Paradigmes, símptomes, prototips i projeccions

Hangar: Paradigmes, símptomes, prototips i projeccions

“We did not want to think this book based on the model of editorial work that, outlined briefly, usually consists of selecting authors whose ideas and bodies never coincide or are related in any other place than the virtual space of a book or in the composition of mental place that the readers make from the different contributions. Our starting question was What to make a book do? and reality has done much more than what these pages cover.

The proposal to address a 20th anniversary publication was not a series of contents, but a methodology. The intention was that the book should reproduce the workings of Hangar. The book does what Hangar does. The editorial project has served as a framework – excuse, occasion, or context – to initiate and accompany processes of research, creation, or encounter. This methodological preference mirrors several of the voices that appear in the book when they insist that intervening in the terms and conditions of work is increasingly the only way to modify the material, discursive and political qualities of the artistic context – and of life – over and above the results or contents to which those conditions give rise.

The publication not only wanted to explain what Hangar is, but also to make visible the social base it has through the people who have inhabited it and passed through it as guests, residents, recognized collaborators or stowaways.

Making a book about Hangar was like making a book about many other things. To a great extent, Hangar has been acquiring and adjusting its identity and functions based on its capacity to respond. It responds to the needs of the artistic community, which in turn depends on political, urban, technological and sector contingencies… As a center that has been characterized by thinking in terms of replication and operating with the aim of being able to react to the needs of artists and creative collectives, Hangar’s evolution is a mirror of the mutant contingency of the last 22 years. The history of the center is traversed by it, and to that extent it is capable of reflecting the evolution of the city’s cultural and urban policies, technological changes, the urgencies and shortcomings of artists at any given time, or even the terminology we use to express ourselves, among other factors.

Pedro Eurrutia’s design by making visible, as a layer of layers, the book’s gut insists on the amount of factors, agencies and moments that settle on Hangar’s floor and makes the word “Hangar” read on the book’s spine from a different mark on each of its pages, from its layers”.

Anna Manubens & Julia Montilla / Editors

 

HANGAR: Paradigmes, simptomes, prototips i projeccions (pdf)