FONS AUDIO #42
Carlos Garaicoa
Carlos Garaicoa works with a wide range of artistic disciplines to devise his narratives of the contemporary city. Over the years, photographs, interventions, texts, videos, drawings, sculptures, architectural models, and installations have built up a visual and conceptual body of work with the city as backdrop. Garaicoa’s city is conceived as a symbolic space of political, social, and emotional interactions that the he attempts to disclose, in order to conquer new fields of freedom.
In FONS AUDIO #42 Carlos Garaicoa talks about his education in Cuba, about the pressing need to move beyond post-colonial narratives, about his cultural activism, and about ‘Yo no quiero ver más a mis vecinos’ (‘I Don’t Want to See My Neighbours Any More’), which forms part of the MACBA Collection.
Núria Güell
In Núria Güell’s (Vidreres, 1981) practice, the museum-institution becomes the actual medium of her art: she manipulates, squeezes and expands it, questions its rationale, blind spots and contradictions, and seeks to transcend its boundaries. Her works always spring from social conflicts that directly affect her, and she uses the strategies of art as platforms to dismantle the logic of power. In this podcast we talk to Núria Güell about her working methods and about the activation of artistic practices that become mechanisms for listening. We reflect on the realm of ethics and morality in art, and on disobediences, psychoanalysis, precarities, the status of the artist and the urgent need to recover the subversive potential of contemporary art.
Núria Güell
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.
Mircea Cantor
Mircea Cantor talks about his work 'Chaplet' (2007), about the impact of borders and the society of control, and about the poetic resonance of tracks, materials, and other physical traces.
Deleted scenes
We dig up some unreleased fragments of the interview with Carlos Garaicoa that we were unable to include the first time around.
Adrian Melis
In FONS AUDIO #41 Adrian Melis talks about contemporary Cuban art, about his formative years in Tania Brughera’s Cátedra de Arte Conducta, about the usefulness of art, and about production systems, consumer goods, dreams, and paradoxes.
Carlos Bunga
Using ephemeral materials, Carlos Bunga addresses a galaxy of complex notions such as fragility, transience, mutation, and accident. In FONS AUDIO #30 he talks about his early video essays, about how his working process occurs, and about the imminent transitoriness of all architecture.