Storage #3
Poetics and Politics of Storage and Circular Use
Poetics and Politics of Storage and Circular Use is an action-research group that emerged at Hangar from a shared interest in storage and its widespread consequences in the arts sector. Since late 2022, the group, whose members are David Bestué, Lucia C. Pino, Francesc Ruiz, Esther Doblas, Antonio Gagliano, and Anna Manubens, has explored these often-backgrounded practices—such as storage, dismantling, recycling, disappearance and mourning—in relation to what the group sees as a missing, yet-to-be-invented infrastructure. They are interested in how these practices give rise to conversation about sustainability in the arts, dealing with overproduction and the need to imagine alternatives to the tenets of eternal heritage conservation and infinite growth.
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. They discuss the life of black boxes, and also work processes that necessarily involve the hands, like a tremor passing from one body to another. They also consider the tenacity of gestures, legacies, sediments, and chaotic crystallisations that preserve the wisdom of particular contexts and the shared memory of the institutions we need to imagine.
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Poetics and Politics of Storage and Circular Use
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.
Poetics and Politics of Storage and Circular Use
Following the Poetics and Politics of Storage and Circular Us group’s work, 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 first instalment, Anna Manubens, David Bestué, Lucia C. Pino and Francesc Ruiz connect artistic processes to the larger-scale processing of materials. They talk about scrapyards, landfill, sewage treatment plants, and trucks, highlighting the energy and the aesthetic fascination that is sometimes sparked by waste and the intense memory of materials in motion. They also address the proliferation and promises of storage units, storage as crisis or free fall, and the bewilderment of knowing themselves part of a generation which has been dispossessed of space.
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