The opening of the exhibition Wonders on 26 May match the LOOP Festival 2016, with this programme:

19:30h: opening

20:00h: Live Perfomance. Shana Moulton: "Every now and then I fall apart"

20:30h: live music :
- Josep LIVE
- Josep Xortó + The Congosound DJ SET

LOOP Festival 2016 opens its programme with the première of Wonders by Carles Congost (Olot, 1970).

Wonders was the proposal winning of the 2nd edition of the Prize of Videocreation promoted by LOOP Barcelona, the Xarxa de Centres d'Arts Visuals de Catalunya and the Arts Santa Mònica. Included in the Festival LOOP Barcelona 2016, Congost will use for the first time in ASM its work Wonders, a video that questions the cultural, social and economic model of the world of the mass culture.

It is a videographic proposal that uses resources next to the musical biopic and the performance to analyze the figure of the "one-hit wonder", probably, one of the most symptomatic of the neoliberal paradigm that has impregnated all of the spheres of the global world the last three decades.

The expression "one-hit wonder" is, in the record industry, for calling those that have attained the massive recognition in a fleeting way thanks to a successful single. Some of these success are are, until a certain point, ephemeral on purpose, products created for humorous reasons or to use a novelty in the popular culture, however, in the majority of the cases, it implicates serious and enthusiastic musicians who strive to continue its careers when the popularity declines, such it is the case of Dennis Seaton and Michael Grant (members of the group Musical Youth). At the beginning of the decade of the eighty, the formation Musical Youth achieved a strong world repercussion thanks to its first album "The youth of today" and, very especially, to the single "Pass the dutchie" that sold five million copies to all over the world and opted to a Grammy (the Oscars of the music).

In Wonders, both musicians interpret themselves from a series of script interventions that are inserted with other more personal moments where they explain anecdotes of their own lifes, for example, how they managed to achieve with any of the most important icons of the pop of the period like Stevie Wonder, Paul McCartney Donna Summer, Quincy Jones or Michael Jackson. The texts of the script are conceived by both musicians to be read, recited and sung, and start from a specific order to the essayist Eloy Fernández Porta who makes a reflexive and poetic contribution to the phenomenon of the megahit.

In a formal and conceptual level, Wonders connects and becomes related with another recent work, Before the House / An unstable biopic across the Sonido Sabadell (2015) with what shares the contribution of diverse characters who open other perspectives, the fragmented story, the subversion of genres, etc. But in this case the thematic interest focuses much more on the idea about the artist as a product. The "one-hit wonder" understood as a complex and paradigmatic figure of our time, the analysis of which can remit us other areas of the society and the culture.

Organized and produced by

Arts Santa Mònica - Departament de Cultura
Xarxa de Centres d'Arts Visuals de Catalunya
LOOP Barcelona 

In collaboration with: Joya Barcelona