Specials
In this first episode, we revisit the early days of Video-Nou and its connection with other artists who were also starting to work with video in Catalonia. Hand in hand with Lluïsa Roca, Luisa Ortínez, Xefo Guasch and Carles Ameller, we look at the collective’s relationship with the counterculture, the underground, and libertarian movements. And we consider the particularities of video as a tool for documentary, communication, creation, and protest, with special attention to its uses within the political and social context of the period of the Spanish transition. We explore strategies such as feedback and counterinformation, and we get a behind-the-scenes insight into the making of Video-Nou’s first projects: Gràcia. Espais Verds (February-March 1977) and Campanya política per a la Lliga de Catalunya (April-May 1977), better known as the Video-Bus.
Artist Lucía C. Pino approaches her sculptural work as a conversation with the materials, the media and the surroundings—in relation to where they come from as well as the place they will occupy—, emphasising their performative aspect and their interdependence with her every move. It is a practice that is not easily defined, permeated by a wide range of interests, influences and concerns, among which Lucía includes the rituals of reading, writing, and doing-with-others. In FONS ÀUDIO #58, Lucía C. Pino presents Non-Slave Tenderness, 2018.
In this podcast, we talk with Edwin van der Heide about using radio as a way into the public, outside world, and about radio as a highly regulated space that sometimes resists experimentation. We discuss his early interest in short and medium wave radio and how it came to be expressed in these immersive, awe-inspiring installations, and we speculate about the production of meaning inherent in each of them.
Bernat Daviu (b. Fonteta, Baix Empordà, 1985) is an artist who considers himself a painter first and foremost. A painter aware that the death of painting has long been anticipated but has not yet arrived. As such, he expands it and allows it to mutate into objects, costume design, dance, performance, video, music, and art installations. He activates painting, sets it in motion, and turns it into a mirror of our surroundings. Daviu is interested in the borderlands between art and non-art. In this podcast, he talks about his 2020 work Stanza, in which painted canvases break free from the frame and start to dance and interact with other artistic disciplines.
Fito Conesa inhabits many languages and disciplines, stretching the chewing gum of his practice to stick on different forms of knowledge, ways of doing, and conversations that are often found outside the white cube. In this podcast, Fito Conesa takes us behind the scenes of the visually and sonically imposing video Helicon (2019), in which a seven-member brass band invokes the end of the world in an almost apocalyptic landscape, in which geological time, human time, and personal time collapse into one.
Núria Güell’s artistic practice always starts with a contradiction or social conflict that she feels directly challenged or affected by. These give rise to long collaborative processes in which listening, legal research, negotiation, and confrontation—as well as affinities and affects—become essential creative tools. Her practice is part of her life, and it often involves taking legal, physical, and emotional risks. In FONS AUDIO #55, Núria Güell talks to us about the processes, conversations, research, and formalisation behind the making of Ayuda humanitaria (Humanitarian aid) (2008-2013), a piece she began during the years she spent in in Cuba, which became part of the MACBA Collection in 2021.
Eugènia Balcells (Barcelona, 1943) began her artistic career in the mid-seventies within the conceptual art scene. A pioneer of experimental film, video art, and video installation, she also works with visual scores, artist’s books, objects, performance art, photocopies, sounds, and photographs. Balcells considers herself an interdisciplinary researcher interested in the possibilities of physics, astronomy, mathematics, philosophy, sociology, music, and poetry. She brings these disciplines into the field of art, as an agora from which to reimagine and reinvent the world. In FONS AUDIO #54 we join Eugènia Balcells in looking back over a life dedicated to art, pausing to examine some of her works in the MACBA collection.
In FONS AUDIO #53 El Palomar tell us about their work in the MACBA collection Not Only Homophiles Are Homosexual, but Also Those Blinded by the Lost Phallus, a project in which they take up an unfinished, unproduced script by essayist and anthropologist Alberto Cardín and decide to make the film by their own means. In the course of rereading (and rewriting) Cardín’s cinematic vision, and through a process of immersion and meticulous research into its immediate context and background, El Palomar reconstruct a chapter in our history of sexual dissent, which is today still full of gaps and absences. Chief among them, Alberto Cardín.
In previous episodes we have hinted at limits as an interesting feature of objects that are often fuzzy or vague, and therefore hard to outline. This time around, we take a radically different approach to limits. A much darker, urgent take on boundaries and edges, if you will. This is not so much about ontological boundaries, but rather about the dangers of looking at the world with no limits in mind. In dialogue with Andrea Ballestero and Chris Korda. Music by Jessica Ekomane.
In FONS AUDIO #52 Cabello/Carceller talk about their two works in the MACBA Collection: 'I Don't Care about Your Gaze Anymore' (February 1994) and 'A/O (The Céspedes Case)' (July 2009-July 2010). Through them, they reflect on blurred identities, on the diverse possibilities of genders and on the need to create new representations that disrupt the traditional patterns structuring our gaze.