BARCELONA.- In her poem “A Song for Many Movements”, Audre Lorde reminds us that “our labour has become more important than our silence”. The coming together of bodies makes noise, especially when attentive not only to the voices raised, but also to the sounds and vital rhythms emerging from the necessary pauses, relays, and breaks. It is in these multiple modes of holding one another and in the ongoing rehearsals of ways of being together, that scenarios for collective creation are articulated. This is what sustains collective bodies, but also institutions.
Song for many movements is an ephemeral experiment in which the ground floor of the museum becomes a stage for encounters, conversations and shared listening. It is a provisional opening of ongoing research, following its past and future genealogies, inside and outside of the museum, thus exposing collective learning dynamics and the questions raised in the process. The project is an invitation to conceive the exhibition as a space to be inhabited. A display of situated experiences, embodied archives and bodies of research that emerge from the transversal work of the museum and beyond.
More than an exhibition, it is a rehearsal in different ways of mutual exposure and sustenance of one another. The materials gathered refer to processes of collective creation in the present, while invoking past histories that constitute the living memory of what is to come. The project is articulated around an intensive public programme —talks, conversations, poetry, performance and live radio broadcast— that aims to turn the exhibition space of the museum into a public agora over the course of six weeks.
In dialogue with this series of encounters, Song for Many Movements unfolds a complex documentary device that includes moving-image works, sounds, publications, printmaking and archival materials belonging to more than fifty artists and collectives. These materials form constellations around specific case studies of militant cinema, community video or cooperative printing while exploring alliances and networks of solidarity across geographies and temporalities: from the 1969 Pan-African Festival in Algiers, to the International Palestinian Exhibition in Beirut in 1978, passing through the International Resistance Museum in exile (1973-1989) to the emergence of new forms of activism and cultural agitation around the HIV/AIDS crisis, which made clear that illness cannot be individualised and that it is always political.
These “scenarios of collective creation” are woven from spontaneous alliances, networks of affection and elective affinities. The collectivity at stake here is that which takes place in kitchen conversations, in shared readings and songs, in solidarity understood as an everyday practice. This “collective creation” refers to the brewing processes that precedes the instituting moment. What happens behind the scenes and before the heroic gesture with which some burst into history, while others are erased and silenced. Collective creation is mobilized within the invisible theatre of everyday life.
Participants: ACT UP, Tania Safura Adam, Radio Alhara, Xoán Anleo, María José Arjona, Miquel Arnal, Marwa Arsanios, Belleza y Felicidad Fiorito, Benzo Canela, Chimurenga, Collectif Mohamed, [contra]panorama, Julio Cortázar, Bojana Cvejić, Festival panafricain d’Alger 1969, Antonio Gagliano and Verónica Lahitte, Jesús Garay, Maite Garbayo Maeztu, Dora García, Nancy Garín, Daniel Gasol, Gran Fury, Grupo Cine Liberación, Grupo Experimental de Cine de la Cineteca del Tercer Mundo, Grup de Treball, Emily Jacir, Kuwa Jasiri, Equipo Jeleton, Jokkoo Collective, William Klein, Las Cosas, Learning Palestine Group (with Maya Watanabe), Lesley Lokko, Leve Productora, lumbung press, MACBA’s Kitchen, MACBA Young People’s Group (with Anna Irina Russell), Marina Monsonís, Metzineres, Miramizu, Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende, Nazario Luque, Neigbourhood Children’s Group (with Marc Larré), Ocaña, El Palomar, Past Disquiet (International Art Exhibition for Palestine, 1978) by Kristine Khouri and Rasha Salti, PEI (Independent Studies Programme) Participants, Vijay Prashad (Tricontinental Institute for Social Research), Precolumbian, Joan Rabascall, La Rara Troupe, Marlon T. Riggs, Mayra A. Rodríguez Castro, Sabine Salamé, Christina Schultz, Softchaos (aka Teresa Stout), Top Manta, Tucumán Arde, Josune Urrutia, Cecilia Vicuña, Video-Nou/Servei de Vídeo Comunitari, among others.
Curated by María Berríos, Sabel Gavaldon
[contra]panorama
Prologue
From February 10, to April 1, 2024
This thing we are calling a prologue, could well be an epilogue, or an afterthought. We are not starting from scratch, we are not even starting, we are turning back. There is a desperate optimism in the triennial (or biennial) repeated attempts to define the present and plant its flag on the future. They are always, somehow, late to the party. The accelerated temporality with which the artworld picks up and discards its themes and topics only increases this sense that everything becomes prematurely old.
Now that the future has ceased to be the repository of all the unfulfilled promises of modernity to become the source of our planetary anxieties, what is the point of continuing to organise biennials? As an institution that serves to organise the modern and make it legible, what legitimacy does the museum still have?
This prologue gathers two interventions that deal with these questions better than we could do ourselves. Dora Garcia’s The Kingdom (2003) is part of the permanent collection at MACBA (information about the image emission device of The Kingdom), Reconstruction: Barcelona Art Report [2001] by Antonio Gagliano and Verónica Lahitte was commissioned specifically for this event.
Artists: Antonio Gagliano, Dora García, Verónica Lahitte
Curated by Alicia Escobio Alonso, Yaiza Hernandez Velazquez, Yolanda Jolis, Anna Ramos, Isaac Sanjuan
[1]The 1st edition was Notes for an Eye Fire. Panorama 21, which took place from 22 October 2021 to 27 February 2022, at MACBA. Curated by the collective Latitudes and Hiuwai Chu, head of exhibitions at MACBA.
