PUBLICS Parahosting, with Laia Estruch

The curatorial agency PUBLICS is “Parahosting” Latitudes by hosting a series of activities throughout 2022. PUBLICS began its Parahosting programme in 2018, and it has evolved into a flexible, expanding, and sometimes messy method of decentering curatorial authorship through partnership.

PUBLICS and Latitudes first worked together in 2019 as partners of the festival “Today is our Tomorrow”. Since then, and despite the several complications caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, Latitudes continued dialoguing with PUBLICS to develop a partial, distributed, and fragmentary retrospective of the Barcelona-based artist Laia Estruch.

In October 2021, PUBLICS supported the production of Estruch’s work “Ocells perduts” (Stray Birds), an installation and performance rehearsals commissioned for the exhibition “Panorama 21: Notes for an Eye Fire” at the MACBA Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, curated by Hiuwai Chu and Latitudes.

In March 2022, as the first introductory event of its Parahosting programme, Latitudes presented its curatorial practice at PUBLICS which was followed by Laia Estruch’s “Mix” (2021–ongoing). This solo performance compilation revisited the diverse voiced sounds, resonances, and articulations that she has developed and learned throughout her projects to date. An exercise in sonic recall and muscle memory, “Mix” is a live non-chronological edit that extracts the most ephemeral aspect of her practice – the voice – while exploring it as a kind of organ of the body, and as a tool for sculpting air.

Between June and October 2022, Helsinki-based writer and curator Irina Mutt in collaboration with Estruch, led a series of workshops with PUBLICS Youth, an education initiative for Helsinki-based 18-21-year-olds. Based around the idea of “touring” Estruch’s “Ocells Perduts (Stray Birds)” from its original museum context to the human bodies of PUBLICS Youth’s members, the sessions broached performative practice, translation and transcription, and the non-verbal capacity of the voice.