Specials

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.

Eugènia Balcells (Barcelona, 1943) began her artistic career in the mid-seventies within the conceptual art scene. A pioneer of experimental film, video art, and video installation, she also works with visual scores, artist’s books, objects, performance art, photocopies, sounds, and photographs. Balcells considers herself an interdisciplinary researcher interested in the possibilities of physics, astronomy, mathematics, philosophy, sociology, music, and poetry. She brings these disciplines into the field of art, as an agora from which to reimagine and reinvent the world. In FONS AUDIO #54 we join Eugènia Balcells in looking back over a life dedicated to art, pausing to examine some of her works in the MACBA collection.

In FONS AUDIO #53 El Palomar tell us about their work in the MACBA collection Not Only Homophiles Are Homosexual, but Also Those Blinded by the Lost Phallus, a project in which they take up an unfinished, unproduced script by essayist and anthropologist Alberto Cardín and decide to make the film by their own means. In the course of rereading (and rewriting) Cardín’s cinematic vision, and through a process of immersion and meticulous research into its immediate context and background, El Palomar reconstruct a chapter in our history of sexual dissent, which is today still full of gaps and absences. Chief among them, Alberto Cardín.

In previous episodes we have hinted at limits as an interesting feature of objects that are often fuzzy or vague, and therefore hard to outline. This time around, we take a radically different approach to limits. A much darker, urgent take on boundaries and edges, if you will. This is not so much about ontological boundaries, but rather about the dangers of looking at the world with no limits in mind. In dialogue with Andrea Ballestero and Chris Korda. Music by Jessica Ekomane.

In FONS AUDIO #52 Cabello/Carceller talk about their two works in the MACBA Collection: 'I Don't Care about Your Gaze Anymore' (February 1994) and 'A/O (The Céspedes Case)' (July 2009-July 2010). Through them, they reflect on blurred identities, on the diverse possibilities of genders and on the need to create new representations that disrupt the traditional patterns structuring our gaze.

Pere Noguera is a conceptual artist. Since the early 1970s he has been experimenting with the aesthetic, poetic, and metaphysical possibilities of mud, water, landscape, paper, photocopies, photography, everyday objects, action, and the passage of time. In FONS AUDIO #51, he gives us some insight into works such as "La fotocòpia com a obra document" (1975), "Càntirs" (1976), "Pedra i ganxos de ferro. Sèrie 'Massanet'" (1977) and "Porta doble" (1990).

As part of the exhibition "Sampler #4. Things that Happen", Enric Farrés Durán turns the tables on us with a proposal to get Ràdio Web MACBA to talk about his practice. In this podcast, we talk about learning together by doing, about Enric’s multidirectional transfers of knowledge, and about a practice shot through with discourse. We also touch on the aesthetics of sound, the post-human voice, and the limits of editing; we talk about complexes, accents, and the political act of making vulnerability visible; about the loss of control and about the intimate realm impressed onto the dimension of sound. A space for listening in suspended time that gives voice to the people behind this project.

Francesc Torres (Barcelona, 1948) is an artist, essayist, poet, collector, and curator, who has been involved with conceptual art since the late sixties. He has been a pioneering figure in the use of installation as an artistic and narrative device with which to explore the possibilities of the exhibition space, the artistic object, and the interactions that take place between the audience and the art work. Historical memory, understood as a political category, is an another element that runs through his work. In FONS AUDIO #37 Francesc Torres talks about some of his works in the MACBA Collection as he looks back over his years in Paris working with Piotr Kowalski and his early performances in the United States. He also reflects on the aesthetic-political characteristics of installations, on historical memory, collecting, and the role of museums.

This new episode of Roc Jiménez de Cisneros' OBJECTHOOD series features conversations with Diego Falconi, Rick Dolphijn, Dave Phillips, and music by Kali Malone. A spiral-shaped trip about fire, burning, ashes, rituals, cooking, food, and jungles. Though it is also about everything that lies in between and beneath each and every one of those things. The invisible micropolitics of food in the military; the symbolic charge of ashes, solid remains of an intangible object – fire – which has shaped this planet for millions of years; the untold gender-related motifs behind the Aimara genocide; a circular, cyclical perception of time; or the role and relevance of ecosystems, even beyond the good old wildlife cliché – because, you know, “everything is an ecosystem, at the end of the day”. 

We talk to Karo Moret, Diego Falconí and Lucía Piedra Galarraga interculturality, multiculturality, and migrant sit-ins. They share ideas on cosmopolitics, the Hispanic world, atavisms, and Afrofuturism; on El Cid's beard, the Royal Spanish Academy, and taking academia to the street. They examine the ways in which a transvestite theory of childhood challenges the imaginaries embodied in literature and explore the legal loopholes and the counter-routes of knowledge that could allow us, collectively, to come together in the south.