The volume includes texts on each exhibition by the exhibition curators Latitudes, reprinted texts by Giorgio Agamben ('Notes on Gesture', 1996) and Georges Perec (excerpts from "Species of Spaces and Other Pieces Gesture", 1974), installation views, biographies of the participating artists, as well as specially-commissioned essays by scientists and academics:
Peter Osborne (Professor of Modern European Philosophy and Director of the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University London) text "‘Fragments of the future’: Notes on project space" centres on the idea of ‘project space’ as a peculiar one insofar as it characterizes a type of space wholly by its appropriateness for a particular kind of temporalization: the temporalization of the project. What is the distinctive spatialization corresponding to this? And how is it affected by the specifically artistic coding of a project?;
Ryszard Żelichowski (Professor and Director for Scientific Research at the Institute of Political Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences) text "Neutral Moresnet and Amikejo – The Forgotten Children of the Congress of Vienna" offers an overview of how Neutral Moresnet (the state 'renamed' Amikejo in 1908) came into existence;
Theo Beckers (Former Professor of Leisure Studies at Tilburg University and currently faculty member of the Tilburg Sustainability Center and Visiting Professor of the Chinese Academy of Sciences) text "Free time. The rise and fall of a social project" traces western society’s relation to work and time, from Seneca the Younger, through the rise of the factory and Frederick Winslow Taylor's 'The Principles of Scientific Management' (1911), to today's blurring of labour and leisure;
Menno Schilthuizen (Research scientist at NCB Naturalis, an endowed chair for Insect Biodiversity at the University of Groningen and an Associate Professor at Leiden University) text "On Mirror Images in Nature: How Identical Forms Can Be Completely Different" reflects on Uqbar's exhibition centered on chirality: on how in asymmetric animals and plants, sometimes both mirror-image forms exist side by side, but sometimes only one exists, the other being "forbidden";
Amikejo was an anomalous in-between state which never entirely existed, founded on a desire to foster more effective international communication through the synthetic language Esperanto – Amikejo menas 'place of great friendship' in Esperanto. This episode-place between pragmatic and conceptual borders of cartography, language, nationhood, and subjectivity, was entreated as a twin site to Laboratorio 987 and lent its name and symbolic implications to the exhibition series.
About Latitudes
Latitudes is an independent curatorial office initiated in April 2005 by Max Andrews and Mariana Cánepa Luna, that works in an international context from and in Barcelona, Spain. We initiate and develop contemporary art projects in association with institutions and collaborate with artists in productions encompassing a range of organisational forms and scales: genres of display and presentation; editorial practice and publication; forms of assembly, hosting and programming; as well as theoretical and interpretative contexts. (+ info...)