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I taste the future

Museum Futures was exhibited as part of I Taste the Future, the 2017 iteration of the Lofoten International Art Festival (LIAF), Norway.

I Taste the Future proposes speculations about the future of the Lofoten archipelago and its surrounding sea. Situated 150 years from now, the Festival draws on science fiction as a model for thinking about futures, rooted in Henningsvær, a village with 460 inhabitants. Historically Henningsvær was the most important fishing village in what still remains one of the world’s largest seasonal fisheries, known primarily for the cod that has been coming to spawn in Lofoten for centuries.

Speculative shards

 

I was invited by Verina Gfader to contribute to Echo. This is from the introduction...

Echo is a reverberation of an original sound after this sound has stopped or is in the moment of evaporating. Not a background noise, it resonates and doubles a tonality, pitch, vocation. I am thinking about the experience of echoing in a particular mountain landscape, something to do with a sound being thrown, trashed towards a wall or large rock–and returning in a ghostly and consuming fashion.

How did Echo the project come about?

The materiality of Echo project serves as a hint to what happened during a visit of the Los Angeles Art Book fair in January 2014. It was on the occasion of a prior book project, titled Prospectus, that the editorial team had been invited by the LAABF team to both present the printed matter in the format of running a book stall, and stage a discursive event at the Classroom. Out of curiosity of exploring a ‘present LA,’ that is the very surroundings and stage of the fair, we–three Londoners at the time–accepted.

ok.

Echo project charts encounters with voices and questions, some out of synch, some in dialogues; musical, conversational confrontational, and in dis/agreement. Content-wise one finds a phantom meeting around a failed or missed art book fair deal . . .

a sort of surplus of a fair (or affair)?

You could say so. An essay on the General Intellect and Financialization sets a conceptual ground for rethinking subjective freedom; an encounter with Another LA opens out a multitude of cartographies - revealing more discreet and politically dynamic movements in the urban grid; there are glimpses of Machine Project’s events, a visual story around mothers and demonology (Kathy Acker’s property deals in the UK), and more; and future materials formalized as poster texts . . .  and possible scenarios.....

Mariana Santiago & Verina Gfader, 2016

Read the complete introduction...

Insatiable

InsatiableChelsea College of Art & Design, London Friday 19 October 2012

As part of Critical Practice I helped facilitate Insatiable a symposium to critically examine the conflicted idea of sustainable growth and to envision alternatives.

Insatiable is an exchange between Art, Economics and Ecology. Each of the fields is contested and constantly changing, and the relationships between them are ambiguous and paradoxical. While the symposium offers a critical focus on ‘sustainable growth’, we aim to move beyond critique towards guidelines for creative action.

As a global centre for contemporary art and finance, London is a unique context in which to consider the conflicted idea of ‘sustainable growth’. Decades of constant economic expansion have overwritten considerations of ecological sustainability, even human survival.

Expert 3

Maria, Suset, MirenThe third of the Procesos de archivo /Archivalprocess expert working sessions took place at Intermediæ in Madrid. The working sessions are to enable the core curatorial team to gain knowledge and experience. The sessions are closed but resources will be on-line soon.

Curator, editor and librarian Miren Eraso, recent director of Arteleku lead the sessions. In the first, Miren made an interesting analogy between the problems for libraries in post-Franco Spain and contemporary archives, and in the second we refined the mapping of the knowledge ecology of intermediae.

I wrote into Miren’s presentation as she spoke, following are the tweaked notes....

Expert 2

Daniel García AndújarThe second of the Procesos de archivo/ Archivalprocess. expert working sessions took place at Intermediæ in Madrid. The working sessions are to enable the core curatorial team to gain knowledge and experience. The sessions are closed but resources will be on-line soon.

Artist Daniel García Andújar, founder of the post-capital archive lead the sessions. In the first, Daniel gave an overview of his ideas of the archive, and in the second talked through his post-capital archive and its exhibition.

I wrote into Daniel’s presentation as he spoke, following are the tweaked notes....

Critical Forum

Collecting Moving Images
the Nunnery, Bow, London

I participated in a Forum discussion curated by Cinzia Cremona, around the theme of Collecting Moving Images as part of a survey exhibition of recent work.

The Forum was chaired by Cinzia and included
3 pm Collecting: Myriam Blundell collector and curator, and Lucy Bayley from the Contemporary Art Society
4 pm Coffee and Pampero rum break
4.30 pm Circulating: Peter Lewis, Chris Meigh-Andrews and myself

I screened Screen Tests, and talked about working with public media archives and the possibilities offered by copyleft licenses.

We had an interesting discussion (on-line here) on collecting - storage, exhibition the museum and the archive; circulation - gallery or private exhibition, and the 'free' circulation of material via archive.org or copyleft distribution; economics - the differences in a consumer model, or fee based commissions; and more generally the dynamics of private collections, educational archives and databases; and the impact of changing technologies.

images

Timeline InstallationDaniel expert 1BasiaSelf Portrait; Relational MapKFKM screening roomWood wall