Storage #1

Following the Poetics and Politics of Storage and Circular Use research-action work group, this three-episode miniseries looks at the symptoms and possible responses to the current challenges of temporary storage and palliative curating of works and legacies. In this third instalment, David Bestué, Lucia C. Pino, Francesc Ruiz and Anna Manubens reflect on the slow speeds of storage and on the persistence in time of the things we make. They talk about fluids and pipes, about affects and manias, trees and shrubs, and reproductions and contradictions.

Following the Poetics and Politics of Storage and Circular Use research-action work group, this three-episode miniseries looks at the symptoms and possible responses to the current challenges of temporary storage and palliative curating of works and legacies. In this second instalment, Anna Manubens, David Bestué, Lucia C. Pino and Francesc Ruiz share experiments and valuable experiences to shape a new institutional hypothesis. They speak of celebratory arrivals, orchestrated destructions, unobscured forms of maintenance, and networks of adoption of works that involve care without ownership. They also explore the possibility of making space and creating forms of public memory that accompany heritage objects through their processes of decay, crumbling, and material transformation.

In this podcast, we talk to sociologist Fernando Domínguez Rubio about the ecologies of care that fuel the fiction of artistic stability —a network of infrastructures, climate technologies, conservation laboratories and underground storage facilities, as well as the largely invisible workers whose labour is usually left out of the traditional narrative of art, even though it is pivotal. We talk about the constant struggle against entropy, reflecting on the physical and human resources devoted to it, but also on the ethical, political, and economic implications of trying to slow down the passage of time. Because the way Domínguez Rubio sees it, the museum is much more than a space for contemplation and a collective archive: it is a political and cultural technology aimed at freezing time, ordering the world, and determining what is worthy of conservation. We talk to Fernando Domínguez Rubio about regimes of objecthood, about storage facilities, memory, and greenhouses, about uniqueness, and about other ways of holding onto things.

In his exploration of the speculative traces of comics as a cultural form, Francesc Ruiz calls up notions such as détournement, desire, fan culture, window, vignette, and counter-history. In FONS AUDIO #33 he talks about his projects, about the ideological aspects implicit in newsstand displays, and about how comics can reorganise the way a city is used.

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.