Research residencies

The first focus of this project is an experimental proposal about how to narrate the recent history of the junctures between art, politics, activism and mass communication.

The second focal point emerges from the following hypothesis: certain aspects of these junctures can be considered a restatement of experimental prototypes originally embraced and put into practice by the historical avant-gardes.

The starting point for this investigation is the conjunction of two essays by Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction and The Author as Producer, and the project proposes the existence of a “productivist Benjamin”. The relationship between Benjamin and a certain time and spirit (the politicised Russo-Soviet avant-garde, the avant-garde theatre radicalised towards anti-bourgeois politics, etc.) is exemplified through his growing relationship and, in the end, deep affinity with Bertolt Brecht.

This research project attempts to define the sphere of political-cultural entrepreneurship and its base in the production of openly distributed cognitive-cultural goods and services.

This requires the establishment of an operative definition of this concept by developing a preliminary inventory of projects of this type that can be included in this definition in the Spanish context and describing the genesis and development of these entrepreneurial projects in relation to the social and political context of the last two decades, recognising their strengths and weaknesses. At the same time, the project analyses their value as a source of wealth, heterogeneity and distinction within the creative sector of cities, along with their social, economic and political value in their contribution to the intellectual commons. Finally, it identifies possible forms of synergy that can reinforce this type of network and increase their agency.

This project involves art research that falls within the so-called radical pedagogies of visual culture. It is structured around an analysis of the different narratives that have vindicated alternative models of art and audiovisual production, by using disruptive strategies in the forms of administration, efficiency and authority in disciplined societies.

The research project was built around the confluence of a series of interviews done in an earlier phase and groups of artists currently working in Europe. These groups or projects are characterised by their collaborative working styles and their experimentation with creating new critical views of globalised societies. The project also calls for a re-reading of the legacy of different experimental documentary image practices developed during the last century that tried to deconstruct the structures of judgement and productivity in inherited learning in order to generate other forms of social coexistence and empower them with collective action.

This project was designed to study the processes of artistic creation for women in Spain starting from a basic concept: invisibility. Because of the Franco dictatorship, the so-called women’s liberation movements and the associated feminist ideology were incorporated into Spanish social structures more slowly and were controlled by strict patriarchal doctrines.

The research project plans to briefly trace the careers of the first professional female artists in Spain, who for the most part practiced their profession during the brilliant decades of the 1920s and 30s and endured the darks depths of the Civil War, exile and repression under Franco. This background serves as a base from which to analyse one of the paradoxically least studied eras in terms of gender studies and the visual arts in Spain: the late-Franco period and the transition, a time consigned to oblivion when the new figuration and neo-expressionist movements of the 1980s emerged.

This research project situates Antonin Artaud’s work in drawing, theatre, cinema and radio, as a relevant legacy for understanding postwar artistic practices. Artaud’s importance to the visual arts and poetry is often overlooked due to the centrality accorded the work of Marcel Duchamp and Dada when narrating this history. The researcher proposes a monographic study that hones in on Artaud’s reception in relation to neo-avantgarde practices, including cinema and painting. At issue is what Jacques Derrida calls the blow (coup) that is struck to the art institution by means of Artaud’s work. How might one understand the singularity of this blow in relation to the histories of modernism? Finally, this project responds to today’s increasingly global art world by articulating a transatlantic model for thinking Artaud’s legacy in France, the United States, and Brazil.