Son[i]a #348
Marc Vives
![Son[i]a #348](https://img.macba.cat/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/vives-08.jpeg)
It’s not just that Marc Vives’s work eludes categories and concise descriptions, which it does. Rather, it is like a kind of art of elusion itself, a tenacious and obstinate exercise in dodging limits and clear formalisations. His is a generative systems art, an alchemy of closeness, a kind of cartomancy that zeroes in on social relations and interpersonal connections. And It tends to put pressure on the logic of the white cube and the logic of cultural management, one thing on top of the other, all at once. Collectively, whenever possible. Above all, it is a practice of doing and of everyday life and experience, which often includes voice, music, language and staging, but does not fit into what is usually considered performing arts.
Marc constructs situations, although he generally takes the role of an observer of processes rather than an architect. He puts forward and activates proposals with various ramifications, which are not meticulously calculated stagings but mappings of relations and their scope of power. Sometimes he is like someone who leaves a handful of lentils to sprout without knowing what will happen. Other times, like someone who sticks two packets of Menthos in a bottle of Coca-Cola and sits down to see what happens after shaking it vigorously.
In this podcast we talk to Marc Vives about swimming, about nerves, about floors stripped of paint, and about strategies for eschewing comfort and courting risk and emptiness in the usually safe environment of the art world. He talks about process as something more than just a path towards a goal, about catharsis and escape valves, and about his solo and collective work. And about his love-hate relationship with the mountain of Montjuïc.
Marc Larré
Marc Larré works with video, photography, sculpture and objects, giving free rein to a dilettante practice that entails attentive listening to the materials he handles, and also to the context—to his surroundings. In his thinking-by-doing, Marc generates countless unexpected connections between temporary situations, objects, and people, in order to question notions of progress and modernity. In this podcast, we talk to Marc Larré about megaliths, stones, and anti-monuments. As we listen, artisanal practices, traces, frictions, clay, and plaster make an appearance. We talk about the experiential dimension of his practice and about the connections and synergies with the art community in Barcelona. And naturally, we also talk about art, about precarity, and about the need to rethink our working conditions, together.
Clàudia Pagès
The work of artist Clàudia Pagés unfolds and contracts in many forms. Words, the body, and movement circulate in multiple directions through her processes, forging a tangled linguistic web of micro-narratives that involve critically listening to the immediate environment, and recording it through persistent writing. In this podcast, we open Clàudia Pagés’s box of tricks and tools. Repetition, 'zoom-ins', physical and metaphorical shifts, and translation emerge as some of her main strategies, while singing, composing, and dancing come together as desire and a pure space of experimentation and possibility.
Luz Broto
Luz Broto talks about invisible forces, the space of art, negotiation, the visualization of processes, the poetics of politics, the art of the void, and her exquisite capacity to stick her nose where it doesn’t belong.