escoles de context

Schools of Context, the second edition of which starts this October, is a study programme that focuses on providing training resources, fields of research and meeting spaces for the artistic community in the city of Barcelona. The goal of ‘building context’ through practice is one of La Capella’s core objectives and has given rise to a series of ongoing subprogrammes specialising in the performativity of the voice, textuality, LGBTQI+ culture, the notion of the bookshop and institutional self-learning.

Schools of Context encompasses diverse timeframes, rhythms and intensities that also bring to the table certain contextual attributes inherent in emerging artistic practice in Barcelona and make it possible to take a fresh look at the institutional model – at both an infrastructural and a human level – of La Capella, while at the same time questioning that model. The Schools of Context study groups are aimed at the art world and establish dynamics of proximity through small and regular groups that will only be open to the public when the situation demands this.

The people that make up Schools of Context are Enric Farrés Duran, Anna Pahissa, Alexandra Laudo, Daniel Gasol, Laia Estruch and Jara Rocha, who between them pursue the following areas of research:

 

PUBLICATIONS  JA Llibreria

Enric Farrés Duran and Anna Pahissa

JA Llibreria (JA Bookshop) is a collective research, production and learning project related to the possibility of opening a bookshop in the Centre d’Art La Capella. The project is pursued from and for the context and is based on three premises: the artist’s book as a tool for producing, distributing and sharing content; the local production of artists’ publications; and the ability to shape La Capella’s editorial department.

 

TEXTS – Branca, arrel, brot, tija

Alexandra Laudo

Branca, arrel, brot, tija (Branch, Root, Shoot, Stem) is a practical, theoretical and poetic programme that revolves around the text, the word and writing in artistic practice and in its intersections with curating and literature. The programme explores the possibility of thinking about a piece of writing and a way of relating to the text and the word imbued with seasonal changes, with the cycles of growth, death and rebirth that take place in nature. It aims to be a course that proposes ways of reading, producing text and orality that are not indifferent to the natural transformations of the perceivable world.

 

VOICE – Escola de veu

Laia Estruch

The Escola de veu (Voice School) is conceived as a research laboratory specialising in phenomena related to the voice in contemporary art. It aims to study in depth the voice as raw material, as a tool, a device and an experimentation space for artistic proposals that explore the aerial conditions and emotional possibilities of the performative voice. The sessions will feature alternating local, Spanish and international guest speakers who will teach seminars on theoretical research, voice training and laboratories based on their own practical research.

 

LGBTQI+ CULTURE – Transmaricabollo

Daniel Gasol

Transmaricabollo (TransLesbigay) aims to consider how LGBTQI+ activism has been exploited by liberal commercialism in its zeal to find new consumers, and how dominant educational spaces distance themselves from a social reality studied in ethnography and sociology. The school consists of people who are not teachers or academics, creating a space for shared and horizontal learning and challenging the synonymy between right and need and the heterosexualisation of the collective to establish its legitimacy, as well as the legislative and social criminalisation of dissident bodies and other non-normative realities.

 

INFRA-INTRA-INSTITUTIONAL LEARNING – Elefants dins l’habitació

Jara Rocha

The network of infrastructural dependencies in which the day-to-day work of institutional structures takes place is also culture and it defines artistic practices. Elefants dins l’habitació (Elephants in the Room) is posited as a space-time in which to explore the continuities and discontinuities, legacies and prospects, potentials and powers that make up the technical, bureaucratic and semiotic-physical context and with which art centres are constituted. Through talk and documentation based on close readings of infrastructures, tools and grey literature in inter- and intra-institutional study sessions,  La Capella invites other cultural and artistic institutions of the local context to the table of study and unlearning,  and in this way, it is exposed to a multilateral process of knowledge of the medium where art centres exist.