Today is Tàpies: Remei Sipi – Erick Beltrán

Aquest event forma part de: Today It’s Tàpies

Today is Tàpies  is a series of conversations across generations and disciplines, led and moderated by arts journalist Rita Roig (Terrassa, 1997) and organised by the Fundació Antoni Tàpies as part of the Tàpies Centenary Year. It sets out to interpret the artist’s texts as a starting point to discuss current issues such as environmentalism, self-determination for peoples, interculturality and the political commitment of art.

The series will encourage people to think about the artist’s words and thoughts though thirteen events at the Fundació Antoni Tàpies involving people from a range of professional backgrounds (arts, education, science, politics, the environment, health and life sciences) and different generations. Altogether it will construct a polyphonic dialogue that will be recorded in podcast form thanks to cooperation with Catalunya Ràdio, in order to recover and experience the knowledge generated in a different format and a different context.

Chapter 8: Activism from the sidelines

Tàpies celebrates the moment when Europe finally comes up against “other cultures up to then considered savage that shifted the hitherto untouchable centre of gravity away from the shattered humanism of Europe for good.” The artist was clear that looking beyond Europe did not mean fleeing, and that in the art of some communities described as backward there was useful wisdom for modernity. In this conversation, Remei Sipi and Erick Beltrán will be discussing why some western values still seem untouchable to us and some forms of cultural expression are regarded as exotic, taking as a starting point Antoni Tàpies’ thoughts on the Eurocentric bias in the art world and about the colonial inheritance in our culture.

PARTICIPANTS

Remei Sipi is a writer, essayist, children’s educator and activist, an expert in gender and development. She works to defend women, ethnic minorities and migrants, and has helped organise African women’s associations in attempt to avoid the folklorisation of the intercultural events to which they are invited. Since the 1980s she has led different associations and been a member of groups like E’Waiso Ipola and the immigrant women’s network in Catalonia. In 1995 she set up the publisher Mey, a landmark in Equatorial Guinean literature. She is currently the secretary of the association E’Waiso Ipola and promoter of the federation of African women’s associations in Spain.

Erick Beltrán is an artist who explores and reflects on the concept of publishing and discourse construction. He takes an interest in the information that circulates and how it influences our view of the world. His work makes use of drawings, photographs, maps and other objects with the aim of linking public art and graphic languages. His aim is to reveal the mechanisms that define, assess, classify, select, reproduce and distribute images to create political, economic and cultural discourses in contemporary society.

Today is Tàpies programme

Podcasts Today is Tàpies, by Catalunya Ràdio.