PROGRAMME:

12:00 Open debate – Art and political resistance with Bani Brusadin and Júlia Ojeda Caba.

How can strategies for resistance be established in artistic practices in a hyper-vigilant world?

What role do artistic discourses play in utopian and dystopian accounts and on the intensification or alienation of social conflicts in art?

What are the ethical implications of the dereification of society? What role can art play in repairing the broken links caused by the government’s management of the pandemic?

The glitch in art. What artistic stories can be told from the spoils of capitalism?

People involved in research into digital society, the criticism of neo-liberalism and its relationship with artistic practices will be participating.

12:00 Performance – La performance del árbol. Participatory action linked to the debate offered by theatre company Trashèdia AP-7.

The piece presents a performative installation in a public space that hints of a utopian future landscape in which nature and technology are joined in symbiosis. The piece involves the participation of the audience and pedestrians who will be asked to illustrate or write their wishes for the landscapes of the future.

14:00 Communal meal led by Xarxa d’Habitatge of the Nova Esquerra de l’Eixample.

COL·LECTIU BORD
The col·lectiu bord group is made up of Aina Canyelles, Iris Verge and Eduard Olesti. We are three individuals involved in very different fields such as journalism, design, neighbourhood activism, communications, illustration, philology and stage management.

As a collective, we consider it essential to install artistic discourses from a perspective of responsibility for the place occupied by cultural production in contemporary society. This is why we are committed to practices that respond to the three primary areas involved in the class perspective: anticapitalism, feminism and antiracism.

We think that art is a communication tool, and therefore offers the potential to alter gazes, actions and social movements. However, we believe that artistic practice is often entropically alienated in artistic circles, and fails to take into account the reality of residents who do not have access to certain cultural capitals.

For these reasons, we think that art should be collectivised rather than sectorised.

We therefore ask ourselves how we can convey these debates around the link between artistic practice and political transformation processes involving a return to society. Whilst we are aware of the complications this task entails, we firmly believe in the potential of artistic and cultural mediation. This is why one of our main objectives is to establish direct dialogues between political movements, collectives and communities.

GENERAL DESCRIPTION OF THE PROJECT
Our curating programme is based, abstractly, on pointing out and emphasising the tensions between ethics and aesthetics. We want to bring a politicised curatorship project to fruition; explicitly anticapitalist and responsible towards the place occupied by cultural production in contemporary society. More specifically, we want to encourage Sala d’Art Jove artists to propose the kind of dialogue they want to establish with society over time, beyond conventional artistic circles: with local women residents and political organisations and collectives.

We believe that the artistic forces the artists selected for the Art Jove Creación 2022 grant bring should be transferred to their relationship with the problems affecting society today. As such, we want to relocate training sessions and debate for artists, taking them to open spaces in the very neighbourhood Sala d’Art Jove inhabits. We want the various entities not explicitly related to artistic circles to be able to access, collaborate on and participate in the workshops we propose, in order to put artists’ narratives in contact with the society which they are part of.

The Nova Esquerra de l’Eixample neighbourhood is densely populated with few public leisure spaces and hardly any cultural facilities. For years, the various entities in the neighbourhood have been struggling to free up spaces, create links and form a solidarity-focused, active and politicised network. For this reason, we believe that Sala d’Art Jove must opt for closer links with local women residents and entities in order to join the fight for neighbourhood sentiment.

CRISI Y TECNOLOGÍA DESCRIPTION
We have divided the 18 artistic projects into three blocks of thought, aiming to create rhizomatic experiences between artists on these three discursive strands that, whilst not isolated, can establish an enriching dialogue.

The first block, which will be the focus of the 21 May session, is entitled Crisis and Technology.

We perceive an indissoluble concern regarding the spread of digitisation and technological devices that are increasingly sprawling uncontrolledly into more and more facets of our lives.

The future is uncertain for a generation that has been raised in the period of abundance and optimistic capitalism characteristic of the historic moment our parents lived through. The result, due to the cyclical and unavoidable crises of late capitalism, is profound generational disenchantment; an absolute lack of imagining a hopeful future and a passive and nihilistic anticipation of the end of the world.

The projects selected this year, discussing crisis and technology, are based on two political concepts that have clearly materialised during the government’s management of the pandemic: dystopia and fascism.

We seek to have an impact on a reflection about the cause of this generational dystopian imagination and the relationships it has with alienation and the futuristic abstraction that does not address the dystopia of the present.