Open Studios October 2017 by AADK Spain

Open Studios artists in residence AADK SPAIN

This Saturday, October 28, at 9:00 p.m., AADK opens Centro Negra to the public to show the research processes of the artists in residence.

centro negra CALLE DEL CASTILLO, 30

Open studios This Saturday, October 28, at 9:00 p.m., AADK opens Centro Negra to the public to show the research processes of the artists in residence. Campo Creative Studio: Roxana Roxana Pérez Méndez and Mario Manuel Marzán (Puerto Rico / USA) will share a few video works dealing with absurdity and impotence. Gabrielle Zimmermann (Stuttgart) develops an interactive installation wrapped in a sound landscape which places the visitor between the essential and the residual, the playful and profound. Nicolás Dardano (Buenos Aires) shows a laboratory of sound and light feedback based on the temporal pattern of the bells of the church of Blanca. Giuliana Grippo (Buenos Aires) shows us an installation in which it restores a series of elements that reflect natural events with a strong formal aspect. Antonio Pagán Buendía and Adriana Da Silveira will activate a space through a dialogue with the mountain.

Campo Creative Studio: Roxana Pérez Méndez (guayama) and Mario Manuel Marzán (trujillo alto) Campo Creative Studio is a new partnership centered on a common feature in their work that links the ways in which human constructs of land influence our experience of place. These particular contexts exist in their individual work. Roxana has created video performances embedded in Pepper’s Ghosts Holograms and installations that situate the viewer into an Other’d landscape or borderland, while Mario has created drawings and installations that reference the graphically encoded language of colonial cartography and tropical weather patterns. Similarly, in both works, they interrogate the 19C. romantic landscape tropes and traditions. Since they left Puerto Rico, their country has been hit by two hurricanes, which unavoidably affected their research. On top of the personal and material loss, they are confronted with memories. The distance blurs an unreachable reality as well as brings a discomfort privileged. One have to deal with news that fall once and again in absurdity and reveals the hidden or forgotten economical power relationships. At this point, they ask themselves: What is there to say or to do? This question drives their current research towards exercises which talk about the absurd, dead ends and impotence.

Bio Professor Roxana Pérez-Méndez is a video performance and installation artist who creates work about the slippery nature of contemporary history and identity through the lens of her own experience as a Puerto Rican woman. Her research interests include installation, site specific and video performance, imprinting of the landscape or loss of landscape on the self, post-colonial/colonial identity, Spanish colonial history, Caribbean migration and immigration politics, tourism and pilgrimages. Roxana embarked on her first Camino in 2012 and has logged thousands of miles on foot since. She teaches all levels of Sculpture and has developed courses related to the Phantasmagoria and Makerspace technologies. She holds a BFA from The Ohio State University and a MFA from Tyler School of Art. Mario Marzan is an artist whose work includes drawing, painting, installation and sculpture. He grew up in Puerto Rico and now lives in Durham, NC where he is an Associate Professor in the Art and Art History Department at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His work is about the constantly shifting, changing and evolving negotiation of landscapes in relation to individual identities and histories. Using scale models to relate to the characteristics of sculpture and architecture, his work addresses the spontaneous phenomena and transient moments that occur in nature as a way to talk about culture and assimilation. His investigations, often informed by peripatetic structures, are symbolic of place and space and use cartographic languages as modes of representation. Mario Marzan teaches all level drawing courses as well as an immersive summer seminar on the intersections of art and nature. He has a BFA from Bowling Green State University and an MFA from Carnegie Mellon University.

Gabrielle Zimmermann (Stuttgart) Entre Medias (First Stage) Zimmermann develops an interactive installation with plastic bottles, evolved by a soundscape made by these bottles and the water sounds she experienced in Blanca. The movement and sounds produced by the wind and the intervention of the bodies of the audience are key in this artwork. The very particular beauty of Blanca´s landscape highlights the importance of water as a source of life. The desert becomes green as the river passes through, surrounded by orchards which provide not only beauty but also an economic base for the area. Zimmermann, who often tries to understand a society through its waste, finds in the plastic water bottle a reflection of one of society’s many paradoxes. While the water itself is a major part of our daily requirements, and lacking access to it can easily become a life-threatening issue, the mass-consumption of bottled water creates enormous pollution through its fabrication and in turn leaves behind a huge amount of refuse. This month, Gabrielle has collected plastic bottles used by the residents and arranged them into an installation. Playing with the beauty of their forms, the natural element remains through its absence - reinforced by the presence of the mountain in the space, and the audio. “Entre Medias (First Stage)” places us between the natural and the artificial, the essential and the residual, the thoughtful and the playful, the beauty and the horror.

Bio Gabrielle Zimmermann, a self-educated artist, grew up between Germany and France. Having graduated with an M.A. in art history and comparative literature, her theoretical background is often reflected in the mostly conceptual nature of her works, but always with a certain sense of humour. Since the beginning of her artistic career, with video as her primary medium she’s questioned the notion of “the individual” and its “image”, its position in society, and the sensation of the absurd.

NICOLÁS DARDANO (Buenos Aires) A set of program reactions Audiovisual installation / PC, video monitor, two projectors, light Theremin, three audio systems, contact mics, percussion synth, midi controller.

She’s inspired by the philosophical approaches of the existentialists as well as Lacan and Zen philosophy, often using her body as a working material.

Starting from experiments and studies built around the idea of translations between video and sound, the installation examines the relationship between a partiture that works within a gregorian model of measuring time, and a set of digital, physical, and pre-programmed electronic reactions.

In the last 8 years, waste products (e.g. the various forms of packaging) and food have become the main subjects of her work, bringing to the forefront questions about contemporary lifestyle - its relics and its environmental impact.

The structure of this partiture, abstract, constant and cyclical, replicates the behaviour of the church bells of the town, breaking in the individual temporalities, to mark with its bangs the presence of its inescapable temporal metric.

This notation is read by an electronic device sensible to light, which reacts by generating a sound that simultaneously vibrates a piece attached to a contact mic, which is in turn connected to a synth that interprets these vibrations and translates them into a new series of sounds which, at the end, are decoded for the PC. The PC processes them and sends them back in a video format.

The programming and defined rules in each of the components allows a synesthesia and autonomous functions in the system, the flow of which can suffer transitory alterations caused by a sound, always cognizant of physical intervention but also random, the structure is repeatedly recovered by the logic of the partiture.

Bio Nicolás is a graphic designer, animator, art director and university tutor. In 2004 he founded Trompo, an audiovisual studio which he directs, where he has developed content for television, cinema, theatre, digital platforms, and editorials. In recent years, his interest has turned towards the investigation of new media, and focuses on the production of hybrid and interdisciplinary formats involving space, light, video, and sound for artworks, mapping, museums, installations and performances. In the academic field, he worked as a professor from 2002 until 2010, and as the director of Work Practices from 2010 onwards in the Faculty of Architecture, Design, and Urbanism at the University of Buenos Aires.

Giuliana Grippo (Buenos Aires) Installation Giuliana’s work began developing as drawings where the lines and strokes were understood as translations of movements or temporal encodings. While continuing her work, the interaction with materiality became increasingly relevant, yet the original analytic vision remains. At present, her work explores the identity of organic matter and the information that’s imprinted in its form, always in dialogue with orderly, analytical, and pure forms that extracts, delimits, and redefines the organicity. She searches for natural elements that carry the impression of climatic or geographical events, or in which an exceptional behaviour appears. Re-contextualizing and presenting them as artworks, she intends to create a sense of considered suspense; a fragile balance between complimentary materials. We can associate this methodology with the words of N. Bourriaud: a work as postproduction of life, an itinerary that stops to frame the everyday and show us all its magic and its power.

In this space, two pieces are presented:the piece suspended in the centre is an outbreak of cane that has grown, crawling on the ground in search of water, for about fifteen metres. It speaks of a determination to survive, where all the vital energy of growth has resulted in an extremely fragile thinness. The piece is suspended in the air to reconstruct the natural curves of the material, and to generate a formal dialogue with the projected shadows. The second piece is the skeleton of a puddle resting on a clay soil. After allowing her gaze to break from captivation, the artist decides, working as an archaeologist, to extract piece by piece and then to reconstruct the drying fragments in her studio.

Bio Giuliana graduated as a Graphic Designer at the University of Buenos Aires, where currently collaborates as a teacher. Her artwork focuses in exploring the notions of trace and temporality through different mediums, going from drawing, to performance and installation. In parallel of her artists development, she did her postgraduate studies in research and theory about projective disciplines. Lives and works between Buenos Aires and Berlin.

Aadk | Sonora Antonio Pagán Buendía and Adriana da Silveira Tablas (Murcia /San Paulo) Sound performance Scholarship holders from AADK Spain are invited to join the programme Sonora - School of Experimentation - to be part of this initiative, contributing their experience and vision. Pagán and Da Silveira’s artistic intervention aims to establish a dialogue with the mountain that inhabits the Centre. The piece is inspired by the heritage of the Sufi mystic Ibn Arabi, who connected with the valley lands when Blanca was still called Negra. The voices, the body, and some natural elements will be the matter with which the artists will activate the space to make us aware of the landscape, the history, and our relationship with both. It is a back and forth journey to our insides in connection with our ancestors. Antonio Pagán Buendía studied Fine Arts at the University of Granada and Adriana da Silveira Tablas Architecture at the University of São Paulo. Together they, with their strong interest in the landscape, have created Ramablanca, an expanded landscaping study based on the recovery of gardens with native vegetation and a formal sculptural, pictorial, and Zen vision. They have collaborated with multiple artists, creating projects of interventions into public space, soundscapes, and relational art. Their sensitivity and ways of connecting knowledge have generated a body of work whose parts, however subtle they are, never leave us indifferent.

AADK Spain [International platform of research and contemporary creation] Team 2017 Abraham Hurtado Artistic Director Elena Azzedín Residency Program Director Selu Herraiz AADK Lab Director Juan Conesa Head of Production Daniel Hernández Communication Rubén Martínez Assistant of Production Klara Menzel Cultural Management Harry Bullen Assistant of Communication Merve Özcan Visual Design

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