Spectators in Residence was a study community (created through an open call) that promoted spaces for research and learning based on the artistic residencies program at Graner Creation and Live Arts Center during the years 2020-21. It was a space, mediated by artefactum, to share an active and reflective condition with the artists, getting closer to their creative processes, generating learnings, and developing the contents of our experiences through a collective exploration of the poetics of the spectator.
Through stage presentations, artist encounters, readings, debates, shared practices, and screenings, the program proposed a space for experimentation that played with the playful, epistemic, and subversive potential of spectators to appropriate artistic materials and reconfigure collective imaginaries. If the gaze is an organ oscillating between passion and action, a sort of seismograph tracing maps of relationships between seeing, feeling, speaking, and thinking: what relationships can we explore? What poetics and politics shape us as spectators? What devices influence our ways of seeing and interpreting artistic works? How can we modify them to free imagination from the circuits of consumption and spectacle? How can we transform the image into a collective territory to affirm future modes of experience?
The first edition unfolded through:
- In the Living Room with… a series of periodic meetings with Graner’s resident artists to get closer to their processes and methodologies through work-in-progress presentations, shared practice sessions, conversations, etc. Some of the resident artists we met in this first edition included Núria Guiu, Laida Azkona and Txalo Toloza, Pere Faura, El Conde de Torrefiel, Nyamnyam…
- The Circle of Spectators was a space for experimentation on the gaze and the condition of the spectator. A place to explore the bodily dispositions that guide the ways we see, feel, and relate to the images that traverse us.
Interrupted by the Covid-19 pandemic, the spectator community carried out the project Scenes from Confinement, a game of audiovisual correspondences inviting participants to share scenes of the most unusual aspects of (un)confinement. To do so, it proposed starting from observing one’s own life, searching like a flâneur –who, after all, is a spectator of the theater of the world– for those images that challenge, move, and invite us to reflect and elaborate on “what is (happening to) us.”
artefactum: “We are an artistic tandem that moves between the arts, pedagogy, and critical thinking. Our proposals create artistic devices and situations that question the present – cultural, social, and educational – to foster processes of multiple, situated, and transversal learning. We understand artistic creation as a space for the exploration and articulation of learning communities through strategies based on mediation, experimental pedagogy, and contemporary creation methodologies, encouraging horizontal and collaborative practices aimed at developing situated and sustainable knowledge. Our activities are organized around three main lines of action: research and creation, mediation and collaboration with active networks, and learning and training. All of our projects place the body and experience at the center of the creation and learning processes, combining artistic strategies with (trans)feminist methodologies that encourage horizontal and collaborative practices to weave communities that work in a situated way.”
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