memory

"Portrait of Us on the Run": extract from sound pieces of "Audiodatabank" by Vito Acconci.

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.    

We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with artist Francesc Torres that we were unable to include the first time around. 

David Bestué’s practice sits at the intersection of sculpture, architecture, and language, although it also extends to other forms such as curating and essay writing. In A FONS ÀUDIO #64, we focus on his works in the MACBA Collection, taking us back to the beginnings of his career, to contextualize his collaboration with the artist and performer Marc Vives, under the alias Bestué/Vives—a key phase that precedes his later research into architecture, memory, and materiality. Over the course of a decade, the duo developed a body of work marked by constant experimentation, in which sculpture and performance merge with narrative fiction. After the dissolution of the shared project, Bestué directed his research toward the relationships between architecture, memory, and materiality, a line of inquiry materialized in works such as Uralitas, also documented here.