Open Chair
Forms of Thinking
Open Chair is a project which stems from a collaboration between Museo Reina Sofía and the Bachelor’s Degree in Art at Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) and aims to annually organise an in-person encounter to intersect and place in dialogue university with museum. The space, geared towards training artists, seeks to contribute to creating an expanded and connected community of student creators and researchers, and is linked to the Museo Reina Sofía Study Centre.
Departing from this point, and from its first edition under the title Forms of Thinking, the Chair places value on artistic research as a space from which to generate thought, welcoming some of today’s pertinent critical debates. It is a public programme which starts with the presentation of a selection of six final degree works by students from the UOC’s aforementioned Art Degree, opening a subsequent discussion to share processes, methodologies, questions and learnings related to artistic practice and reflection. The Chair will then host a public conversation with visual artist, performer and writer Clàudia Pagès centred on her work, methodology, experience and career, and will conclude with a workshop conducted by Patricia Esquivias and Matteo Locci, whereby a walk will put into practice the methodology of performative research.
Participants
Loreto Binvignat Streeter is a designer and artist whose work brings together design, sustainability, innovation and research. She is an Art graduate from Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC).
Laia Blasco Soplon is the director of UOC’s Bachelor’s Degree in Art. She holds a degree in Fine Arts from the Universitat de Barcelona and is a candidate on UOC’s Online PhD Programme in Information Technology and Networks. Her artistic and academic research focuses on the creation, study and critique of interactive visual tools for experimentation and learning.
Joan Codina Donaire is an artist. His interest in art-making can be understood as an obsession with creating images that depict human beings and their relationships and behaviours. His works reflect on life, art and human misery, and from daily life, absurdity and irony he looks to create new realities which lay bare our contradictions.
Albert Comerma Bertran is an electric guitarist who plays live and records in Spain, and is a guitar and music teacher, a columnist in didactics for Cutaway Guitar Magazine and an endorser of different international brands. Currently, his work on electric guitar and thought is carried out under the name Eremitt.
Patricia Esquivias is a storyteller and narrator. In her videos, drawings, photography, sculptures and installations she deconstructs hegemonic narratives and offers alternative routes to reconstruct them and rediscover lost stories, taking as her point of departure events, characters, cultural objects, phenomena from pop culture and archive images. She has displayed her work in Spain (Museo Reina Sofía, Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo, Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona), Germany (Frankfurter Kunstverein, 5th Berlin Biennale), the USA (White Columns, New Museum, Hammer Museum, Midway Contemporary Art) and the UK (EASTInternational, Tate Modern).
María Iñigo Clavo is a professor on UOC’s Bachelor’s Degree in Art. Her research themes include colonialism, museology, modernity and its inventions of otherness, critical heritage, and art and curatorship in Latin America, with a focus on Brazilian art.
Germán Labrador Méndez is the director of the Museo Reina Sofía’s Public Activities Department.
Matteo Locci is a multimedia artist and researcher who articulates his work through collaboration with multiple collectives of which he is either a member or ally. Among other collectives, he is the co-founder of the ATI collective from Rome (2014), whose work considers questions around contemporary political representations, architectural ideology and interventions in public space. He is a founding member of the collective Funduk (2020), where he works on perceptive and interactive concerns in the link between speech, language and politics.
Alba López Revelles is a multi-disciplinary artist whose concerns from a very young age have revolved around the art world, particularly drawing, literature and poetry. She began a degree in Fine Arts at Universitat de Barcelona, and continued her studies at UOC. The themes she explores include violence, introspection and the gender condition, and also works on herself using her alter ego “el lobo” (the wolf).
Aida Martí Pago is an interior designer and Art graduate at UOC. In parallel with her art studies, she has embarked upon a personal and professional project as a freelance artist, employing different languages and techniques in her work to create a symbiosis between training and practice. She currently works as a drawing teacher in secondary education.
Clàudia Pagès Rabal is a visual artist, performer and writer. Her most recent work focuses on the logistics system and its link to jurisdictional language, with both operating in the verb tense of a non-finite and violent gerund which has direct effects on bodies. She has performed and exhibited at Fundació Joan Miró and Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona (Barcelona), Vleeshal Center for Contemporary Art (Middelburg), La Casa Encendida (Madrid), Hebbel am Ufer (Berlin), Capc Musée d'art contemporain de Bordeaux (Bordeaux) and the Sharjah Art Foundation (United Arab Emirates), among others.
Aida Sánchez de Serdio Martín holds a PhD in Fine Arts from Universitat de Barcelona and is a professor on UOC’s Bachelor’s Degree in Art. Her main field of specialisation is educational and community practices in relation to arts and culture, understood as a place to produce knowledge, political debate and social transformation.
Cesc Sidera Roca is an Art graduate at UOC. He is a freelance sound artist and composer with over fifteen years’ experience in creating and developing community art and culture projects. In recent years, the body of his art projects has sparked dialogue between experimentation, research and the socialisation of sound and listening as an art object and social agent.
Programa
4pm Welcome and Presentation
― Conducted by Laia Blasco Soplon and Germán Labrador Méndez
4:15pm Presentation of Final Projects from UOC’s Bachelor’s Degree in Art
― With Albert Comerma Bertran, Loreto Binvignat Streeter, Joan Codina Donaire, Alba López Revelles, Aida Martí Pago and Cesc Sidera Roca.
Albert Comerma Bertran. El Transbordador (The Shuttle), 2022
This work explores the artist’s personal memory via four specific components: text, the found image, the technical element and the electric guitar. The project starts from a need for searching in a process of self-transformation — the origin of the conceptual deployment of the work — and seeks to respond to situations of change, key moments which have occurred in recent years in his life. More than finding certainties, he devises new interrogations from artistic research.
Loreto Binvignat Streeter. Biotex, 2022
A project, resulting from research into regenerative and biodegradable biomaterials, which imagines other possible futures and new ways to create art by placing value on concepts of sustainability, innovation, science and avant-garde.
Joan Codina Donaire. Seguir con el problema. Hacia el abismo, (Carry On with the Problem. Towards the Abyss), 2022–2023.
This work looks to question, create dialogue with and generate new discourses on the exploitation of space through the rotation between the use and disuse of thousands of objects which inevitably increase the environmental footprint and could ultimately put humanity at risk, reflecting on an inability to take on the necessary commitment to the environment.
Alba López Revelles. El reflejo de los dientes del lobo (The Reflection of the Wolf’s Teeth), 2023
This project is a contemporary illustrated literary work related to the genre of modern poetry. An intimist-style book made up of narrative texts, poetry and micro-poetry, with the collection created to give a voice to social problems in the most human and sensitive way possible.
Aida Martí Pago. Monument 24, 2022
This project focuses on the Commemorative Monument of the Battle of the Ebro (Tortosa, 1964), an imposing propaganda work located in the middle of the Ebro River, and symbolically charged, which was conceived and unveiled during Franco’s dictatorship. The work pursues processes in the gestation, production and activation of the monument by mining archives, and going to the heart and roots of the piece in all its scope. From the work a critical visual essay is distilled in the form of an art publication, playing with the materiality of the work.
Cesc Sidera Roca. No matter what, Listen!, 2021
Noises, electromagnetic pulses, radio waves, etc. Inaudible anthrophonies fill the visual vacuums of our local landscape with discursiveness. The art project No matter what, Listen! maps the process of subjectively transforming the identity of the artist’s local environment into agency and an aural temple.
5:30pm Debate
―Moderated by Laia Blasco Soplon
6:30pm Break
7pm Conversation with Clàudia Pagès Rabal
―Presented and moderated by María Iñigo Clavo and Aida Sánchez de Serdio Martín
In this encounter, María Iñigo Clavo and Aida Sánchez de Serdio Martín, researchers and professors on UOC’s Bachelor’s Degree in Art, engage in conversation with visual artist, performer and writer Claudia Pagès (Barcelona, 1990), whose artistic research explores the multitude of formats for thinking about the insertion of bodies in legal frameworks within a capitalist and migratory context. The conversation, followed by a talk, addresses themes the artist explores in her works, how she articulates art-making and thought in her projects, her formative experience, and her process of professionalisation.
Nouvel Building, Auditorium 200 and online platform
200 people
This workshop sees artists Patricia Esquivias and Matteo Locci go on a walk to test the Museo’s centripetal force. The time the activity will end is not set and is inversely proportional to the group’s indecision.
Meeting point: Nouvel Building, Library and Documentation Centre
20 people
Free, until full capacity is reached, with prior registration via email by writing to mperaire@uoc.edu until 7 June, stating (name and surname[s]) and reasons for participating in the workshop (a maximum of 150 words). Those selected will be notified