When we were asked to take charge of the mediation project with audiences for the exhibition series
Preventive Archaeology
at the
Espai 13
of the
Fundació Joan Miró
, we thought it was a good opportunity to put into practice some of the ideas we had about the processes of knowledge construction and relationality within the framework of artistic institutions.
In reality, these ideas could be reduced to a single idea-vector that would consist of decentralizing and dislocating the spaces, discourses, and roles established in the field of art, with the aim of – as far as possible – instituting more horizontal and fair processes and relationships between the various agents involved in the production of meaning, within and through said field.
One of the fundamental operations of this project will be to move these processes of knowledge construction and relationship outside the space of the Fundació Joan Miró, and place them in a new space, within a specific geographical, social and cultural context
[1]
such as the Bellvitge neighborhood.
This choice is not random: since February of this year, LaFundició has had a small space at number 11 Carrer Prat in this neighborhood of L’Hospitalet. There, we have tried to open spaces and times in which diverse individuals and groups can find in culture a sphere of dialogue and negotiation (not without conflict). Likewise, we have been weaving potentially lasting collaboration networks.
From September 2013 to September 2014, this space will be doubled as Espai 14-15 of the Fundació Miró, a space that can be considered, in turn, as a double of Espai 13 itself. And we say a double because Espai 14-15 does not pretend to be a copy or an extension in Bellvitge of the institutional space of the Fundació Joan Miró. Otherwise, we intend to place the different actors involved in the
Oriol Vilanova
,
Lúa Coderch
,
Lola Lasurt
and
Antonio Gagliano
– and its curator, Oriol Fontdevila, but also to the works themselves and their creation processes, to the staff of the Fundació Joan Miró and to that amorphous and too abstract entity that is its ‘public’.
In this sense, Espai 14-15 should not have a program of activities, but rather a series of moments in which work processes already active in the territory and related to the programming of Espai 13 of the Fundació Joan Miró are made visible.
It is not a question either of producing a reading in a local key of the ‘contents’ of the cycle or, worse still, of offering a reading ‘adapted’ to the social and cultural context of Bellvitge. In a very different way, our intention is to test new agencies in order to generate hybrid -monstrous- ways of doing and knowing that make it easier for each of those involved (among whom we count ourselves) to rethink their position in the cultural field and the range of possibilities that this position implies.
The Preventive Archaeology exhibition cycle is presented as a series of tours of some ways of doing associated with the writing of history (understanding ‘writing’ in a broad sense) and what we could call ‘production of memory’ (and also the production of its reverse: oblivion).
Each of the artists who participate takes as a pre-text some of these ways of doing or some of the devices that operate in these ways of doing; the resulting works give rise to thinking about the regimes of truth that they institute.
We understand that our role is not to add a new ‘layer of meaning’ or a critical reading to the work of the artists; otherwise, we understand that it can be to provide a series of times and spaces that facilitate collective processes of meaning production. We also understand that, with the aim of dehierarchizing knowledge, these processes should not focus on the work and discourse of the artists and the curator of the cycle, but should put these in relation with existing social and cultural processes that also have to do with the historiographic production and collective memory. Processes that already occur autonomously, in a social and cultural context different from that of the Fundació Miró, such as the Bellvitge neighborhood. Processes in which LaFundició, as ‘inhabitants’ of that territory, are already involved from the beginning -and will continue to be involved once Preventive Archaeology ends-.
We understand that putting the agents, the work, the knowledge and the discourses coming from the field of contemporary art in relation with those present in the context of Bellvitge, involves creating ‘contact zones’
[2]
; that is, times and spaces in which to collectively address the points in common and the controversies that may exist between both spheres. We are not trying, therefore, with Espai 14-15, to create a neutral dialogical space
[3]
nor, of course, to contribute to a process of cultural colonization. On the contrary, we aspire to generate, in collaboration with all those involved, a space in which the position from which each one speaks, their reference structures and the habits that each one embodies can be demarcated; with the aim of collectively constructing a common knowledge about the production of memory.
We can say that memory is built (and destroyed) continuously: in a casual conversation on the street, in the media, when reading a textbook, when taking a photo, when erecting or demolishing a monument… countless acts with very different scales that produce memory and oblivion. In Bellvitge, many of these acts are related today to the commemoration in 2015 of the 50th anniversary of the construction of the neighborhood, and the commemoration in 2014 of the 300th anniversary of the siege of Barcelona.
The respective commemorations of these two apparently disparate events share, in reality, very similar ways of doing. The facts are the facts and that is unquestionable, they tell us -some historians, among other people-; however, what is questionable is the way in which the facts are ordered, categorized and related, as well as the context in which the stories are situated and the order of the discourse in which they are inserted. And Preventive Archaeology and Espai 14-15 are a bit about that.
[1]
Obviously, Espai 13 of the Fundació Joan Miró is also located in a specific geographical, social and cultural context, however this is something that artistic institutions try to avoid by presenting their ways of doing as cultural standards, politically neutral and assimilable to those of any other contemporary art museum in the world.
[2]
‘Contact zones’ is the term coined by Mary Louise Pratt with which she refers to the intermediate spaces of negotiation between two cultures. We owe the knowledge of this term to the project so titled that Aída Sánchez de Serdio, Daniel García and Javier Rodrigo launched in 2010 from La Virreina, Centre de la Imatge.
[3]
Among other reasons because such a thing is impossible since every conversation, however innocent it may seem, is crossed by power relations.