Situation 2. The Utopia

Curatorial training programme

(creating) Situations

(crear) Situacions: art i pensament participatius

Programme:

Theoretical sessions on utopia: following Santa Mònica's lines of research that address current issues such as utopia, the pandemic, digitization and inclusivity, a series of sessions will be proposed to dialogue with international figures such as:
- Azucena Klett (cultural manager and curator)
- Layla Martínez (writer)
- Franco Bernardi Bifo (philosopher and activist)
- And more speakers to be confirmed.

Sessions with the curators and artists: these sessions will deal with the inner workings of the curatorial process of artistic creation Utopia Ramblas, which has led to the exhibition and ongoing actions on the Ramblas in Barcelona. With curators Itziar González Virós, Elena Blesa Cábez and artists from the exhibition.
Reading group: a selection of important texts on art institutions, curatorship understood as a relational practice and concepts around the current exhibition on home will be read and discussed together, with the following speakers: Enric Puig (director of 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 has a series of sessions in other facilities with proposals related to the programme.
Optional internships: Santa Mònica will offer the possibility of doing a small curatorial internship between the end of May and the beginning of June.

Who is it for?

The course is designed for those seeking a theoretical and practical introduction following a bachelor’s or master’s degree. The Santa Mònica reveals the processes and internals hidden behind an exhibition as a contribution to future artistic, curatorial and theoretical careers.

Places are limited. The Santa Mònica will therefore base its selection of students on their CVs and cover letters. There is no age limit or previous qualification requirement, but preference will be given to those with life, academic or professional experience that they can contribute to the rest of the group.

General Information

Tuesdays and Wednesdays from 5.30 p.m. to 8.30 p.m. (6 hours per week), from 21 March to 10 May 2023.

Optional internship: between 23th May and 15th June 2023.

DATES AND TIMETABLE

Catalan and Spanish

LANGUAGES

Face-to-face

MODE

Santa Mònica

PLACE

120 € – General
80 € – Students, unemployed people, people with an officially recognised disability, members of large or single-parent families, under-30s, over-65s and holders of the public library network card.

PRICE

Pre-registration form

The registration process consists of 2 parts:

To apply for registration, please fill a form and send an email to santamonica@gencat.cat attaching your CV (maximum one page) with a cover letter (maximum one page) in a single PDF document.
Once the pre-enrolment deadline has passed, all pre-enrolled applicants will receive an email telling them whether they have been accepted, rejected or are on the waiting list. Those admitted will have to pay the enrolment fee and provide proof of status to qualify for discounts.

Enrolment period one:

Pre-enrolment: until 10th January 2023.

Confirmation of places: 17th January 2023.

HOW TO REGISTER

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

With the support of

(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.