SANTANDER.- On Saturday, 23 November, a new edition of Itinerarios opened its doors to the public. The annual exhibition presents the works of the international artists who have been awarded a Fundación Botín Art Grant. Since 1993, these grants have been awarded to support artists in the training, research and production of their projects. ‘The Fundación Botín Art Grants are characterised by their breadth and flexibility, as their criteria do not set limits on age, nationality or specific themes, thereby creating a broad and much-needed space for exchange, experimentation and reflection. Many of the beneficiaries have gone on to establish themselves on the international art scene and exhibit regularly at leading institutions and art events,’ says Bárbara Rodríguez Muñoz, Director of Exhibitions and the Collection at Centro Botín.

The six projects presented in these rooms reclaim art as a fundamental tool for the investigation of forms of work rooted in a context, while at the same time weaving together narratives about communities and knowledge that are hidden and unknown to varying degrees. Patricia Domínguez presents a speculative video that reflects on the distances between spiritual and quantum spaces; Laura Fernández Antolín shows research that is both intimate and collective on the rituals of sleep; Antonio Menchen carries out an exercise in movement from a collection of images to an architectural and sculptural intervention in the exhibition space; Alice dos Reis returns to their family home to explore the archetype of the UFO through a video piece and a series of needlepoint embroidered tapestries; Belén Rodríguez defends a simple lifestyle through the study of handmade Japanese textiles; and María Salgado & Clarisa Navas have travelled, alongside a film crew, to the northeast of Argentina and Ourense to learn about these places, their histories and their languages.

It is worth highlighting the efforts of the jury responsible for selecting the projects, which on this occasion was made up of the curators and researchers Aimar Arriola and Soledad Gutiérrez and the artists Joâo Onofre and Eva Fàbregas, both of whom are past recipients of these grants.

Itinerarios XXIX – Artists

PATRICIA DOMÍNGUEZ (Santiago de Chile, 1984)

Her research engages myths, symbols, rituals and healing practices, combining artistic imagination with scientific research, such as ethnobotany and quantum physics, in her quest to decode how we understand reality and how we can expand our perspectives. For the grant project, Patricia Domínguez has created a fictional video shot in several locations, including the world's largest astronomy project in the Atacama Desert, the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA), and the CERN Science and Technology Centre in Geneva. The video and accompanying watercolours make up a speculative, ancestral and futuristic work that reflects on how there is no distance between spiritual and quantum spaces.

Titled Three Moons Below, this 53:53 video features a woman and a robot bird on a pilgrimage together to the ALMA radio telescope and the Large Hadron Collider and Neutrino Detector at CERN. The protagonist aspires to acquire the capabilities of these state-of-the-art technologies and to incorporate them into her organic, biological and spiritual being. Her end goal is to be able to reconnect with her particle by following the theory of entanglement: a fundamental concept of quantum mechanics in which particles are correlated in such a way that their properties connect instantaneously, regardless of distance. On her journey, the woman also visits ancient places such as an unknown petroglyph in the Atacama Desert, wanders through the La Silla astronomical observatory in Chile and consults an extraterrestrial from the Pleiades (a star cluster in the Taurus constellation), who has already succeeded in coupling with her entangled particle on Earth.

LAURA FERNÁNDEZ ANTOLÍN (Valladolid, España. 1993)

Drive Your Dreams is the result of Laura’s research on sleep rituals, which began during their fellowship at the AEP (Alternative Education Program) at the Rupert Art Centre in Vilnius (Lithuania). The artist proposes these rituals as a time and space for resilience, rest and non-commodified productivity. The exhibition space presents the second iteration of the immersive installation Laura made during their residency in the semi-abandoned Lelija textile factory. The installation is made of discarded materials from automobiles that were once part of vehicles for commuting and travelling: a symbol of our culture that becomes a refuge for encounters, rest, intertwined histories and imaginative deviations. Through an open methodology proposed by the artist, they explored and shared different rituals of their own daily routine through workshops, inviting participants to establish dialogues with their unconscious, memories and imagination through drawing, movement and automatic writing. In the exhibition space, visitors will find drawing materials, a soundscape, spaces of rest and a meditative audio piece narrated by the artist who invites us to use them.

ANTONIO MENCHEN (Toledo, España. 1983)

During the development of his grant project, Menchen moved from image to volume, slowly entering the realm of sculpture. The artist understands his process as a journey from the eye to the hand, from the pleasure of looking to the desire to make. Taking as a starting point a collection of images that he has compiled over the past fifteen years, the works establish a lever for desire, understood as a force capable of propelling all kinds of relationships.

Antonio Menchen has created a mise-en-scène in the exhibition space between the architectural or constructive and the cinematographic. For the artist, this is an exercise in movement, where images have been piled up, taking some and leaving others behind. In each of these structures, there are carefully chosen objects that remind us of a scene, such as a glass with remnants of liquids, or clothing, which challenge us from a scale close to the body.

ALICE DOS REIS (Lisboa, Portugal. 1995)

In this project, Alice dos Reis continues their fascination with how our visions of the supernatural permeate our collective imagination. To this end, the artist has explored the archetype of the UFO in Serra da Gardunha, a mountain in Portugal known for its paranormal occurrences, as well as being the village where their paternal family's home is located. Long regarded as a site of saintly apparitions, the mountain is now famous for sightings of mysterious lights, with rumours of a UFO hangar hidden in its interior.

Our Lady Who Burns (8 minutes) is an atmospheric and dreamlike film that guides us through the Serra da Gardunha to tell us an intergenerational story of falling in love in which, simultaneously, two friends lament the pregnancy of their old cat, speculating on whether the mystical energy of the mountain could interrupt her gestation. Shot in 16 mm with a small and intimate crew, the film is a journey through the biographical landscape of Alice, for whom the presence of the supernatural, the geology of the territory and the biography of an unforeseen bodily gestation are expressed through acts of cinematic apparitions. In addition, under the title Elementales, four needlepoint embroidered tapestries embody the UFOs that appear in the video.

BELÉN RODRÍGUEZ (Valladolid, España. 1981)

Belén's practice advocates for a simple lifestyle, emphasising the importance of reconnecting with traditional techniques and values lost in the bustle of modern life. The artist makes sculptural pieces and installations using mainly textile materials that she weaves, assembles and dyes herself in her studio located in a rural area of Cantabria. Over the last few years, the artist has insisted on the need for sustainability in textile production, promoting practices that respect the environment–such as the use of locally-found dyes–and the preservation of resources, such as the recycling of working materials.

Her project, Farmer's Jacket, is the result of her research for the grant. It is an exhaustive study of different handcrafted textiles from the Japanese tradition from a time when the archipelago was self-sufficient and had a more proportionate and symbiotic relationship with nature. These fabrics were patiently crafted with the materials around them, such as banana or nettle fibre, and the colours were extracted from local vegetation. In this way, they were able to create a self-made garment, which was both labour-intensive and elegant, as well as being suitable for everyday use; valuable but not luxurious, such as the Bashofu, which was also perfect for their climate.

In the exhibition hall stands a wooden cross-shaped structure, which contains a series of elements that reflect Belén's intention to assimilate and learn this work-life philosophy. The jumpsuit is woven by the artist from textile material reused from previous works dyed with vegetation from a local forest, such as oak or birch. The woodcut displays the implements and materials she used to create the garment. The video shows a collaboration with the musician Tatematsu Masahiro, who has produced 22 musical pieces for the xylophone stemming from his interpretation of the Ikat textile technique. In addition, the installation covering the walls and floor is composed of fabrics discarded by the industry for visible flaws.

MARÍA SALGADO (Madrid, España. 1984) & CLARISA NAVAS (Corrientes, Argentina. 1989)

Via Versus is an audiovisual piece resulting from the collaboration between the Spanish artist María Salgado and the Argentinian filmmaker Clarisa Navas and was filmed in Formosa and Corrientes (northeastern Argentina) and the town of Pousada and Verín (Ourense). Departing from these very specific places and from the stories and languages of their inhabitants, the artists set out to tell the story of that which is hardly visible or appreciable under historical forms of repression and silence. Two poems written by María prior to filming in Galicia (Versus) and during and after filming in Argentina (Via) are incorporated as voices within the sound of the piece and can also be read as texts in the printed publications available to the public in the centre of the hall.

The film, more sensorial than rational, is the reflection of a trip during which María and Clarisa moved away from their respective territories and artistic languages toward an unknown place, accompanied by a team made up of Lucas Olivares, Marta F. Salgado, Luis Molina, Marta Orozco and Chus Pérez Limia. According to the artists themselves, this displacement was an opening for everyone involved, which meant that the meaning of the work did not end up being sealed and that it expanded through different proposals.