Barcelona Producció 2019–2020

As in 2016 and 2017, Latitudes is, during 2019–2020, one of the five jury members and mentors of Barcelona Producció, the yearly open-call for artistic projects production funded by the Barcelona Culture Institute of the Barcelona City Council. Through this initiative, La Capella provides financial and production support to the “artistic community of Barcelona and its area of influence”. Alongside curators Alexandra Laudo, Antònia Folguera, and artists Mireia Sallarès and Joan Casellas, Latitudes has awarded 15 projects (from a pool of 259 proposals) and accompanies the artists through the formalisation, production, and presentation of their proposals.

Latitudes mentored projects by Lola Lasurt (solo exhibition), Consol Llupià (offsite project) and Agustín Ortiz Herrera (research project).

Lola Lasurt's solo exhibition ‘Children's Game’ looks back at the 1968 retrospective exhibition ‘Miró. Barcelona 1968-69’ with which La Capella was inaugurated as a venue dedicated to contemporary art. The exhibition included 396 works distributed throughout the former hospital; the space of La Capella corresponded to room #4 where Joan Miró presented "current painting, sculpture and ceramics". Through a new series of paintings, photos, videos, and ceramics, Lasurt addresses the socio-political turmoil at the end of the 1960s. She depicts imagery related to childhood published in the national press during the two-month state of emergency declared in Spain just a few days after the Miró exhibition had ended. Lasurt therefore relates two forms of transition: a period of emergency from the perspective of both political and personal development. The project title refers to ‘Jeux d'enfants’, the Russian ballet scripted by Boris Kokhno whose set and costumes were designed by Miró, and that opened at the Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona in May 1933.

The offsite project ‘The El Prat Whale to El Prat / Return’ by Consol Llupià began when the artist learnt the story of a 19-metre-long whale that was stranded on the beach of El Prat de Llobregat, near Barcelona airport, on 12 May 1983. Until the Spring of 2018, the skeleton was on display at Barcelona Zoo. Llupià’s proposal was to return the whale’s bones back to the sea. What followed has involved a concerted collective effort to broker an agreement with the Zoo authorities and to overcome the technical and logistical hurdles involved. Yet with the COVID-19 pandemic casting a long shadow over all forms of social gathering, Llupià decided to adapt her project. On 22 May 2020, on the 37th anniversary of the beaching of the whale, Llupià invites us to join her in ‘Vibraera’, “an energetic rebellion, a call for a collective immaterial action”, as she has described it, consisting of an energetic gathering intended to activate the vibrational capacity of humans to generate interspecies connections. A growing archive of images, sounds, videos, and spoken word from collaborators across the fields of energy, the environment, science, law, social and sporting activities, humanitarianism and art, will be gathered in the website www.vibraera.net and shared using the hashtags #labalenadelpratalprat and #Vibraera.

In ‘To name, to own. Critique of taxonomic practice’ Agustín Ortiz Herrera focuses his research project on taxonomy and the classification system for species developed in the context of the Enlightenment by Carl Linnaeus (Sweden, 1707-1778). Ortiz is interested in the different practices of taxonomy in specialised study centres, such as those dedicated to Linnaeus in Uppsala and London, where the naturalist’s collection of over 55,000 specimens of plants, animals, and minerals – sent by his disciples from all corners of the world – is located. Ortiz intends to expand his research to Catalonia with the idea of creating synergies and liaising with authors who have developed discourses around post-humanism, queer theory, feminism and decolonialism, such as Donna Haraway, Judith Butler and Ariella Azoulay.

The 2019–2020 edition introduces a few changes: ‘small gallery’ exhibitions are no longer taking place, yet a year-long education and mediation project for La Capella has been introduced. Production grants are again divided into exhibition projects to be presented in La Capella’s 380m2 main space (three solo exhibitions, plus a curatorial project) and non-exhibition projects (two off-site projects, two research projects, one publication project, three live art projects and two transdisciplinary creation / digital media projects).