Situation 4. Potential Stories

Learning and research program in collective curating

(creating) Situations

First registration period:
- Pre-registration: until 31 August 2023
- Confirmation of place: 12 September 2023

(crear) Situacions: art i pensament participatius

The fourth edition of (creating) Situations will be closely related to the exhibition cycle that will take place at the Santa Mònica in the autumn of 2023, which this time explores -in collaboration with the Virreina image centre- the following questions: What would the world be like if Europe (as a trope) disappeared? What would it be like if it had never existed? What has it been like to live time outside the historical time of European modernity?

The programme has been conceived with the aim of activating a temporal community of research and learning. Within this framework, participants will acquire, share and develop theoretical and practical resources that they will use to collectively outline and analyse various situations of participation and artistic mediation generated around the Santa Mònica exhibition cycle, as well as others linked to the city's cultural programme. They will also have the opportunity to collectively develop a prototype of a situation of participation and artistic mediation that can be visited in the Santa Mònica foyer during the first weekend of February 2024.

Programme

We will have dialogues with the curatorial team and the artists involved in the exhibition cycle, workshops with research groups from the centre and guest speakers to enrich the collective debates, as well as activities aligned with other proposals from the cultural agenda located in the city.

Sessions with curators and artists participating in the exhibition cycle: These sessions will address the inner workings of the curatorial processes of participatory creation that took place during both the conception and the unfolding of the exhibition cycle..
Theoretical-practical research and experimentation sessions with the artists in residence and other invited guests: Santa Mònica hosts 21 resident artists who, organised in 7 groups, deploy over a period of 11 months research and experimentation devices in artistic mediation that share with the exhibition some of their starting questions..

In these sessions we will delve for a moment into their research, which always has a practical side, to get some examples and a general overview of the possibilities that a centre like the Santa Mònica currently offers. There will also be some more theoretical sessions with international speakers such as:
- Beatrice Von Bismarck (curator and theorist).
- Tomàs Aragay (playwright and writer)
- And more speakers to be confirmed.

Reading groups: A selection of relevant texts on art institutions, curatorship understood as a relational practice, and concepts around the current exhibition will be read and discussed together with the following speakers: Enric Puig (director of the Santa Mònica), Clara Laguillo (cultural worker) and Adrià Porta Caballé (pre-doctoral researcher in Philosophy at the UB).
Cultural agenda: With the aim of this course to situate itself in the cultural context of the city, the programme will include some sessions in dialogue with similar proposals from other facilities in Barcelona.
Collective prototyping of a situation of participation and artistic mediation: These sessions will offer participants a practical experience of the contents that are being worked on throughout the course. The result will be presented publicly in the Santa Mònica foyer during the first weekend of February 2024.

Who is it for?

The course is designed for people seeking both practical and theoretical initiation in collective curatorial practices. (creating) Situations uncovers the processes and interiorities behind the curating of an exhibition at Santa Mònica with the aim of activating temporary communities of research and learning, as well as contributing to artistic, curatorial, or theoretical careers.

Places are limited. For this reason, Santa Mònica will select participating people based on their curriculum vitae and motivation letter. There is no age or previous qualification requirement, but profiles with a certain life, academic or professional experience that can contribute to the rest of the group are valued.

General Information

From 11 October 2023 to 4 February 2024

Session open to the public and in dialogue with Yuderkis Espinosa and Katia Sepúlveda, curators of the exhibition "El futur ja ha passat: Anti-Futurisme Cimarrón": Wednesday 11 October 2023 from 17h to 19h.

Teaching sessions (3 hours per week): Wednesdays from 18 October 2023 to 31 January 2024 from 17:30h to 20:30h

Public deployment of the prototype of the participation and artistic mediation situation designed and produced by the participants of the course: 2, 3 and 4 February 2024.

DATES AND TIMETABLE

Main: Catalan and Spanish.
Occasionally: English, without translation.

LANGUAGES

In person

MODE

Santa Mònica

PLACE

108 € – General
72 € – Students, unemployed people, people with a legally recognised disability, single-parent or single-parent family status, people under 30 years of age, people over 65 years of age and holders of a public library card.

PRICE

Pre-registration form

The registration process is divided into 2 steps:

To apply, please fill in the following form and send an e-mail to santamonica@gencat.cat attaching your CV (maximum one page) and a letter of motivation (maximum one page) in a single pdf document.
Once the pre-registration period is over, all pre-registered participants will receive an email informing them whether they have been accepted, not accepted or on the waiting list. Those who have been accepted will have to pay the reservation fee and provide the necessary accreditation for the discount.

First registration period:
- Pre-registration: until 31 August 2023
- Confirmation of place: 12 September 2023

Second registration period:
Will be opened depending on the number of places remaining after the first period.

HOW TO REGISTER

For any questions or further information, you can write to santamonica@gencat.cat

(creating)Situations: participatory art and thinking

The artist is conceived less as an individual producer of concrete objects than as a collaborator and producer of situations; the work of art, as a finite, portable, marketable product, is reconceived as a continuous or long-term project with uncertain beginnings and endings, while the audience, previously conceived as "the observer" or "the spectator," is now repositioned as a producer or participant.

Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship

Every four months, the center of arts Santa Mònica develops an exhibition cycle through collective creation processes. These processes are driven by a close and radical curatorial practice, understood as a form of accompaniment and attention. Through this exercise of institutional de-hierarchization, the new Santa Mònica embraces methodologies that foster diverse situations of horizontal participation.

In this same vein, (creating) Situations offers a context of collective learning and research that analyzes exhibition cycles and their creation processes from within, while also generating new situations to approach. It is a tool designed to understand and imbue these methodologies from their core.

With this program, Santa Mònica opens its doors to people interested in curating as a practice of attention and care, as well as in these exhibition processes. The focus is thus on modes of joint and situated co-creation among curators, artists, and context, and aims to interpret and reactivate diverse situations within the exhibition device.

The title (creating) Situations is inspired by Claire Bishop's contributions on the displacement of the hegemony of artistic objectivity, which relocate the spectatorship in an active role and nuance the relational logics that Nicolas Bourriaud diagnosed in the 90s. Thus, the participatory and collective nature not only imbues each of Santa Mònica's exhibition cycles but also aims to be a vehicle for this program, with the goal of activating artistic thought and research from collectivity, with a processual vocation and a connection to the territory. That is why the program also seeks to overflow Santa Mònica by establishing connections with other cultural proposals in the city of Barcelona.