ARTISTS AND RESEARCHERS 2020-2021 (PROCESSI 148)
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VIDEO ART
IRENE DE ANDRÉS (Ibiza, 1986)
Después del descanso is structured around an analysis of the evolution of the concept of leisure, taking as its cardinal points organizations devoted to indoctrinating the working class under 20th-century European dictatorships. The first organization of this kind, the Opera Nazionale Dopolavoro, emerged under Mussolini. Nazi Germany imported it as Kraft durch Freude [Strength Through Joy] which, after a major investment, would be transformed into one of the biggest tour-operators of the 1930s.
TXUSPO POYO (Pamplona, 1963)
Gran Hotel Nazareno, el cuerpo se hizo pantalla o las imágenes no caen del cielo, analyses the symbolic, metaphorical and literal displacements of Natural Science display cabinets, which were a pedagogical model employed at religious schools. These display cabinets contained collections of minerals, herbaria or stuffed animals… many of which came from religious missions. The Nazareno School, founded in 1630 by José Calasanzio, was the first school in Europe that was free and accessible to all. After almost 400 years of activity, it was sold for conversion into a luxury hotel.
PHOTOGRAPHY
TONI AMENGUAL (Mallorca, 1980)
ICONA explores how we relate to images and how they affect us. The city of Rome, a crossroads of three ideas, was the perfect setting for this operation. Palimpsest: Rome and humans as a product made by compounding all the preceding layers. Panopticon: sight, seeing and being seen as a form of control. Scenery: Rome and its artistic heritage as a deliberate construction of power for social control.
MAR SÁEZ (Murcia, 1983)
Terza vita ponders the emotional experiences of the city of Rome at a time when it was overwhelmed by the pandemic. Both in its analysis of the notion of freedom and its seductive games and love pacts, Terza vita explores a main aspect of that active coexistence: the promise of a future. The people whose testimonies are featured therein reveal their desire for another life; a life that transcends the nostalgia of a secure past and the shock of the present.
PAINTING
NATIVIDAD BERMEJO (Logroño, 1961)
Cruces y naranjas: a coin’s trajectory when tossed into the air traces a vertical path up and down, an axis mundi. The cross and the orange could be the two sides of the coin. Heads, the pleasure of being alive, and tails, mourning the fragility of existence. The pandemic has intensified awareness of these two realities that come together in this project, which contains symbolic and formal connotations alluding to the vanitas genre and to carpe diem.
SARA GARCÍA (Gijón, 1983)
El orden nocturno is an exploration revolving around hospitality and relationships with others. Basic foods, such as flour and rice, are altered by bacteria, fungi and yeast to provoke new textures, colours, odours and flavours. A nocturnal order is set up that embraces the loss of meaning and proposes a shared experience. One of the most rudimentary forms of cooperation and ritual allows us access to other forms of wisdom. The piece becomes active during the ceremony at which the food is shared.
ÀNGELS VILADOMIU (Barcelona, 1961)
Il viaggio di archivio is based on something which has not often been the subject of study: the three months Humboldt spent in Rome. Humboldt’s “Roman notes” in his journal reveal this catalysing moment of his career. From what Benjamin described as “botanizing the asphalt”, he builds a “archival trip”, a plant collection a la Flora Ruderal: colonizing aqueducts, monuments and ruins. The more than fifty herborized species, pressed and indexed in april and may, came from two habitats: one vertical and the other horizontal, they are spread out across the chaotic, organic Roman topography.
COMIC
YEYEI GÓMEZ (Madrid, 1993)
Eppur si muove, una historia sobre la escritora María Teresa León. Having spent more than thirty years in exile, she lived the last fourteen of them in Rome. It was there that she wrote Memoria de la melancolía, a book in which her struggle against progressive memory loss, both her memory and historic memory, became noticeable. This graphic narrative re-evaluates her work and deals with the layers of memory loss, a social neglect that acts as a persistent pattern, where one identity is being built while another is being eroded away.
MUSEOLOGY, CURATORSHIP AND ART MEDIATION
MARAL KEKEJIAN (Madrid, 1977)
URMA, espacio público y paisaje contemporáneo en la ciudad de Roma, expands in three directions within the realm of artistic and cultural management. Firstly, there is research into public space, into ephemeral and immaterial heritage. Secondly, there is the context of Rome and the Academia, which is permeated by the idea of time: history and tradition, pandemic present and fictional future Rome. Thirdly, there is a practical direction: URMA has presented five actions thus far.
LEIRE VERGARA (Bilbao, 1973)
In qualche luogo lontano: Roma is the title of the programme developed at the Academia as part of the research project by Bulegoa z/b Space is the Place/The Place is Space, which seeks to analyse art’s role as a critical practice offering tools to stop, look and attune oneself in the world, in order to produce situations, imagine lifestyles and create space. Structured as periodic encounters, it has taken different forms, such as presentations, actions… and the making of a shared authorship film.
LITERATURE
CRISTINA MORALES (Granada, 1985)
Optar por la luna: Una novela sobre arte y okupación, initially an exploration of three spaces in the city of Rome that had been squatted which questioned the theory and practice of established artistic and literary circles. However, it became, thanks to Covid regulations, a quest for people and small groups who were willing to circumvent the laws imposing lockdowns on houses and venues.
CARLOS PARDO (Madrid, 1975)
El tonel y la torre de marfil is an essay in its most whimsical and primitive sense: an attempt at order. It sets about proposing a hypothesis regarding reading modern fiction and to gain access it resorts to using an undercurrent of western thought, the cynics school. El tonel y la torre de marfil is not an exercise in literary archaeology, but rather an opus incertum. It wanders in first person through some of humanism’s critical places, both excontemporary and perhaps domesticated, in the ambivalence of which a subversive-able literature still finds support.
CULTURAL HERITAGE CONSERVATION AND RESTORATION
VIRGINIA MORANT GISBERT (Alicante, 1987)
Il risveglio dell’archivio fotografico dell’Accademia di Spagna a Roma aims to re-evaluate the photographic archive of the Real Academia de España en Roma from the perspective of contemporary restoration and conservation. The project has been through several stages – evaluation, restoration, relocation and digitalization – with the objective of improving future conservation and allowing access. To put into effect the archive’s reactivation, various steps were taken that are presented as conclusions in the 148 exhibition.
MUSIC
JAVIER QUISLANT (Bilbao, 1984)
Sinuoso tempo, ciclo para cuarteto de cuerda develops the “compositive principle of sound stratification” based on Scelsi, applying it mainly to the parameters of height, duration, timbre, articulation and intensity; as well as to the qualities of polyphony, and the technical and timbric possibilities of string instruments. It uses the stylistic premise of austerity, to be found in Palestrina’s and Victoria’s counterpoint, as well as their spiritual quality. The cycle seeks to recover the purity of primitive, poetic and ritual listening in order to attain the germ of communication and language.
PERFORMING ARTS
MURIEL ROMERO (Murcia, 1972)
Resonancias ocultas is a choreographic project centred on making a dance and sculpture fusion. The choreography uses techniques such as movement capture, machine learning, interactive sonification and digitalization tools to create a piece inspired by the masterpieces of classical sculpture. What would a Bernini sound like? The fluidity-rigidity of his Apollo and Daphne, or the gestural tension of his The Rape of Proserpine? Using three different formats — cinematographic, theatrical and museologistic — a bridge is built between sculpture masterpieces, artificial intelligence, music and the body’s physical experience.
GRAPHIC DESIGN
GONZALO GOLPE (Madrid, 1975)
Verba Volant is part of La Distancia, a project which researches visual language and although launched some time ago, it was formalized during the Rome residency. It explores a poetic fiction regarding the origins of language and the evolution of English towards a “unilanguage”. From New York to Babylonia; from language treated as a science to a cuneiform tablet that looks like it was written by a bird; from Chomsky to Darwin; from language understood as a weapon to a mother tongue.
ENGRAVING
SHIRIN SALEHI (Teherán, Irán, 1982)
El tiempo sin derrota. The cracks in a fractured inscription on stone or metal, a collapsed fresco and a chipped bust: the pulse of all of them seems still to beat with the touch of an incisory hand, a crafted body. They tremble inside due to the essence of language: in the gesture of an incision, a body destined to disappear leaves its imprint on another material that may not perhaps perish. Transcending all the signs of a time, within the act resides a fundamental gesture of humanity: the desire to leave a memory for eyes and minds that do not yet exist.
GASTRONOMY. CREATIVITY AND INNOVATION OF CULINARY TECHNIQUES.
MIGUEL DE TORRES (Segovia, 1958)
El pan de la Academia de España (Spanish Academy bread) has risen literally in the air of the Real Academia de España en Roma, where sleeping, latent, bread yeasts were awaiting some dough, their nourishment, to colonize it. Bread is the union of cultures, it is an ambassador, it is sharing. Bread is a syncretism of Mediterranean culture and of Spanish and particularly Italian culture too. The results are produced by a mixture of techniques that balance crust and a spongy crumb. Thanks to the Taraxacum officinale picked in the Academy gardens, an amaro, or bitter touch is added, which is omnipresent in Italian cooking.
SCULPTURE
ALÁN CARRASCO (Burgos, 1986)
Come un battito nel cuore, una genealogía visual del movimiento obrero en Italia, is a project that seeks to rebuild a specific moment of 20th-century Italian history, set between the magnicides of Umberto I of Italy (1900) and Aldo Moro (1978). In the Years of Lead the “tension” in Italy provoked instability and death, a new State mechanism took care to subtract meaning from the word “worker”, thus deactivating the power of identification of the post-proletariat who from one day to the next woke up to find they were middle-class.
ELO VEGA (Huelva, 1967)
De sculptura takes its title from Pomponio Gaurico’s treatise which stated in 1504: “In ancient Rome the imaginary population of statues outnumbered that of living people”. Today, one must add to that populus fictus the countless images populating the media. The title contains the wordplay “de-culture” or “de-strike”, that leads to a critical re-reading of sculpture, its mythologies and its mutations in consumer culture, that may identify concealment, euphemisms and camouflaging of the millenary violence against women, in order to visualize, neutralize, reverse, and undo it.
FASHION DESIGN
GADEA BURGAZ (Madrid, 1992)
Sarcófago, un muñeco, la copia y otros cuentos is a textile collection, and additionally a creative take on sculptures as models. The proposal seeks to reproduce whole bodies and body parts and to reflect their movement. These garments should dress a human body that moves, dances, is looking for comfort, the article is donned and removed, whether an outfit, clothing, attire, tailored, fabric pieces, fashion collection… It is not clear.
