FONS ÀUDIO #55
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.
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.
Fito Conesa
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.
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.
Iván Argote
Iván Argote is a multifaceted artist who uses media such as video, photography, sculpture, performance, and installation to question the notion of heritage, and tests the events that govern our social, political, and private contexts. In FONS AUDIO #39 Iván talks about the family as a small social unit, about pranks or ‘pilatunas’ and caresses, about a change of scale as a critical tool, and about the archaeological remains that we carry around within us.
Carlos Garaicoa
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.