With the support of: EREMUAK – Department of Culture of the Basque Country
Coordinated by: Aimar Arriola
Participants: María Ángeles Alcántara Sánchez, Jesús Arpal Moya, Tamara Díaz Bringas, Santiago Eraso, Dora García (non-presential), Nancy Garín, Antonio Gagliano, Nicolas Malevé, Pablo Marte, Julia Morandeira, Susana Talayero and Linda Valdés.
Date: 16 March.
Timetible: 12- 19pm.
“[...] the archive is also that which determines that all these things said do not accumulate endlessly in an amorphous mass, nor are they inscribed in an unbroken line […] but are grouped together in distinct figures, composed together in accordance with multiple relations.”
"Marginalia" started up a year ago as “a critical laboratory to reactivate the Pepe Espaliú Library”. The common process should now be described as a joint model to approach the spheres of memory, affect, the document, representation and circulation of knowledge in a place which is here suggested as simultaneously combining encounter and conflict: the library. A library that, in line with Foucault, no longer belongs to the repertory of mythical forms but rather to the “archive”. A library that, furthermore, in our case, takes many forms: the one set by two proper names, Pepe Espaliú and Arteleku; the library made up of the more than four thousand books that the artist collected during his life and of which he read a part; the one that used to be his personal collection and become patrimony, under the inscription of AIDS; the one that, subject to the disciplines of architecture and design, is more furniture than place; the one that during two decades was consulted by other artists that some called "community" and who would gradually leave; the one that has witnessed many of the changes of the institutional framework that hosts it and which it resists with its physicality; the one that is, in short, a remnant, but also a promise, of a multitude of experiences.
During a year, that “approach model” has been developed around the processes of reading, notes, meeting, exchanges, documentation… (partially referred to in the online consultation area http://lab-marginalia.tumblr.com/), which have resulted in four archive and artistic productions that are now being presented here – run by Jeleton, Antonio Gagliano, Pablo Marte and Susana Talayero (in collaboration), and Equipo re –, and in research underway on the final work of Pepe Espaliú (1955-1993), taken as a symptom and condensation of a series of critical criteria mutations, whose results will be unveiled in a second phase to showcase the project.
“Marginalia” has sought to vindicate the operational and political dimension of any “margin”; thus, these four archive and artistic productions have addressed “the library” from some of its various limits and opportunities: as a context where to raise questions about the regulations in the access to and meaning of cultural artefacts (Jeleton); asserting its material waste to trigger an experimental device for the free circulation of knowledge (Antonio Gagliano); questioning, with the dialectic potential of the image and montage, its emblematic nature of culture and civilisation, and as a spectral body that contains “the difference" (Pablo Marte and Susana Talayero); and as a framework to start to reflect on the instability of the archive from the perspective of AIDS politics in the Neo-liberal context (Equipo re).
In order to generate a multiple agency and contagious situation, these four productions are now brought together in a session of presentations and debate, which includes the spatialization of materials related to some of the work processes, in different areas of the first floor of Arteleku , and the “interpellation” of as many other external voices, oscillating between the illusion of perfection and the vertigo of the unattainable*.
Aimar Arriola
Donostia-San Sebastián, February 2013
*“Like the librarians of Babel in Borges story, who are looking for the book that will provide them with the key to all the others, we oscillate between the illusion of perfection and the vertigo of the unattainable.”
–Georges Perec, Penser / Classer, 1985 (Think / Classify 1986)
PROGRAM – Saturday 16 March
12.00 noon – 1.00 p.m. – “Marginalia” Presentation – Aimar Arriola + introduction – Santiago Eraso
1.00 – 2.00 p.m. - “Anarchivo sida” Presentation - Equipo re (Nancy Garín and Linda Valdés) + interpellation - Nicolas Malevé
2.00 – 4.00 p.m. - lunch
4.00 – 5.00 p.m.– Presentation “The Free Mimesis Project” - Antonio Gagliano + interpellation - Tamara Díaz Bringas
5.00 – 6.00 p.m. – “Principios movedizos y provisionales” presentation- Pablo Marte & Susana Talayero + interpellation - Julia Morandeira
6.00 – 7.00 p.m. - “Paris Is Burning oharduna”* presentation - Jeleton + interpellation - Dora García (non-presential)
(*) this action will be preceded by the “Paris Is Burning oharduna” production meeting run by Jeleton at Arteleku from 11 to 15 March (http://www.arteleku.net/programa-es/201cparis-is-burning-oharduna201d).
PARTICIPANTS (in alphabetical order):
Aimar Arriola is a curator and researcher and the proponent of the “Marginalia” project.
Tamara Díaz Bringas is a researcher and curator. Between 1999 and 2009, she worked as a curator and editorial coordinator at TEOR/ética, San José, Costa Rica. She has implemented projects such as "FM_el archivo y la caja de zapatos" (2011), around the Fina Miralles archive.
Santiago Eraso headed Arteleku between 1986 and 2006. From 2009 to 2011, he was the Cultural Director of the San Sebastián bid to be European Capital of Culture 2016, where he is now a Board Member. Since 2001, he has been a member of the UNIA arteypensamiento content team.
Dora García (non-presential) calls upon the viewer in ethical controversies and reflections on the institutional nature of the encounter with the artwork. She has participated in Münster Sculpture Projects 2007, the Spanish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, 2011, and the Documenta, Kassel, 2012, et. al.
Nancy Garín (Equipo re) is a researcher and member of the “Marginalia” project. She previously belonged to the Etcétera artistic collective and of the Internacional Errorista.
Antonio Gagliano is an artist and member of the “Marginalia” project.
Jeleton (María Ángeles Alcántara Sánchez and Jesús Arpal Moya) are artists and members of the “Marginalia” project.
Nicolas Malevé is an artist, free software programmer and data
activist. As a part of the Constant collective (Brussels), and among
other lines of work, he has implemented archive re-appropriation such as
Active Archives.
Pablo Marte is an artist and member of the “Marginalia” project.
Julia Morandeira is a curator and researcher. She is current Project Artistic Director at LOOP/Screen Projects.
Susana Talayero is an artist and member of the “Marginalia” project.
Linda Valdés (Equipo re) is a researcher and member of the “Marginalia” project. She works in the activities department of the Fundació Antoni Tàpies, where she is a member of the Arts combinatòries team, the platform to activate the centre’s archive, and coordinates the Prototips en codi obert project.
PRODUCTIONS
Jeleton – PARIS IS BURNING OHARDUNA
Jeleton is an intervention team in literary, musical and iconographic repertoires. Among its other lines of work, since 2008 it has been researching around the concept of the “footnote”, as a way to redistribute the uses and meanings of specific cultural artefacts (a film, a work of art, an archive, etc.). This line of work, where different knowledges, gestures and techniques are deployed, explores annotation as a performative technique and to empower any reader and, by extension the viewers/audiences of works of art. The general method is to provide a public annotation of a piece by a specific artist in an equally specific context, a priori not related, and the subsequent publishing of the notes produced in a publication.
"Paris Is Burning oharduna" (Paris Is Burning annotated), the Jeleton intervention at the Pepe Espaliú Library is in the form of a collection of footnotes to the documentary "Paris Is Burning" (Jennie Livingston, 1990) that are disperse in space, time and distribution channels and compiled in a printed edition. “Paris Is Burning”, a complex piece that is simultaneously historicization and a cosmology, and which tackles the Chicano, trans Afro-American and gay culture of the “Houses” (communities) in the city of New York at the end of the 1980s, will be projected in a multiple and specific context –the personal library of Pepe Espaliú, his “Carrying” action, AIDS politics, Arteleku, Donostia-San Sebastián in 1992 and in 2013, etc.- seeking to generate frictions between document and body, work and affection.
**Jeleton are María Ángeles Alcántara Sánchez (Murcia, 1975) and Jesús Arpal Moya, (Barakaldo, 1972), who have been working together since 1999. They have produced and presented their work in different exhibitions, workshops and research and documentary projects (consonni, Bilbao, 2012; CA2M, Móstoles, 2012; ENPAP, Bilbao, 2012; Proyecto Rampa, Madrid, 2012; Sametitled, Berlin, 2012; General Public, Berlin, 2012; Arizko Dorretxea, Basauri, 2011; TEXTO, Barcelona, 2011; Manifesta 8, Murcia, 2010; Casa Vecina, Mexico City, 2010; Espacio Abisal, Bilbao, 2008, among others). www.jeleton.com/
Antonio Gagliano — THE FREE MIMESIS PROJECT
Antonio Gagliano regularly resorts to drawing and writing as tools to research the different ways in which knowledge is produced, organised and disseminated. His work mixes visualisation and editing methods inherent to the formal structures of knowledge (the university, archives, television, etc.) with dynamic or emerging phenomena (Internet viral explosions, oral history, etc.) and he reworks them in order to intervene in their regulatory processes. The link of remote historical events and images, the creation of fantasy tales or the critical exploration of the conventions of information dissemination (cartography, articles, PowerPoint presentations, readings, fanzines, etc.) are some of the strategies that he uses.
His proposal under "Marginalia" has been to initiate "The Free Mimesis Project", an experimental editorial prototype designed to release and circulate materials "locked" in archives by means of their being copied by hand as drawings. In this first episode, the project will tackle a selection of materials from the vast set of documents (reading notes, press cuttings, post cards, etc.) that were initially found among the pages of the books that make up the Pepe Espaliú Library and were distilled from the collection in its institutional transformation from "private body" to public resource. As an informal appendix to the Library, this set of materials highlights the entropic nature of the collection and its resistance to the logics of the archive, at the same time that it provides indicators to produce new partial readings of the Espaliú practice. The graphical results will be published in an online repository with open licence.
**Antonio Gagliano (Cordoba, Argentina, 1982). In 2012, he took part in the following exhibitions and cycles: "Composición de Lugar III" , along with Efrén Álvarez (Espai Cultural Caja Madrid, Barcelona); "Això no és una exposició, tampoc" (Fabra i Coats, Barcelona); and "De com Convertir un Museu en Arena" (L’Aparador, Museu Abelló, Mollet). He had previously participated in the Can Xalant, Can Felipa or Sala d`Art Jove programs and in the "Peligrosidad social" workshop (PEI/MACBA), and "Prototips en codi obert" and "Arxiu FX: La ciutat buida" (both, Fundació Tàpies) research projects. He is a contributor to different media and has produced two curatorial projects along with Ingrid Blanco. http://antonio-gagliano.blogspot.com
Pablo Marte and Susana Talayero (in collaboration) – PRINCIPIOS MOVEDIZOS Y PROVISIONALES
The work of the artist Susana Talayero ebbs between painting, video and installation as a means that allows her to explore the limits between the different media; along with the generation of encounters that jointly form an attempt at epistemology and resilience. The work of Pablo Marte revolves around how the meaning of image and the production of discourse processes are expressed – and re-expressed –, by means of heterogeneous, expansive and symptomatic montage.
For “Marginalia”, Marte and Talayero first wanted to spotlight the uncertain nature of the pooling of their work methods. They thus dedicated several sessions to a type of mutual mobbing, “as two planets unexpectedly coming together," as they put it, “which leads to gravitational fiends whose limits the collaboration calls into question". Three focal points thus emerged and which they believe feature in any collaborative work: encounter, tension and confluence. They then rethought the three focal points relating to the library and to its compounding influence as an expression of culture, knowledge and civilisation. They returned to the words of Didi Huberman in his research on Aby Warburg and the Atlas Mnemosyne: “an exhibition of differences”. They then approached the differences as the very separation, "the space between", which may also be seen as the space that remains (the residual, the trace). In keeping with the work processes, they have generated a satellite material that functions as a territory in itself: Principios movedizos y provisionales [Provisional and Shifting Principles].
**Pablo Marte (Cadiz, 1975) has exhibited his work, individually and collectively, in contexts such as “Habitación propia, compartida” (consonni, Bilbao, upcoming); Festival Pantalla Fantasma (Bilbao, 2013); EspaiDos (Terrassa, 2010); CA2M (Móstoles, 2010); Lobeart (Berlin, 2010), among others. In 2012, he was the curator in residence at the Bilbaoarte Foundation, when he implemented the “Enter the Ghost, Exit the Ghost, Re-Enter the Ghost” exhibition intermittent cycle. http://www.pablomarte.com/
Susana Talayero (Bilbao, 1961) trained at the Fine Arts Faculty at the University of the Basque Country, although she embarked on her artistic career in Rome, where she lived between 1986 and 1995. She has exhibited individually at La Taller and at the Museum of Artistic Reproductions (both, Bilbao, 2012), the Carreras Múgica gallery (Bilbao, 2009) and the Antonio Pérez Foundation (Cuenca, 2008), among others. She has run educational projects in conjunction with different art institutions and she is the co-driver of the public encounters initiatives, *L'occasione* (http://locccasionecon.tumblr.com/).
Equipo re – Anarchivo sida
Equipo re is currently embarked on identifying, compiling and analysing the aesthetical practices, representations, collective experiences and performative tactics that have determined the AIDS politics, for the first time, from a non-Anglo-American perspective. The end purpose of the initiative is to implement a “counter-archive” or Anarchive of AIDS politics. It is does not merely involve a new approach to the relationship between "art and AIDS" - in the sense of "art inspired by the disease"-, but rather to map the type of displacements, structural breakthroughs and failures that emerge in the field of cultural production from AIDS.
Equipo re’s intervention in “Marginalia” has consisted of associating to this process the Pepe Espaliú document collection available at Arteleku and, in particular, the set of materials relating to The Carrying Society (1992-1998). Founded by a group of participants from the workshop run by Espaliú at Arteleku, The Carrying Society implemented different projects on art and the public sphere whose impact remains scattered and which Equipo re now plans to recover. Equipo re’s participation in “Marginalia” is inconclusive in nature and the final form that the “Anarchivo sida” may take will depend on the work carried out during the coming stages of the project.
Therefore, the 2012-2013 two-year period is being dedicated to compiling, producing and the critical distilling of the materials that make up the core of the archive, by means of different production and research actions in specific work frameworks, such as the “Políticas del cuerpo*” [Body Politics] initiatives that have already been held in different locations of Chile; the research residency program at the Reina Sofía Museum that is currently underway; the UNIA – arteypensamiento program (Seville), which is forthcoming; and the PAGADI system, the dss2016eu trans-disciplinary platform to foster art, creation and contemporary thought, which the Equipo re has joined.
**Equipo re is a collaborative and trans-territorial action and research platform built around the interest of its participants to approach the art space through critical action. It has developed debate, dialogue and research initiatives in settings such as La Purée Associació Cultural (Barcelona); Fundació Tàpies (Barcelona); Centro Cultural de España (Buenos Aires, Argentina); Universidad de Concepción (Chile); MUMS – Movement for Sexual Diversity (Santiago, Chile); MAC Contemporary Art Museum (Santiago, Chile). http://equipo-re.org/
