistic creation but also one that of methodologies of educational and training practices.

The project also corresponds with the “Es Baluard en moviment” (Es Baluard in Movement) programme, the museum beyond its own walls, a white box or a black cube, can move and develop its functions in correspondence with other spaces. For the presentation in Chile and given the characteristics of the place proposed by the MAC, we have come up with a selection that enables one to discover representative Balearic creators, emerging art and educational development and research projects with artists.

In curatorial terms, the generational perimeter is very clear, as is the significance of each personal trajectory. The works of Amparo Sard or Diana Coca question the intimate-internal from the external gesture, and the apparently naïf stories of Núria Marquès or the initiation journey to an encapsulated world with no sun of Joan Bennassar, or of the breakdown of the natural proposed by Marcelo Viquez synthesize universal concepts from our immediate surroundings.

Moreover Les Clíniques, the non-official training programme for artists of Es Baluard, the only museum in the whole of Spain that has been engaging in the stable development of this type of course, has also given rise to new generations since the competition of 2013, in which Natasha Hall, Marta Pujades and Natxa Pomar took part. Along these lines, the proposals from programmes such as the “GranGent/GentGran” programme for the elderly and “Géneros y transgéneros” (Genders and Transgenders) respond to a continuous R+D centred on two focal points: education and training, which complement each other and also connect to the function of public programmes. Aware of the need for continuous evaluation and reformulation at the pace of society, in both directions, work is carried out on researching new formulas of action that could provide a response to the diversity of needs and interests that exist in the different participants and contemporary audiences.

The power of each electronic particle is proportional to the intensity of each discourse, its etheric print elevates its plasticity, transcending things aesthetical.

It is a fact that, after the 2000s, we find ourselves in a new period in which creators use video-art and new technologies for their proposals naturally. This is not so much a technological leap when the obsolescence of the analogue made way for the spread of the digital, but of a new annunciation, different ways of narrating and interpellating spectators and of conceiving creation between disciplines. The artists selected for the exhibition in Santiago de Chile (Joan Bennassar, Diana Coca, Natasha Hall, Núria Marquès, Natxa Pomar, Amparo Sard, Marta Pujades, Marcelo Viquez) and the projects generated from the basis of actions with different collectives (“Mujeres Valientes presenta “Entérense!’”, “Un lugar para vivir cuando seamos viejos: Escuela de envejecer”) propitiate knowledge of a context and a collection which are probably unknown throughout Latin America.

Paul Virilio insists repeatedly in his writings on the fact that the reduction of the geophysical extension of the planet Earth occurs every time a new speed regime is conquered, every time a new dromological phase is reached. Visibility begins to depend entirely on velocity and its mediatisation. Concerned as we are with these questions, we have developed projects like Reproductibilitat video, with the creation of a proposed Decalogue of good practice and functioning in order to impact models of management, dissemination and acquisition of audiovisual art.

Collecting video-art also involves promoting the visibility of new artists, a responsibility in terms of heritage in the age we live in. A fluid age, the influence of which can be observed and analysed by the cultural institutions with the aim of preserving its material, in order to transmit it to future generations and immortalise it.

Nekane Aramburu