Hangar, Center for Artistic Production and Research

Founded in 1997, Hangar is an artist-run initiative committed to prototyping, updating, and sustaining the essential conditions for artistic production and research, understanding these activities as critical speculative practices that respond to and innovate within contemporary debates and urgencies.

Hangar supports creators at all stages of the production process. We provide resources and contexts for technical, logistical, and material development, and we also develop programs for conceptual support and the amplification of artistic careers both locally and internationally. To this end, we continuously design and improve contexts for presentation and knowledge transfer specifically tailored to the needs of contemporary creation.

Hangar views art as a knowledge-producing practice and defends artistic research as a legitimate form of inquiry, equipped with its own mode of discovery and knowledge production. After more than 20 years dedicated to opening up the field for artistic research, Hangar is currently a leading center in this domain, both locally and internationally.

In terms of both production and research, Hangar has always sought to offer opportunities for internationalization. Firstly, by generating mobility opportunities for local artists, building bridges to spaces and cities of interest in the context. Secondly, by organizing regular visits from international professionals and programmers. Finally, by participating in various international research networks.

Hangar establishes all kinds of alliances and participates in various networks to enable the interaction of contemporary art with other fields of cultural production; with technoscientific research, and with cultural studies as intersections from which to observe issues such as ecological transition, the tacit governance of infrastructures, gender, class or race privileges, and neoliberal dysfunctions.

Hangar operates based on a unique institutional structure. It is a private foundation created by an association of artists with a public and community orientation.

Hangar as a Changing Environment

Hangar is an environment in the sense that it encompasses all the factors that influence an organism, determining its living conditions and its capacity to survive. Hangar operates under a permacultural approach where the variety of elements, resources, tools, and agents that coexist mutually nourish each other, together creating an environment capable of sustaining the development of artistic practice and thought.

Hangar is a backstage environment. Rather than focusing on the presentation of results, we are concerned with generating conditions to foster artistic development. This is why our public programs constantly explore ways to share processes and methodologies, long before the results. However, we understand that publishing and engaging with the public are also interfaces for innovation that require institutional imagination capable of inventing new forms of openness and programming. Consequently, a significant part of our program focuses on generating new public contexts for practices, languages, or reflections that might not otherwise have a place.

As a center responsive to the needs of contemporary creation, Hangar is an unsettled and changing environment. Its history is that of a receptive center that has adapted to the times, paying attention to the gaps that need to be filled and the conversations that need to be sustained.

The Hangar environment consists of:

— Resident artists (18-20), resident projects (3-5), and orbital collectives (5-7);
— A series of laboratories and production tools, managed by Hangar or by resident projects;
— Programs for the amplification and development of artistic practices;
— A series of action-research lines with different methodologies and durations that address current concerns in practical consequences, resulting in various public programs;
— Local and international research and context networks;
— Opportunities for internationalization;
— Production, research, and mobility grants;
— Various public activities to share the creation and thought generated at the center.