Today is Tàpies. Jordi Colomer – Brigitte Vasallo

Aquest event forma part de: Today It’s Tàpies

Organised by the Fundació Antoni Tàpies as part of the Tàpies Centenary Year, Today is Tàpies is a series of transgenerational and interdisciplinary conversations conducted and moderated by the cultural journalist Rita Roig (Terrassa, 1997). The aim is to interpret Tàpies’ texts as a starting point for reflecting on current issues such as ecology, the right to self-determination, interculturality and political commitment in art.

The words and ideas of the artist will be revisited during a series of thirteen sessions, with invited participants from different generations and diverse professional fields (culture, education, science, politics, environment, health and human sciences) helping to construct a polyphonic story that will be collected in the form of a podcast. Thanks to the collaboration of Catalunya Ràdio, the podcast will allow us to experience the generated knowledge in another format and in another context.

Chapter 13: In Common: The System as a Wall

We idealise artists as unquestionable geniuses and enclose their work within four walls. On the other hand, the internet and new technology promise immediate access to anything we want to know. But who actually has access to real art? And what exactly is this art that we consider real? “For me, any living gesture has far more value, even if it is just scrawling something on a wall, when this gesture is justified by a human fact, than all the paintings in galleries that lack any connection with our lives,” wrote Antoni Tàpies. This reflection by the artist leads us to question institutions in today’s world, in a conversation in which Jordi Colomer and Brigitte Vasallo wonder whether they should all just be abolished or whether they can survive, even as part of a system that must be contested.

PARTICIPANTS

Jordi Colomer is an artist with a strong performative sense who puts to the test the conventions of architecture and urban space to subvert them, in an exercise that sets out to encourage people to think about cultural tradition, the status of art and the role in the inhabitant in today’s cities. Colomer works in the field of sculpture, installations, photography and video art, and his creations deal with topics like nomadism, the periphery, the popular imagination, community and utopia. Since 2018, together with producer Carolina Olivares, he has been involved with La Infinita, a creative laboratory and meeting place between visual and performing arts in L’Hospitalet de Llobregat.

Brigitte Vasallo is a writer and activist focused on processes of otherness, affective policy and cognitive capitalism. She is the author of the novel PornoBurka and the essay Pensamiento monógamo, terror poliamoroso (La Oveja Roja, 2018), an exploration of the centrality of monogamy in our amorous constructions and of how this system has prevailed. She lectures on the master’s degree in Gender and Communication at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, on the postgraduate course in the Culture of Peace at the same university and the LAP at Es Baluard museum of contemporary art in Palma, and has been an international consultant on the project INTIMATE – Citizenship, Care and Choice: The Micropolitics of Intimacy in Southern Europe at the Centro de Estudos Sociais (CES) of the University of Coimbra.

Today is Tàpies programme

Podcasts Today is Tàpies, by Catalunya Ràdio.