︎︎︎ADIÓS ESPAÑA. ACCIÓN Y RESPUESTA.
[GOODBYE SPAIN. ACTION AND RESPONSE]
September 24 to November 4, 2023
How is violence naturalised in the relationships we build and inhabit every day? How can we put it in tension through our artistic practices? For this version of Otro(s)ures, we wanted to approach the concept of violence in such a way that could be multiple readings according to its place of enunciation, overcoming unilateral notions associated with the word.
Within the framework of our curatorship 2022 - 2023 ‘The Weed Club’, we question the forms of classification established by Western history that colonise thought. From this perspective, we ask ourselves how the positive or negative relationship associated with the idea of violence is structured, in order to overflow its meaning. Each of the invited artists, Nicolás Cox (CL)* and Levi Orta (CUB)*, will work according to the research they are developing. The aim is to cross both proposals to configure a project whose individual processes are permanently put in common, thus negotiating a final result that allows them to dialogue visually and conceptually.
Levi Orta* has lived in Spain for fifteen years and has now moved back to Havana, his birthplace. Adiós España is a project that functions as a farewell. His interest was to create a disturbing, cinematic, playful, almost childish image, but with multiple conceptual layers that revisit the social constructions of masculinity; the strong, violent man, provider and successful father. But also, and by way of analogy, to review the passive violence that cultural policy applies to artists in art.
The project aimed to organise several farewell parties with his fellow artists with whom he shared his life while living in Spain. At these parties, he would show them his collection of weapons, thus generating an archive of his relationships in the field of local culture and his colleagues' interaction with weapons.
Note: The weapons in his collection are non-functional replicas, so they are completely legal and do not constitute a danger.
Levi Orta* (CUB/ESP)
Graduated from the Instituto Superior de Arte de La Habana in 2010, from the Cátedra de Arte Conducta in 2009 and from the HWP Askhal Alwan in Beirut in 2016. He has participated in the Biennials of Havana, Pontevedra, Girona, Liverpool, Merco Sur and Las Fronteras. In recent years he has shown his work in Germany, Austria, USA, Spain, France, Israel, Brazil, Mexico, Canada, Croatia, UK, China, Lebanon, Japan and Cuba. In Spain he has received awards such as the Premi Ciutat de Palma ‘Antoni Gelabert’ d'Arts Visuals, the Fundación Botín Visual Arts grant and the Generaciones MonteMadrid grant in 2017. In Cuba he was awarded the CDAV scholarship in 2010 and the Maretti Prize in 2015. Several of his works are part of the collection of the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de Cuba.
As a result of the research processes of his work, Levi Orta also holds the titles of: Lord of Sealand, General Secretary of the One Man Party, Official Painter of Gunther IV, and most recently National Record Holder of Cuba in three categories of the Rubik's Cube.
http://ortalevi.blogspot.com/
Nicolás Cox* sought to take different actions around the concept/notion of violence, understood from different focuses or points of view. The main lines he worked on were violence understood as an offensive and legitimate response to the repressive apparatus of power. Colonial violence in Spain and violence based on anti-fascist historical memory.
The works constructed make use of different formats in their development, including symbolic activation through gestures, the use of archives and the creation of two-dimensional and/or sculptural objects.
Nicolás Cox *(CL)
Currently lives and works in Madrid. He develops his work mainly in art actions and photographic media, making the use of the body one of his main axes. He frequently performs street interventions and occupies the object from a sculptural notion. His pieces articulate conceptually, sensitively and materially different relationships that reflect on and problematise language and the socio-political context. He has participated in exhibitions in Chile, Spain and France. https://www.nicolascox.com/
︎︎︎Opening of the process “ GOODBYE SPAIN. ACTION AND RESPONSE ”
At this opening, the results of the residency were presented, and as usual, the artists cooked for us to discuss their research. During the process, both artists tried to consider the different forms of violence, projecting their everyday naturalisation and asking themselves how, through artistic practice, they could navigate its tensions and meanings. This prefiguration of the word, from both the positive and the negative, implied that they bordered on its rethinking and visibilisation, from a series of actions and objectualities that enunciate it, in a sustained dialogue.
Levi Orta* invited us to a mise-en-scène of which he made us part, and where we learned about the work done around his collection of weapons and what they mean in relation to his farewell to Spain after several years of living and producing his work in this country. A conceptual relationship that combines themes about the institution of art, the relationships it establishes and the violence hidden in them.
Nicolás Cox*, for his part, exhibited a series of actions that reflect on the coercive apparatuses used by power to maintain order and political-social subordination in a systematic way. Her work interpellates the use of violence by the state from its neoliberal mechanism and its imposition of repressive statutes, and its continual intimidation in different experiential dimensions.
experiential dimensions.
These works function as conceptual proposals that link body, object and context. The pieces are activated through different ways of using language, sensitively posing gestures that function as questioning devices.