OPENING MEETING

Route through the Besòs Delta with Daniel Barré Farré; essayist, geologist (specialising in sedimentology) and visual artist, curator of the ‘Arxiu de Paisatges Inestables’ and performative artist Jordi Mas.

Saturday 12 September from 11:00 – 13:30.

Meeting point:

Sant Adrià de Besòs train station at 11:00.

Orphan isochrones or overexcited landscape (a hidden disorder in Robert Smithson’s entropy concept).

Overexcited landscapes are those where entropy does not make everything immediately visible and they are internally broken down. The itinerary takes us from the mouth of the River Besòs to Badalona Marina, built on land contaminated by the old Cros factory. Isochrones are timelines that unite processes that occurred simultaneously between different places. We call them orphaned when most of the processes the isochrone travels are outside the site studied. The last stretch of the Besòs Delta is a Ballardian dystopia, camouflaged in post-modern cookie-cutter town planning; the equivalent of seeing the corpse of an unrecognisable animal floating on the surface of a Hockney swimming pool. This animal is the past.

ENCUENTROS Y SEDIMENTACIONES

A seed knows how to wait. It is alive below ground, wanting to exist, waiting for the ideal weather to germinate. Over months of lockdown when meetings have become problematic, we have been waiting for the right conditions for this year’s 2020 programme, opening a shared space for research, learning and experimentation. A space where we can put our affections, our feelings, on the table, as well as our ways of doing, our tools and methodologies.

Embracing the setbacks, we are opening an Encuentros programme with several guests to be held between September and October 2020. To give shape to these activities, we have modelled three thematic core areas (Embodied Archives, Plastic Cooking and Rooted Extra-terrestrials) that cross or question the proposals of the winning artists of the Sala d’Art Jove grant 2020. We wanted to avoid starting from closed or dichotomous concepts, and instead search for suggestive themes that can be generated from the tension and mixture of concepts frequently found in semantically distanced fields. Our aim is to invite artists and the other players involved to together imagine possible definitions of these core areas, which stories they can generate, and how and from where their tensions call into question our artistic practices.

The vestiges of what will have taken place in the Encuentros will be accumulated as Sedimentaciones. In this joint work framework, Sala d’Art Jove will be a space with memory, inhabited as a mutable and disputed scenario.

A proposal from the Art Jove 2020 mediation team: pli-é collective (Eva Paià, Marina Ribot Pallicer, Angelica Tognetti).