Dada Primitiva

Primitive Data is a line of work by Montserrat Soto that analyses the relationship between art and its spaces. Primitive Data 6.1, 6.2 and 6.3, the three projects exhibited at Santa Mònica, produced expressly for the exhibition The tradition that runs through us, explores contemporary forms of artistic censorship and self-censorship, especially in digital environments, based on previous forms of censorship. In particular, the project is based on a reading of how some of the rules of the Inquisition can be transposed to the present day.

Montserrat Soto (Barcelona, 1961)

In 1989 he received a diploma in painting from the Escola Massana. During his studies he began to experiment with photography and video, which became his main means of expression, and the following year, in 1990, he graduated from the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Grenoble, France. In 1992 he presented his installation Pasos at the Miró Foundation's Espacio 13. That same year he received a grant from the Generalitat de Catalunya to further his studies and work in New York. There she prepares the installation Sin nombre, which she presents at the Sala Montcada in Barcelona in 1996. During these years Montserrat Soto began to define the two lines of investigation of her artistic process: the landscape through travel and the processes and spaces where art develops. In 1998 she visited the Aland Islands in Finland and made her first video works. In 1999 she is selected for the P.S. 1 International Studio Program in New York, where she starts working on the series Secret Landscape, in which she portrays the houses of art collectors, which she shows as creators of the history of art. He thus began to work on his research into memory, which will come to an end in the exhibition Archive of Archives, which he presented at the Centre d'Arts la Panera, Lleida, in May 2006.

In February 2005 he exhibited his work Tracking Madrid at the Centro de Artes Reina Sofía, where he carried out a study on the new urban landscapes and reflected on the changes brought about by what was already a social future: trying to understand human beings through their individual and collective forms of resolution. He continues to work along these lines in a research project entitled Doom City. From being nomadic to being placeless. In 2018 he presented his exhibition Imprimátur at the Sala Alcalá 31, which refers to censorship and self-censorship in the art world.