Newsletter #15 · September 2009 Presentation of three new projects as part of Portscapes, a series of commissioned projects taking place throughout
Newsletter #15 · September 2009
Presentation of three new projects as part of Portscapes, a series of commissioned projects taking place throughout 2009 in and around Maasvlakte 2 – the extension of the Port of Rotterdam, The Netherlands: Fucking Good Art's broadcast/'base camp' from Maasvlakte, Paulien Oltheten's billboard and forthcoming exhibition, and Ilana Halperin's audio field guide
During August Fucking Good Art (Rotterdam-based artists and editors Rob Hamelijnck and Nienke Terpsma) have been living and working in a ‘base camp’ on the Maasvlakte. Until the 21 September they will be broadcasting from Portscapes ON AIR Station Maasvlakte. Comprising a series of audio walks, field recordings and conversations with experts from different disciplines including architecture, photography and biology, Portscapes ON AIR will be available via Portscapes' website www.portscapes.nl.
On 14 August 2009 a billboard by Paulien Oltheten was placed along the A15 on the Maasvlakte. Oltheten made use of the lack of reference of natural elements, such as trees, bushes and people by arranging meetings, often involving variations of the theme ‘one becomes two’, referring to the Maasvlakte, of which there will later be two. This has resulted in a series of photographs and two video pieces, which will be seen during October in and around the visitor centre Futureland.
On 18 September New York-born, Glasgow-based artist Ilana Halperin will present A Brief History of Mobile Landmass, a scripted audio field guide tour that visitors will be able to experience through walking around the nearby area to the visitor centre Futureland while listening to MP3 players picked up at the centre. Mixing fact and fiction Halperin's script is triggered by the question 'how do you think about an overnight landmass in geological time? and gathers the opinions of volcanologists, geologists and geographers.
'Portscapes' is an accumulative series of art commissions taking place throughout 2009 alongside the construction of ‘Maasvlakte 2’, a 2,000 hectare area of reclaimed land that will extend the Port of Rotterdam, Europe's largest seaport and industrial area by 20%. Projects of variable scales will be produced under the leitmotif itineraries and destinations comprising tours, performances, screening, temporary sculptures or interventions, for example. + info...
Latitudes will be participating in the second part of 'Produce, Exhibit and Interpret (Strategies and conflicts in today's curatorial practice)' in Matadero Madrid (25, 26 and 27 September), the first part of which took place last May at MUSAC in León (22–24 May). The seminar is a meeting of generationally-linked contemporary art Spanish-based curators designed to generate and strengthen social networks among professionals from the sector and to draw attention to a range of issues concerning the redefinition of the curatorial practice. + info...
Participants: David Arlandis / Javier Marroquí (Independent curator, Valencia); David Armengol (Independent curator, Barcelona); María Bella (Curator Intermediae, Madrid); Álex Brahim (Independent curator, Barcelona); Amanda Cuesta (Independent curator, Barcelona); Beatriz Herráez (Curator, Centro Cultural Montehermoso Kulturunea, Vitoria); Latitudes (Independent curators, Barcelona); Iván López Munuera (Independent curator, Madrid); Manuela Moscoso (Independent curator, Madrid); RMS La Asociación (Independent curators, Madrid); Manuel Segade (Exhibition Department, CGAC, Santiago de Compostela); Virginia Torrente (Doméstico, Independent curator, Madrid); Leire Vergara (Independent curator, Bilbao).
'Provenances' reflects on the heritage industry and the museumification of history, as well as the creation, transmission and fidelity of cultural worth. The artists share an aesthetic and pragmatic concern with the principle of the personal archive or the pre-museal wunderkammer – the categorization and veracity of objects, images and words is always provisional. + info...
Erick Beltrán presents four works each focussed around a relic-like artifact made of a particular natural substance. Following the related ‘Serie Calculum’ (Calculum Series) (2008) – "an essay about the concentration, the density and the creation of value" as he has described – each object is accompanied by a text-diagram, and together they elicit a dense proliferation of references, narratives, contexts and interconnections.
In 'Floating Lines' (2009) Jordi Mitjà reflects on practices of information retrieval, falsification and accumulation. In his seemingly-sparse installation, clusters of photocollages are hidden from immediate view by a string curtain which protects them from light while necessitating the visitor’s gesture in order to reveal them.
Encompassing formats including performance-lectures, published fiction and collections of articles and artefacts, the projects of Simon Fujiwara take shape as a carefully constructed borderline of ethology, eroticism, architecture and ancestry. 'The Museum of Incest' (2009) is a multipart project which unearths an implicit myth of human origins and an explicit sexual archeology. Fujiwara realised the performance-lecture 'The Museum of Incest. A Guided Tour' during the opening night. A guide of the museum has been published by Archive Books (Softcover / 21 x 15cm / 52pp / ISBN 978-88-95702-09-4).
Press review (La Repubblica, 3 June 2009, Italian) here.
UMBERTO DI MARINO | Via Alabardieri 1, Piazza dei Martiri | 80121 Napoli, ITALIA
Opening hours: Mon-Sat 15–20h (August closed)
Artists: Mariana Castillo Deball (1975, Mexico City. Lives in Berlin/Amsterdam), Heman Chong (1977, Malaysia. Lives in Berlin/Singapore), Graham Gussin (1960, London. Lives in London), Victor Man (1974, Cluj–Napoca. Lives in Cluj), Francesc Ruiz (1971 Barcelona. Lives in Barcelona/Berlin), Jordan Wolfson (1980, New York. Lives New York/Berlin) and Haegue Yang (1971 Seoul. Lives in Berlin/Seoul)
'Sequelism...' is an exhibition reflecting on the future and that which is yet to happen. It looks at the political, social and ecological implications of the inexact arena of futurology: the science and interdisciplinary practice of postulating possible, probable, and preferable futures from the present. This is the first in a trilogy of Sequelism exhibitions, with Part 2 in 2010. + info...
Latitudes is a Barcelona-based [41º23’ N, 2º 11’ E] independent curatorial office initiated in April 2005 by Max Andrews and Mariana Cánepa Luna. Latitudes collaborates with artists and institutions in the conception, organisation and production of exhibitions, public commissions, conferences, editorial and research initiatives across local, pan-European and international situations. Latitudes is on the editorial board of Archive Books (formerly The Bookmakers Ed.),Turin/Berlin and is a curatorial advisor for APT Intelligence. + info...