Paratext#31 with Iterations, Anas, Kenneth Dow, Sebastián Restrepo

This name, Paratext, hides a monthly programme of presentations by the artists residents in Hangar of long and short duration, as well as the international residences, always on Wednesday, from 19’00 to 21’30 h. Various artists will be presenting in different formats, concrete projects or parts of their work. The sessions are always open to the public in order to facilitate interaction with the artists themselves. In addition, each Paratext has an editor who then publishes his/her impressions of the presentation on this blog. On this occasion the editor will be Aldo Urbano.

The next Paratext session will take place on Wednesday 14 November in the Sala Ricson of Hangar, at 7 p.m. They will present their projects:

Formed by Antonia Manhartsberger, Connie Mendoza, Giulia Deval, Azahara Ubera, Iris Torruella, Julia Gorostidi, Rosa Llop.

Iterations is a European project committed to the future of artistic collaboration in digital networked contexts. Multidisciplinary artists and professionals come together to create speculative works that feed the imagination of possible forms of artistic collaboration. Through a series of practical residencies and discursive exhibitions, Iterations offers situations in which artists collectively experience new forms of artistic work that generate spaces for collectivity and collaboration.

The project is structured around the conceptual model of “iteration”. Inspired by the recursive forms of collaboration as they exist in the development of open source software, the Iterations project applies the repetition and circularity of artistic methodologies, in which the result of one activity is used as a starting point for the next. In each iteration, a group of artists is invited to develop in residence a collaborative artistic proposal based on one or more of the results of the previous iteration. The last iteration of Iterations took place in Sicily in April 2018 within the framework of Trasformatorio. Prior to the residency in Hangar this November, artists who participated in the iteration in Sicily have met with the artists who have participated in the residency in Barcelona to give them the material that has been one of the starting points of the collaborative work that has been developed in Hangar. The institutions participating in Iteration are Constant (Brussels, Belgium), Esc (Graz, Austria), Trasformatorio (Amsterdam, Holland) and Hangar.

The conceptual video-installtions of Anas deal with the interplay between projection, his carrier and the motive. They are founded and driven by his interest in experimenting within the fields of photography and film. He tries to establish a relationship between elements in
the space of a room, like a reaction between a video projection and an object. In the act of composing an installation He makes the two dimensions of a digital picture three dimensional again and divides it into many layers in space.
Furthermore, he combines two projections and in doing so, building a new picture immanent of enhanced content and shapes that also provide the work with a physical element. He is attempting to explore the techniques of given tools and tries to expand them to open up new possibilities.

In his projects, Kenneth Dow navigates through a fictionalized world, heavily inspired by his own biography and present surroundings. His artistic work is concerned with strategies to make the absent, absentees, the invisible perceived, absent as in no longer present, invisible as in interiority.

Subjective states are made palpable through choice, combination and recursion of procedures, together forming a representation apparatus. The representation machine set in motion then conceives the work of art, as seen on display.

Kenneth Dow has studied in Milan, Hamburg and Shanghai and holds a MFA from Stuttgart Academy of Fine Art. In 2015, he was admitted to the German Academic Study Fund. He has participated in numerous institutional group shows, theatre and film Festivals.

The work of Sebastián Restrepo has a selfreferential, anecdotal, experiential, and biographical component. But this component passes to a second plane in which his life becomes the territory for the crossings of the game and at the same time, one more of the lines that cross; a line that is divided into a more series when he activates the machine, because his is a work-machine that is put into motion by chance. For him, his ancestors, the houses in which they have lived and those in which his relatives live, his childhood house, long walks through the city streets, the people he has known, the books he has read, and everything that he comes across in his daily life constitute more lines, more divisions of the line that is his life. In this way his work refers the notion of the archive and, like Atlas Mnemosyne by Aby Warburg, it reveals a search as rigorous as it is impossible: a cartographic survey of a time, or of time itself. We could think of each of the elements that composes Sebastián’s work as one of the photographs that compose that cryptic German art historian’s book, which proposes to trace a conductive thread of a part, of a feature, of a thread of European history through images. As undertakings, both are unattainable, delirious, hyperaesthetic: How is it possible to plot a map of continuities and transformations throughout time? How is it possible to capture the act of becoming? This impossibility is in fact the work’s greatest fortune, in both cases. This indetermination is what compels those attempts towards permanence and to an opening of possible futures. Sebastián has spoken about his encounter with Warburg, and maybe he recognized the historian’s work as being close to his own, even though his mission (Sebastián’s) is substantially more modest: from the cartography of a continent to that of a life, nevertheless, one rich with lines that overrun their individual spatial-temporal coordinates and ascend to a priori and a posteriori space-times that cross one another without a starting or ending point. How could one not think of a rhizomatic structure? (From the essay Sebastián Restrepo or the Work of Art as an Impossible Map of Chaos, written by Elena Acosta, translated by Max Schnuer and Justin Vahala. From the book Casus edited and published by Taller Siete).