Texts — 2021

Beyond This Point, Nothing is Fiction

The artist’s book Aparicions / Apariciones is part of the exhibition project Coses que pasen, in which the artist Enric Farrés Durán uses the institutional archive of the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) as a primary source of materials and inspiration. For the preparation of this project, as with other people who had been … Continued

Texts — 2020

Reading the archive against the grain: Power relations, affective affinities and subjectivity in the documenta Archive

«…Because of her role as Archive director, Ela Spornitz is, in fact, mentioned on the Archive’s website, where the list of directors includes photographs of each one of them. So as to illustrate these letters during the lectura that I was preparing, I requested from the Archive her photograph. The digital file that I received turned out to provide, again, a new and suggestive surprise…»

Texts — 2020

Archives of the Commons 2: The Anomic Archive

This book brings together the lectures presented during the second edition of seminar Archive of the Commons II, which was co-organized by Foundation of the Commons, Museo Reina Sofía Museum and Southern Conceptualisms Network, and took place in Madrid in 2017. The seminar set off to review the role of the archive in contemporary culture, its metaphorical potential and also its possible use as a tool for knowledge and critical practice.

Texts — 2018

Gesa Lange: Im Halbkreis Neben der Lampe

«…Tatsächlich sind die assoziativen Bindungen zwischen Gewebe und Textualität sehr eng: etymologisch stammt das Wort Text der lateinischen Vokabel textum ab, dem Partizip des Verbs texere, das „weben, flechten; kunstvoll zusammenfügen“ bedeutet…»

Texts — 2017

Reading Films, Watching Books

«How is a book similar to a film? The range of back-and-forth relatioinships that can be established between print media – books, comics, posters, postcards, etc. – and cinema, video and other audiovisual formats clears the way for an extremely broad workspace, wich a large number of artists have assiduously traversed since the invention of cinematography at the end of the nineteenth century…»

Texts — 2017

Desfases del archivo: cómo construir la imagen desde la memoria (y no a la inversa). Tres casos de estudio

«El archivo, en sus numerosísimas manifestaciones posibles, es el repositorio por excelencia de la memoria y el recuerdo, herramientas indispensables en la construcción de la identidad tanto individual como colectiva. Entre los soportes en los que los documentos del archivo, a su vez, atrapan y fijan en el tiempo los recuerdos, la fotografía ocupa desde su invención un lugar…»

Texts — 2017

Modificar lo dado. La experimentación espacial en los libros de Francisco Pino

«…El corpus poético de Pino, aparecido en numerosos volúmenes de poemas y en colaboraciones con revistas, siguió desarrollándose por los cauces esperados para un poeta de vanguardia hasta 1970, momento en que, con la publicación de Solar —a la edad de 68 años—, su trabajo dio un nuevo e importante giro experimental…»

Texts — 2016

Dear Reader, Don’t (Only) Read

«Manuel Raeder has been working on publishing and design projects for more than 15 years. He has run his own design office, Studio Manuel Raeder, since 2009, and in 2013 founded the publishing label Bom Dia Boa Tarde Boa Noite , a platform for challenging…»

Texts — 2016

Dora García, Read with Golden Fingers (L’Innommable – Samuel Beckett)

“En la primera década de los 2000 Dora García inició una serie de obras, realizadas a partir de volúmenes de obras literarias, que ha proseguido ampliando hasta la actualidad. En esta serie, además de materializar su constante interés por estudiar los fenómenos vinculados al lenguaje y la comunicación, la artista pone en juego su habilidad para explorar…”

Texts — 2016

Patrícia Dauder, 41°08’ 56.66” N / 08° 36’ 43.60” W

«The artist book was conceived together the work with the same title, produced for the occasion of the exhibition The Second Image, presented at Museu Serralves, Porto, in 2012. The work, an original drawing – graphite on paper – in twelve parts, subsequently transferred to offset prints…»

Texts — 2016

El cubo blanco reducido a tamaño de bolsillo. La publicación como práctica curatorial y artística

«Venecia, mayo de 2015: la 56 edición de la exposición internacional de arte se inaugura entre los destellos de las cámaras fotográficas y el relumbre de los invitados vip. Pocos días después comienzan a aparecer, tanto en la prensa diaria como en la especializada, numerosas críticas y reseñas. De ellas se desprende que la impresión que parece haber calado entre los comentaristas es que esta edición de la Bienal…»

Texts — 2015

How to Do Things with Email: My Holy Nacho

«In June 2013, Jamie Allen and Bernhard Garnicnig took three steps to set in motion the collaborative, fragmented and remotely controlled project My Holy Nacho. To start with, they selected six different used objects that were being sold on well-known web pages. Then…»

Texts — 2014

Return Journeys: Documentary Threads of Art in the Lafuente Archive

«Such was the panorama at the dawn of the new millennium: despite the evidence of the inextricable relation between work and document in the artistic output of the 20th century, in Spain – and in Latin America for that matter – there were hardly any important bibliographic collections for documenting it…»

Texts — 2014

Autor, actor, lector. El camino de la performance al libro

«La conferencia performativa es un subgénero de la performance en el que los recursos, la técnica y las herramientas de las conferencias académicas se ponen al servicio de la práctica artística. Las conferencias performativas suelen echar mano…»

Texts — 2012

Latin American collections in Macba’s Study Center

«…The first magazine, entitled WC, which referred to the famous Fontaine (1917) by Marcel Duchamp, was a collective project that spanned five issues and adopted the format of an envelope which included wood engravings, collages, graphic compositions, foldable leaflets and texts-manifestos…»

Texts — 2012

Collection/recollection. The idea of collecting as editorial praxis

«…And it is not often the case that the collector’s activities are linked to those of the editor, although both, in essence, devote themselves to quite similar work: at the end of the day, what is an editor if not a “collector” of content carefully ordered and chosen from abundant material to be included in a particular context…»

Texts — 2011

¿Es una obra, o es un documento? El Centro de Estudios y Documentación del MACBA

This text was published in the 10th volume of the “Impasse” series – published by La Panera in Lleida –, which was edited by Glòria Picazo and bears the exhaustive title of Artist’s Books, Special Editions, Object Magazines, Editorial Projects, Independent Editions, Publications Specials, Limited Editions, Desktop Publishing, Artist Editions, Digital Publications…

Texts — 2011

Hacia un nuevo modelo de biblioteca de museo

«Esta transformación, evidente sobre todo en prácticas como la performance, el happening, etc., ha tenido profundas consecuencias que llegan hasta la actualidad, en tanto que ha otorgado un nuevo estatus a la documentación que ilustra eventos creativos de esta índole, asimilándola a la “obra de arte” en muchos sentidos…»