María García Ruiz begins “Camps. Displacements of Bodies at the Limits of Form”

On May 2nd the artist María García Ruiz begins her residency at Hangar as part of the Fifth Artistic Research Grant Fundación Banco Sabadell — Hangar.

Over the course of an 8-month residency, María García Ruiz will develop the project Camps. Displacements of Bodies at the Limits of Form, which will focus on exploring a set of historical tensions and relationships between architecture and movement. What does it mean to Western civilizing logic to end the forms of nomadism that inhabit it? The project takes this question as a starting point to open up an investigation into the various topological relationships that exist between concentration camps — especially those created for nomads, gypsies and itinerants — and architectural projects to fix nomadic gypsy populations in the 1960s Europe. From the unfolding of this constellation of relations, the project questions the present moment, the forms of inhabiting linked to the movement which are most often conflicting with the space of the polis.

The project aims to compose a visual essay made with the images collected during the research process, as well as with comments or expanded captions attached, which function as an appendix that overflows the very content of the images: materials that will provide an insight into genealogies that have not yet been traced, an imaginary that has yet to be constructed.

María García Ruiz (Valdepeñas, 1981) is an artist and researcher with a background in architecture. Her work questions the processes by which both spatial arrangements and their associated imaginaries are generated. She is currently completing a PhD at the Department of Philosophy at the UAB, forming part of the GEARAD group. She has been part of the group of artists and curators led by Iris Dressler and Hans D. Christ who curated “Actually, the Dead Are Not Dead” for the Bergen Assembly 2019 and for the Kunstverein Stuttgart, 2020. She has curated with Pedro G. Romero “Máquinas de vivir. Arquitectura y flamenco en la ocupación y desocupación de espacios” for Centro-Centro and La Virreina Centre de la Imatge (2017-2018) and coordinated the platform “Topografías de la discrepancia urbana” in residence at La Virreina Centre de la Imatge (2016-2017). She has completed a research residency at the MNCARS (2015-2016) and received the MULTIVERSE Grant for creation in video art 2017, the Premi Miquel Casablancas (2016) and the Research and Creation grants from the Department of Culture of the Generalitat de Catalunya in 2016 and 2018.

 

With the collaboration of: