SPECIALS

In FONS ÀUDIO #49, Peter Downsbrough takes his works from the MACBA Collection as a springboard to talk about a relationship with photography spanning almost half a century, and about how it fits into the jigsaw puzzle of techniques and disciplines that make up his artistic vocabulary. We talk about space, cities, invisible lines, and the critical attitude that runs subtly through his practice.

This project by the researcher and curator Marta Echaves is structured as a web of complementary, interconnected narratives that reconstruct the silenced history of a generation marked by heroin and AIDS in post-dictatorship Spain.

Lithium mines, Trotskyist sects, black boxes, planetary exodus, augmented architecture, a city as big as the entire planet Earth, the mythology of Area 51. McKenzie Wark, Liam Young and Mette Edvardsen explore these and other ideas in an attempt to think about space as more than just a medium. Space as object.

Media studies expert Matthew Fuller talks about the origins and legacy of pirate radio culture in London, focusing on this fertile period of DIY resurgence, when radio resumed a prominent role in a scene hungry for alternative channels before the arrival of the internet.

Things that are more than things: frozen embodiments of social relations, petrifications of desires and energies, replicas disguised as everyday objects. Images, microwave, post-its, money, inhalers, cheese. We speak with Hito Steyerl, Helen Hester and Roula Partheniou of these and other ideas. Because things are never quite the way they seem.

In 1953, after attending the first Swedish Radio and Fylkingen Society electronic music concert with Pierre Henry and Pierre Schaeffer, Swedish artist Öyvind Fahlström wrote a manifesto for concrete poetry. More than a decade later, the Swedish Radio broadcasted his pioneer radio piece “Fåglar I Sverige (Birds in Sweden)”. In the decades that followed, the complexity and broad spectrum of productions coming out of the Elektronmusikstudion (EMS), founded by Karl Birger in 1964, made it a hub for artists. But while the text-sound scene was in and out of the Sound Workshop, Knut Wiggen, the first director of the EMS, channelled his energy into the futuristic dream of creating a world-class computer music studio for experts and scholars.

In FONS ÀUDIO #48, Akram Zaatari contextualises his work 'Nature morte', which is part of the MACBA Collection. This film was produced for the 2008 exhibition 'Les Inquiets – 5 artistes sous la pression de la guerre' at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, which explored the war in the Middle East and its representations.

In FONS ÀUDIO #47, Andrea Fraser comments the work 'Little Frank and His Carp', in the MACBA Collection, which registerd her performance in the atrium of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in 2001. Recorded by five hidden cameras, 'Little Frank and His Carp' follows the artist’s movements from different angles and shows the changes in attitude and emotion generated by the male voice of the audio guide.

Pirate radio became one of the protagonists and main motifs of the narrative thread of Lizzie Borden's 'Born in Flames'. In this short excerpt, the cult and self-taught filmmaker Lizzie Borden shares the various reasons that led her to take an interest in the phenomenon of European free radio, and how it helped her to connect the various agendas of this cult film.

Independent publishing is experiencing a boom in the art world. Before the bubble bursts, we speak to Kit Hammonds and Bernhard Cella about the boom, the recovery of supposedly obsolete printing techniques, the risk-aversion of institutional art collections, about professionalisation and about digital generation.

SPA Rogelio López Cuenca looks back at some of the key aspects that led to the creation of three works now in the MACBA Collection: 'No (W) here Postcards' (1998), 'Beaux Arts' (1992), and 'Musée Élan' (1989).

Meireles has the ability to materialise philosophical ideas through small gestures and a great economy of means. His processes are simple, owing to his propensity to not complicate things. In FONS ÀUDIO #45 Cildo Meireles talks about his works in the MACBA Collection.

Malcolm Le Grice talks about his 1970 work "Berlin Horse", which is part of the MACBA Collection and moves on to expanded cinema, materialist structuralism, latency, suspense, and the representation of time in his work.

Mircea Cantor talks about his work 'Chaplet' (2007), about the impact of borders and the society of control, and about the poetic resonance of tracks, materials, and other physical traces.

SPA 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.

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.

Martí Anson is an artist of multiple registers who extends and redefines, through his works, the limits of the exhibition space, the possibilities of artistic reception and the status of the artist. In FONS AUDIO #40 Martí Anson tells us about his childhood summers in La Garrotxa, his formative years, the art public, the limits of the museum and the transfers between reality and fiction.

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.

Dora García works on projects that tend towards infinite growth, resorting to practices such as invisible theatre, footnotes, and serendipitous exploration. In FONS AUDIO #38, she talks about her projects, her working methods, and the countless historical transfers between psychoanalysis and literature.

Manolo Laguillo is a photographer, essayist and professor of photography in the Fine Arts Faculty, Universitat de Barcelona. His stark, deserted urban representations illustrate processes of change in the contemporary metropolis. In FONS AUDIO #37 Manolo Laguillo talks about his methods of working with large format cameras, about his walks in the city outskirts, about puddles, asphalt and ruins, about the qualities of colour and black and white, the sensuality of prints on paper, and the links between music and photography.

The slippery materiality of untraceable objects: from the arsenic poisoning the wells of Bangladesh as told by Nabil Ahmed, to Arie Altena's account of the superstition surrounding the Kola Superdeep Borehole in Russia, or the bizarre biology of the vampire squid from hell in a passage of Vilém Flusser’s ‘Vampyroteuthis Infernalis’ read by AGF.

Through a series of practices designed to examine all the folds and psychological strata of the real, Matt Mullican circles around notions such as virtuality, cosmology, subjectivity, and the idea of a memory theatre. In FONS AUDIO #36 he tells us about life on the other side of the mirror, explains different ways of handling a corpse, and talks about the mind’s endless capacity to create imaginary or parallel worlds.

Patricia Dauder creates essential structures as a result of long-term work processes that allow her to set up a fluctuating dialogue between observation of the physical world, experimentation with matter, and the analysis of systems of representation. In FONS AUDIO #35 Patricia Dauder uses the work Model #1 as a springboard into her creative process and into aspects such as travelling, ruins, colours, textures, and other interests that shape her cosmologies.

Daniela Ortiz and Xose Quiroga carry out artistic research and actions at points where colonial narratives collide with migration control systems and with the consensus that underpins the nation state. In Fons #34, Daniela talks about the duo’s working processes, about different ways of spreading hidden knowledge, and about the nomenclature of the colonial monuments that populate the city.

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, critic and curator Jorge Ribalta talks about his working processes, about the intersections between artistic and social practices, and about the links between creation, pleasure, and knowledge.

Alfons Borrell is one of the greatest exponents of Catalan abstract painting. He has gradually established a solid and highly expressive body of work of great intensity. His painting is a unique case in the artistic movements that shaped Catalan modernity in the second half of the twentieth century. In FONS AUDIO #31 Alfons Borrell takes us on a personal journey through his painting career, as he shares his ideas on art and life, memory and memories, nature and landscape.

Anthropologist Martin Holbraad and artist and curator Quim Pujol discuss monsters, otherness, hybrids, agency and fetish.

Using ephemeral materials, Carlos Bunga addresses a galaxy of complex notions such as fragility, transience, mutation, and accident. In FONS AUDIO #30 he talks about his early video essays, about how his working process occurs, and about the imminent transitoriness of all architecture.

Sergi Aguilar talks about his initial steps in the field of jewellery and about postmodernism in Spain during the eighties, and offers us an overview of his artistic career and his working methods through an analysis of his works in the MACBA Collection.

David Crowley looks at Oskar Hansen's links to the twentieth-century Polish electroacoustic scene, and the role of the experimental radio studio in Warsaw at the time.

Joan Fontcuberta talks about his formative years, about the processes by which photography is incorporated into the art world, about post-photography, and about his works in the MACBA Collection.

RADIOACTIVITY looks into two seminal free radio stations – Radio Alice in Bologna and Radio Tomate in Paris – as singular case studies in which self-management, decentralised organisation and DIY coincide. The mini-series is an introduction to the free radio movement that sprung up in several countries in the seventies as a way of giving voice to actors who were outside the media establishment: an alternative to the dominant narrative that can also be seen as precursor of the horizontal rhizome structure of digital networks.

RADIOACTIVITY looks into two seminal free radio stations – Radio Alice in Bologna and Radio Tomate in Paris – as singular case studies in which self-management, decentralised organisation and DIY coincide. The mini-series is an introduction to the free radio movement that sprung up in several countries in the seventies as a way of giving voice to actors who were outside the media establishment: an alternative to the dominant narrative that can also be seen as precursor of the horizontal rhizome structure of digital networks.

Lawrence Abu Hamdan explores into the contemporary politics of listening and the role of the voice in law.

Jordi Colomer ponders the uses of writing, architecture and representation, and takes us through his works in the MACBA Collection.

Cuts, folds, scales, sound objects, charts, chimeras. Artists Erick Beltrán and Florian Hecker discuss different theories about objects in relation to their respective artistic practices.

Francesc Abad takes us on a tour spanning the last four decades of Spanish and Catalan art, through an analysis of his works in the MACBA Collection.

To coincide with the exhibition 'Before Our Eyes', Javier Calvo and Victor Nubla have created a piece based on Brion Gyin's Dream Machine.

Eulàlia Valldosera talks about the early stages of her career, about her use of light, her status as a woman, her creative processes, and about some of her works in the MACBA Collection.

Overwhelmed by the institutionalised discourse of politics and economists, we invite artists, philosophers, researchers and poets to share their ideas about what is happening to us, to comment on the positive and negative implications of this structural crisis, and to imagine an uncertain future.

Antoni Abad charts a course that begins with his early sculptural works and ends with his current community-based mobile communication projects, by way of his video installations and net.art.

Oriol Vilanova works with materials from flea markets: postcards, books and other documents which he collects, sorts and recomposes to create new mental journeys.

The photographs of Xavier Ribas analyse processes of transformation of contemporary metropolises, and the ways of life and habitability that these changes bring about.

OBJECTHOOD is a series of podcasts about new perspectives on the role of the object in contemporary art and philosophy. The first interviews in this series were conducted during the seminar "Expanded Choreography. Situations, Movements, Objects...", which took place at the MACBA in March 2012.

Born in Salt Lake City but based in Paris, Eric Baudelaire uses various formats to explore politically-charged historical events and documents. In FONS ÀUDIO #21 he discusses the background and context of the ideas and procedures behind 'The Anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi, and 27 Years Without Images'.

Presented in the galleries of the Museum on 23 February 2013 within the programme Experience MACBA, 'Cascando. Variations for another dramatic piece' is part of a radio play by Samuel Beckett, adapted and produced by Joan Morey.

Sandra Balsells has spent more than twenty years using her camera to document and denounce the impact that military, natural and social catastrophes have on people. She practices a humanist, combative, poetic photojournalism that lays bare the conflicts of our time, offering us images with which to construct critical discourses and organise our visual memory.

Overwhelmed by the institutionalised discourse of politics and economists, we invite artists, philosophers, researchers and poets to share their ideas about what is happening to us, to comment on the positive and negative implications of this structural crisis, and to imagine an uncertain future.

Part avant-garde artist and part activist, Eulàlia Grau is considered to be one of the most combative voices of a generation that fought for a profound change of values during the final years of Franco’s dictatorship and the early years of the Transition. Using images taken from the media, the artist draws attention to the perversions and injustices of the capitalist system and its mechanisms of control, repression and persistence.

In his work, Mexican artist Erick Beltrán reflects on the ways in which information is legitimised by manipulating and using discourses from published material.

Overwhelmed by the institutionalised discourse of politics and economists, we invite artists, philosophers, researchers and poets to share their ideas about what is happening to us, to comment on the positive and negative implications of this structural crisis, and to imagine an uncertain future.

Overwhelmed by the institutionalised discourse of politics and economists, we invite artists, philosophers, researchers and poets to share their ideas about what is happening to us, to comment on the positive and negative implications of this structural crisis, and to imagine an uncertain future.

The ICSID in Eivissa was much more than an ordinary congress. It was an experience of socialisation that changed the artistic, intellectual and behavioural mindsets of a whole generation of creative workers. In the words of the critic Daniel Giralt-Miracle, what we saw at the ICSID was “the burial of Noucentisme and the birth of the design generation.”

Judith Barry's installations can be considered to be an intersection of different disciplines (architecture, sculpture, film, video, performance) forged in the seventies when postmodern theories first arrived on the art scene. A substantial part of Barry's work, which is closely linked to feminism, revolves around issues of gender identity and the relationship between individuals and the urban environment.

"UTOPIA IS POSSIBLE. ICSID. EIVISSA, 1971" is a three-part miniseries based on the research carried out for the exhibition of the same name. It brings together the testimonies of some of the participants who took part in the 7th Congress of the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design (ICSID), in an ensemble portrait of this collective experience.

"UTOPIA IS POSSIBLE. ICSID. EIVISSA, 1971" is a three-part miniseries based on the research carried out for the exhibition of the same name. It brings together the testimonies of some of the participants who took part in the 7th Congress of the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design (ICSID), in an ensemble portrait of this collective experience.

Perejaume has a long-standing fascination with the shamanic power of mimesis. And writing, artistic practice and endless walks through his natural surroundings have been the means by which the artist has shaped his personal landscape narratives, which lie somewhere between figuration, imagination and theoretical reflection.

From obsessive classifications to anti-paintings, from a constant probing of the role of the spectator to imperceptible modifications, Ignasi Aballí’s work is both hermetic and accessible. A delicate balance between concept and form that draws inspiration from everyday life, literature and film in order to talk about absences, filters, fictions and limits.

The work of the Catalan composer Josep Maria Mestres Quadreny is an interesting example of an effort to break traditional moulds through an aesthetic and methodological approach, which places him at the vanguard of new music in Europe during the second half of the twentieth century.

Àngels Ribé creates works in which space, nature and the body become the articulating elements of a poetics of fragility based on de-emphasising the artistic object, the use of unconventional materials, and a defense of the ephemeral.

Kristin Oppenheim employs the dramatic properties of her own voice to articulate sound and visual installations that immerse the spectator in hypnotic environments replete with potential narratives. In FONS AUDIO #12, Oppenheim gives us some tips for approaching her installation 'Hey Joe' (1996), which is part of the MACBA Collection.

The work of Antoni Muntadas is an exhaustive study of communication processes and their numerous implications for society.

The work of Ibon Aranberri (Itziar-Deba, Guipúzcoa, 1969) explores the connections between nature and culture, and draws attention to the ideological abuses of the land by those in power at any given time.

The work of Rita McBride (Des Moines, Iowa, United States, 1969) is situated on the hybrid territory between sculpture, architecture and industrial design. Starting with the critical appropriation of everyday objects, the artist creates enigmatic pieces that force us to question the nature of the symbols on which our culture is based.

Pep Duran addresses an active viewer-actor who is willing to walk through his works bestowing on them personal, non-transferible meanings. A passionate collector of objects, his artistic production is inextricably linked with the use of materials that are discarded or found in containers.

By means of films, texts, sounds, photographs, paintings and other materials, The Otolith Group explores the nature of perception and analyses the role played by documents and images in the creation of archives in the post-colonial world.

Pere Portabella (1929) has done significant work on renewing the codes of film language since the 1960s in his dual role as director and producer.

In this show, we treat visual works as if they're audio and see what happens. In most cases, we discover that the sounds emanating from the visual works can stand on their own as great listening experiences.

Benet Rossell is difficult to classify, because he constantly invents new approaches. He uses multiple forms and distorts formats in order to infuse them with new potential: drawing becomes text, writing triggers action, film becomes poetic musings around time.

When television collides with audio arts, a new and disconcerting soundtrack emerges, one that can only have been a product of artists swiping, sampling, détourning, recycling, remixing, and mashing-up sources emanating from the television. This show rescues ten works, inspired by and taken from TV.

Jef Cornelis is one of the pioneers of research into the language of television and its relationship to video art, documentary and the reading of history from the present, and also of the analysis of what it means to make a film.

Although Gil J Wolman's seminal sound work has been largely overlooked, it was a precursor of sound poetry and is one of the key elements of Lettrist poetry. This radio show reconstructs the link between Lettrism, sound poetry, and the work of some isolated but fundamental figures.

This audiotour will take us to some of the key places where people gathered, discussed and engaged in independent, collective production during the seventies.

Narkevičius explores the perception of history and the mechanisms that transform it through utopias or ideologies. He focuses on the personal and individual, often structuring his work around forgotten or repressed testimonies and stories.

"Ombres del progrés" (Shadows of Progress) presents a selection of music that played an important role in Armando Andrade Tudela's journey to Marcahuasi, where he made a film named after this strange place.

"Ombres del progrés" (Shadows of Progress) presents a selection of music that played an important role in Armando Andrade Tudela's journey to Marcahuasi, where he made a film named after this strange place.

In his work, Armando Andrade Tudela (1975, Lima, Peru) explores concepts relating to modernity and the feeling for history.

This program surveys the work and career of John Cage in order to explore and learn more about his special relationship to radio, either as an instrument or as a means of communicating his ideas and transmitting his work.

John Baldessari reviews some key aspects of his approach to art. A look at his relationship to film, language and linguistics, and how the development of photographic reproduction techniques has affected his work.

The oeuvre of Esther Ferrer (San Sebastián, 1937) is characterized by a methodic minimalism, in which quotidian objects and her own body become the main elements in her work.

To complement the exhibition "The Anarchy of Silence. John Cage and Experimental Art" and "Ray Johnson. Please Add to & Return", this programme documents the Fluxus movement, an international network of artists which emerged in New York in the early 1960s.

This program is an audio companion to the exhibition "The Malady of Writing. A project on text and speculative imagination" that presents a pleasurable, humorous and fun version of modernism.

Often reduced to a kind of "psychedelia Made in Brazil", Tropicália was actually a reinvention of Brazilian popular music, which was able to encompass elements from the local scene and beyond, modern styles and traditional music, with all the contradictions that this implies. Curated by Raül G. Pratginestós.

Muñoz went back to patents he had found during the days he'd spent reading at the New York Public Library. The texts of the patents talk about materials and construction techniques and forms that can prevent echo inside built spaces.

Of all the works produced by Muñoz, "Will it Be a Likeness" is probably the most theatrical and less musical.

This program deals with card tricks, which are old favorites on magicians’ repertoires but also used on the streets.

In "Building for Music", Juan Muñoz, in collaboration with Alberto Iglesias, examines the ways in which architecture influences music and composition.

This project by Asier Mendizabal runs through hymns, marches, choirs and "charanga", revealing unexpected results and relationships.

A program directed and conducted by serge Guilbaut in relation with the exhibition "Be bomb" with the Be-Bop, the swing and the jazz.

A program directed and conducted by serge Guilbaut in relation with the exhibition "Be bomb" with the Be-Bop, el swing and the jazz.