ART AND SOCIAL SPACES IN CONTROLLED, UNCONTROLED AND ISOLATED TIMES

Amidst the global context of the pandemic, the congress ADD + ART aims to debate and share projects and research on mechanisms of production, strategies for formalising processes and the configuration of new spaces. The congress aims to lend form to artistic practices and their interaction within the social sphere.

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Artistic practices that generate social spaces are in a perfect position to be reviewed and reconsidered, bearing in mind the paradigm shift defined by the pandemic and the post-pandemic context. A situation characterised by the consequences derived from tensions such as: physical isolation and permanent virtual connection, the danger of contagion and the desire for immunity, control over the body and the lack of control of forms of social interaction, the politics of restraint and depressed economies, healing spaces and the disinfection of spaces, fictionalised reality and the fiction that occurred. This panorama that has appeared as if overnight, defines a new configuration of everything, and has a direct impact within the field of artistic creation, on the habitual structures for combining research, production, concretisation and the visibility of processes and projects. This scenario, at the same time, may be understood as one step further within a chain of processes that, accelerated by the constant need for growth, react by putting various ecosystems under stress.

In contemporary artistic practices, the dynamics of research and production tied to specific locations, to the development of temporary residences, and consequently to all forms of exhibition, socialisation, mediation or revitalisation of artistic practices, are affected by this new paradigm. What strategies need to be deployed in relation to work and its exhibition? What is the new reality for all those practices based upon social action? What elements are needed to generate other forms of content production in an uncertain future? What new audiences must be identified for this emerging public space?

ADD + ART aims to be a meeting point for the sharing of projects of artistic research that deal with these issues, and whose future has been profoundly altered by the current context. The congress therefore proposes three themes that aim to place in dialogue research and experiences prior to the current context (before 2020), investigations and endeavours deployed during the context of the pandemic which offer new strategies adapted to the current emergency (2020) and research and experiences that shape or visualise possible futures.

Thematic strands interconnecting artistic research with future scenarios

• ART - TERRITORY. Temporary and dynamic residences of contextualised and localised production. The interaction, definition or creation of new terms regarding the future of the relationship between artistic creation and public spaces.
• SPACES - DEVICES. Other “structures of location” to display, exhibit, contextualise, or socialise. The creation of new virtual, mixed or face-to-face environments.
• DECODING - ACTIVATION. Investigating new languages, art and performativity, new objectivity, expanded interpretations, productions for alternative audiences.

ORGANISATION

- IMARTE. Research group for art, science and technology.  Universitat de Barcelona. Research project IN>TRA2. Reading as an artistic practice: models of creative decoding.  (PGC2018-093862-B-C21) Spanish Ministry of Education, Science and Universities.

- IDENSITAT. Platform for artistic actions and research experimenting with interactions between art and the social arena.  Idensitat realises the project ARTE ⇆ TERRITORIO in collaboration with Casa Planas, Le BBB art centre and La Escocesa.

IN> TRA2 is a project by the IMARTE research group which explores, through practical and artistic research, processes of decoding in the act of reading, to generate semiotic-material openings in the relationships between art, science, technology and society. IMARTE started participating in competitive research projects in 2000, creating different lines of research and has continued until the present day.

Art ⇆ Territory is a project that has established a network of residencies to encourage artistic research and production in Catalonia, the Balearic Islands and the Occitan, promoted collaboratively by Idensitat, Casa Planas (Palma), La Escocesa (Barcelona) and Le BBB Centre d’art (Toulouse). Project supported by the Pyrenees-Mediterranean Euro-region.