Encura

Encura is a research residency program for curators that aims to encourage, expand and complexify the curatorial research process, intertwining the artistic contexts of Madrid and Barcelona, providing the ideal material conditions to avoid a curatorial approach understood as a pure production of exhibitions. Encura is a program that for four editions was led by Hangar in collaboration with hablarenarte and Curators Network, and that in its fifth edition reinvents itself in a new joint modality with La Casa Encendida to promote the mobility, professionalization and internationalization of Spanish or foreign curatorial researchers based in Spain.

Since its first edition, Encura is been intended as a proposal not necessarily resultant, that puts in value the processes of research and exchange that do not attend exclusively to the exhibition format as a horizon for the materialization of curatorial research. One of its objectives is to support curatorial researches and promote territorial cooperation in the generation and transfer of knowledge, and art’s ways of doing.

Encura infers curatorial research as a political-affective space that summons its own values, questions, languages and possibilities. Its porosity and capacity to entangle with other agents and practices, imagining polyphonic narratives and actions, from the theoretical and the sensitive, always in a being-with and doing-with-others, also implies an ethical-political methodology in itself, which in turn, allows to question ways of doing and producing. As a specific and situated curatorial research device, Encura is based on the coexistence, collaboration, dialogue and interdependence between the Madrid and Barcelona contexts, which aims to work on research methodologies that challenge the hierarchies and logics of production of proprietary and individualized knowledge. Encura promotes the overflow of disciplines, and slowed down and non-productivist times of exchange and research, enabling the adequate material conditions for an investigative process to have the solidity and degree of experimentation necessary to develop curatorial projects relevant to their contexts, and that respond to the questions and urgencies of the moment in which we live and work.

Encura values those research projects committed to:

– An inquiry into the dispositions of the terms of production of knowledge that mobilizes a critical thinking capable of elaborating fronts of aesthetic and political struggle.
– The creation of a dialogue between the contexts of Barcelona and Madrid, and the relevance of both stays for the development of a situated curatorial research.
– Transformation and experimentation, converging different formats and languages of curatorial theory and practice that expand the traditional logics of exhibition production.
– Facilitating research processes and the transfer of knowledge to transversal audiences, not necessarily specialized.
– The generation of new forms of subjectivity and of understanding the world from critical, non-hegemonic, transfeminist, anti-racist and non-capacist positions.
– Collaborative processes in decision-making and new forms of experimentation in relationships with artists and collaborating agents.
– The responsibility and degree of commitment that is summoned in the research processes and what happens with the knowledge accumulated in the course of them.
– The proposal of innovative open source formats for the socialization, visibility and documentation of the curatorial research process.
– The affinity with the programs and lines of work of the convening institutions.

Granted artists:

VII: Sergi Álvarez Riosalido with the project Swiftly arose and spread around me.
VI: Irene Mahugo with the project Revolución Horizontal.
V: Núria Gómez Gabriel with the project Iban oscuro por entre las sombras.
IV: Campobase with the project House of Displacement Barcelona.
III: Luce Choules with the project Itinerant Actions – A fieldwork research programme.
II: Manuela Pedrón Nicolau & Jaime González Cela with the project Chemtrails and Maykson Cardoso with the project Smuggling as an alternative.
I: Renan Laru-an with the project Lightning Studies: CTCCCs and Lauren Wetmore with the project The Conversation.