Agustín Ortiz Herrera’s research centres on the taxonomic practice of the system for classifying natural species developed in the context of the European Enlightenment by Carl Linnaeus (Sweden, 1707-1778). The artist focuses on a range of exercises in documentation regarding taxonomy in study centres specialised in Linnaeus, such as those in Uppsala and London, which hold more than 55,000 samples of plants, animals and minerals sent by Linnaeus’s followers from the far ends of the Earth. Ortiz proposes to expand the research in Catalonia with the aim of generating synergies and of forging links with women authors who have formulated discourses related to posthumanism, queer and feminist theory and the decolonial movement, among them Lynn Margulis, Donna Haraway, Ariella Azoulay and Rossi Braidotti. The structure of his proposal encompasses a number of different ambits, such as the questioning of the goals of the systematic classification of knowledge, reflection on the impact of Western scientific methods on social texture and its degree of cultural imposition and domination, examination of the close connection between taxonomy and the colonialist expansion of Western civilisations, uncovering the future of supplanted local knowledge and, lastly, the search for a queer and feminist vision of this issue.

Agustín presents specifically for INDEX one of the in process research lines. It is an artistic proposal that focuses on the construction of a speculative fiction based on the concept of a future Cabinet of Wonders. Inspired in the inception of Natural Sciences (Renaissance) in which the magical world refuses to disappear, the artist transports us to a parallel or future time (but difinitely ambiguous) in which the remains of a forgotten humanity, are analyzed and recreated by creatures eager for knowledge. This entity tries to expand, experiment and reconstruct the fragmented memory on human culture and its surroundings that was able to preserve. The boundaries between the artificial and the natural are blurred. When studying the anthropocene, disciplines such as biology, anthropology and archeology intersect and even juxtapose.

In 1974, the Argentinean artist and intellectual Oscar Masotta (1930-1979) went into exile in Europe. Settling first in London and then in Barcelona, he organised Lacanian psychoanalysis study groups, as he had done in Buenos Aires. In Barcelona, Masotta taught his first seminars in the studio of the artist Josep Guinovart. Artists such as Pepe Espaliú and intellectuals of the standing of Alberto Cardín, to mention but two examples, took part in these seminars, demonstrating Masotta’s importance on the Barcelona cultural scene in the post-Franco years. This project is framed in a personal and professional quest of Cloe Masotta. In August 2016, she travelled to Argentina with the filmmaker Andrés Duque to do a series of interviews for the exhibition Oscar Masotta. Theory as Action, curated by Ana Longoni. After 17 years without setting foot in Buenos Aires, Cloe Masotta went to the house where her father had spent his childhood. There she found a box full of letters written by her father to his mother (her grandmother) when he was already in exile. The publication Haurem de trobar un lloc on trobar-nos charts Oscar Masotta’s intellectual career, as well as his life in Europe, through these letters and the marks he left in the books he was reading while he was writing.

This project came into being when Consol Llupià learned the story of a 19-metre-long cetacean that washed up dead on the beach of El Prat de Llobregat, near Barcelona Airport, on 12 May 1983. This historical and social event remained engraved in the collective memory of the residents of El Prat and Barcelona and the skeleton ended up being displayed in Barcelona Zoo until the spring of 2018. Consol Llupià has been working on the case in a bid to have the whale’s skeleton returned to the Mediterranean Sea in May 2020, coinciding with the 37th anniversary of its discovery (and the artist’s birthday). In a public event that will demonstrate the many relationships forged during the realisation of this lengthy project, Llupià proposes to weave a dialogue between diverse institutions, organisations and communities in the fields of the environment, science, energy, the law, society, sports, humanism and art, reactivating a new formula for the relationship with nature and a new world view on its conservation.

https://consolllupia.tumblr.com/

RADIO PROGRAMS

Consol Llupià’s radio programs consists of an episode-by-episode explanation of the long process of the Whale from El Prat de Llobregat to the present day. At the start of the month, before she posts material online, the artist will bring the new programme in person to Espai Índex. If you’re round this way, you might come across her.

Program # 1:

Two years ago, the news of a stranding of a whale of 19 meters on the beach of El Prat came to my life. The year I was born. Search in Google for "Whale 1983". The common whales migrate along our coast from March to June. It was the owner of the skeleton installed at the entrance of the Bcn Zoo. You can't hear this type of Whale when they talk because they VIBE. We asked it with our vibrations if it wanted to go home.

#1 program. Here

Program # 2:

The El Prat Whale to El Prat was invited to be part of the World Marine Mammal Conference, celebrated December 7-9 of 2019 in Barcelona titled: “Art as a tool for Communication, La Balena del Prat al Prat. Art, science and other languages to revise how conservation is.” My thanks to Luigi Bundone Archipelagos - ambiente e sviluppo, Italia and Volker Smit of www.m-e-e-r.org.
This is my contribution to the conference.

#2 program. Here

Program # 3

In order to know the natural space where El Prat Whale arrived, I did a field research with my body.

I walked the perimeter on foot at different times of the day and night, I learned to handle the Catalan Skate in El Prat Maritime Club, and there, in front of the El Calamar Chiringuito, there is a Foundation where I volunteered from May to August 2018.

During this time I discovered: which relationship do I have as a human animal with the sea and which relation and links do I have with other non-human animals that cohabit with space.

I have stopped eating meat, I am in the process of Residue 0 and I have removed all my leather wardrobe and shoes from my closet.

#3 program. Here

In March 2019, it was announced that all the music stored on the Myspace social network since before 2015 had been permanently deleted due to supposed professional negligence. Some 50 million songs produced by around 14 million artists were gone for ever. The Internet Archive – a library that preserves digital archives – managed to recover 450,000 of the lost songs and compiled them into a vast archive called Myspace Dragon Hoard.

Myspace Dragon Hoard (Lost WorldWW Music) is a world music album that features tracks consisting of samples of recovered Myspace songs. The album will be released in digital format with the intention of being hosted on the first ever Web server, CERN httpd (installed on an old NeXT computer held at CERN in Meyrin in Switzerland). By regarding the Web server as a kind of monument, the project ponders on the material aspects of the production and distribution of music on the internet and reflects on alternative and decentralised ways of preserving and conserving our digital cultural heritage.

www.lostwwwmusic.net

This research is based on presuppositions that are heir to symbolic thinking founded on archetypal analogies between serial collections and presents a series of experiments that takes to the limit the potential of these analogies for connecting different planes of reality. There are two specific planes that represent the most extreme vanishing points on the path of research that Marc O’Callaghan followed in the years prior to this project. Firstly, and as a consequence of his interest in comparative religious studies, Catholic symbolism and specifically the worship of saints; and secondly, deriving from his exploration of the materiality and functionality of sound, Mákina music. These two worlds represent two types of folklore that belong to very different paradigms. Through the musical symbolism suggested by various studies and trends, exercises will be performed in a bid to establish unexpected connections between the two. Bearing in mind that these are phenomena with characteristic roots in the local context, the artist has chosen the old quarter of Barcelona as the territory in which to map Catholic folklore, which will form the basis for his search for symbolic implications capable of offering a musical reading.

http://marcocallaghan.com/csfcmmcab is the website for Marc O'Callaghan's project. Designed by the author himself with the minimalist encyclopedic approach characteristic of his way of thinking, it functions as an archive-receptacle filled with empty boxes which are filled up as the project evolves.

Ways of working, creating and sharing have been transformed by the advent of the new technologies and by a capitalist system committed to the circulation of knowledge and codes of consumption rather than to the means of production. At the present time, young people from many places around the world are engaged in short-term cultural projects without contracts or in irregular conditions, sometimes as amateurs, in other instances as professionals, but unable to build careers. Some have turned to developing their creative capacities with no remuneration whatsoever using the leisure and social networking channels offered by new platforms. This is the case of video gamers who design modded cars and urban landscapes, thereby completely transforming games. The Sindicato Virtual de Mods project is a virtual association – in other words, a non-existent association – that works firstly to compile, order and classify the images and imaginaries of this community of individuals based on their modded replicas, in particular of public transport and urban maps; and secondly, to generate virtual forums for discussion with gamers, inviting academic experts to test their theories on the employment crisis in the real world.

In their hyperconnected isolation, video gamers devote themselves to briefly reviving a visuality without history doomed to disappear or, in the best case scenario, to remain solely in the virtual space of the video game, questioning the individualism that the Web pushes the consumer towards.

The Gabinet Salvador in the Institut Botànic de Barcelona holds a fascinating, prized collection of historical objects that are, however, largely unknown to the lay public. During his research, Agustín Ortiz Herrera had the opportunity to study some of these objects and to gain insights into their specific nature. These materials, these bodies, look back at us from a historical distance, as well as a physical remoteness forced on them by the display cases in which they are housed. Bodies of desire for knowledge, separated, alienated bodies, queer bodies. In this session led by the artist in the Gabinet Salvador itself, we will be reflecting on historical objects’ capacity for dissidence.

The artist Agustín Ortiz Herrera is organising a series of activities with a view to expanding his project Naming, possessing. Critique of the Practice of Taxonomy, selected for Barcelona Producció 2019-2020 in the research category.

Venue: Institut Botànic de Barcelona. Passeig del Migdia, s/n, 08038 Barcelona
Capacity: 15 people

Prior registration is required: lacapella@bcn.cat

A wound gives off its own light

surgeons say.

If all the lamps in the house were turned out

you could dress this wound

by what shines from it.

Anne Carson, The Beauty of the Husband

The publication Tendremos que encontrar un lugar donde encontrarnos (We Will Have to Find a Place to Meet) is first and foremost a loving encounter between a daughter and her father through letters he wrote over 40 years ago to his mother. The author’s father was the Argentinean artist and intellectual Oscar Masotta, who boarded a ship bound for Europe in 1974. He lived in London and then afterwards in Barcelona, where he died four years later. In 2016, after 17 years without setting foot in Buenos Aires, Cloe Masotta went to the house where her father had spent his childhood. There she found a box full of letters and photographs, a moving and fragile collection in no particular order, an invitation to stitch up the wounds of her own history with a thread of light.

Auditori Meier - MACBA

Prior registration at lacapella@bcn.cat

Limited capacity

Naming nature and classifying it taxonomically in an effective manner was a priority for budding modern science during the Enlightenment. In its global epistemological conception, species of plants gathered during colonialist explorations were catalogued in honour of the white men of Western culture. At the same time, many of these plants started to be cultivated in city streets and gardens and the first botanical institutions were set up. During these sessions, we will be using queer/cuir strategies as a means to question the narratives accepted by the modern scientific construct, to gain insights into a decolonial narrative and to reveal the secrets of species of plants such as Sparrmannia, Washingtonia and Tulbaghia.

Activity 1
Friday 23 October 2020 at 6.00 pm
Urban Route around the streets of Poblenou
Ortiz Herrera invites us to join him on a tour that aims to bring to light forgotten episodes in the development of botanical knowledge during the modern project while experimenting with queer/cuir confrontation strategies.

Meeting place to be confirmed. Participants will be notified.
Activity limited to 20 people

Advance booking essential: lacapella@bcn.cat

Activity 2
Saturday 24 October 2020 at 11.30 am
Guided tour of the Barcelona Botanical Gardens
During this second dérive, historical events will be explained using a methodology of situated knowledge that exposes the scale of the strategy of the cabinet of curiosities in botanical gardens.

Meeting place to be confirmed. Participants will be notified.
Activity limited to 20 people

Advance booking essential: lacapella@bcn.cat

Activity 3
Coming soon
Modern Nature: a tribute to Derek Jarman
Group reading and discussion of Derek Jarman’s book Modern Nature. We will also be talking about Jarman’s film The Garden (1990) and his design for his garden at Prospect Cottage in the south-east of England.

Activity limited to 40 people
Advance booking: https://forms.gle/4MQQXy72SwBxpV6V7
Organised by: Hangar. With the support of Caja Negra Editorial.

These sessions are co-produced with Hangar and are being held as part of the “Fictions of Dis-order” programme of the research and knowledge transfer division.

4 digital sessions on Twitch.tv from September to December.

29 September (Carles Saurí), 29 October (Daniel Moreno), 26 November (Guim Camps) and 10 December (Marion Balac).

Twitch sessions is a programme of online activities in which a number of artists interested in the digital environment, social media and video games reflect on these forms of leisure and entertainment as tools for knowledge.

Between September and December, we will be providing space for this group to run four public sessions to be broadcast on Twitch (a video streaming platform well known in the world of video games) that will present Daniel Moreno and Guim Camps’ projects in the Digital Environment category.

[update] Thursday, January 14, 2021, new Twitch Session: Roc Herms and Carlos Carbonell play with baby simulators while talking about procreation. ⠀

www.twitch.tv/exedra2020