This week I would like to talk about the graphic identity that my friends Sara and Julio have developed for Russafart 2010. Russafart is an artistic event that will take place in Valencia on May 21, 22 and 23 where more than 100 artists from Russafa neighbourhood will open their studios to the general public.
For the graphic identity Sara and Julio use four type of vegetables to group the different artistic cathegories that the event includes: sculpture, painting, videoart and photography. At the same time, this concept reflects the essence of the Ruzzafa neighbourhood, which was in its origins a village of farmers and orchards. This concept accompanies the philosophy of this year’s campaign: “Cultivating Art.”
If you are in Valencia this weekend, do not miss this celebration of art in this beautiful neighborhood!
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Our Lord of San Felipe
This week I ask some questions to my friend Justin Jernigan about the stories within his photos and how these reflect his lifestyle. Justin currently lives around and within the Los Angeles region, adhering to “bike life”, a lifestyle that is centered around constant movement and uprooting, and which involves a complex system of values and sense of community. Thanks Justin!
MO: If your photos tell a story, it seems one of the themes would be constant change and movement. Do you think this is a result of your own incessant need to travel, or is there something deeper, rooted within our generation that calls for this constant movement?
JJ: My freshman year of high school they had me read “The Sun Also Rises.” Hemingway, chasing women and wine across the railways of southern France and Catalonia, was the first real vagabond I came to love, and as a thirteen year old, that book did more to shape the next ten years of my life than any other person or thing. As a result, I have cultivated a fairly far reaching wanderlust for many years now. Although I agree that my own need to travel is greater than the average person’s, I do feel that this desire for movement is more pronounced in our generation than in those past.
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Still from project in progress
Almost a year ago my friend Andreas and two friends founded in Barcelona the documentary film production company De Tot Arreu Produccions (Around the World Productions). This week Andreas tells us about the struggle to survive as a documentary filmmaker in Barcelona.
Q. What difficulties have you faced in bringing your favored projects to light?
A. This is a very complex question and I think that first we need to make a difference between ‘heart projects’ and ‘stomach projects’. ‘Heart projects’ have, in most cases, a higher artistic pretension, but they do not provide enough money to eat (the opposite of ‘stomach projects’). They are too abstract, subjective and demanding. Most of the time we need to work for TV and they have very strict rules and specific formats that do not align easily with a high artistic pretension. Unfortunately! Actually the actual art would be to melt, or disguise, the ‘heart projects’ as ‘stomach projects’. As a result, ‘heart projects’ are difficult to make (I am not saying anything new) cause there is no money to make them. Some how you always manage to make a ‘heart project’ (every creative person knows this), but is it highly difficult and the question always ends up in: “How will I pay my next rent?”
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Our friend and artist Paco Rico tells us about his three projects, currently in progress, that explore the role of history and evolution in our perception of reality and the ways to interfere with images to affect our interpretation. Paco Rico lives and works in Barcelona, where he teaches art. If you would like to see more of his projects, you can visit his website www.pacorico.com
I’ve become more and more interested in the way I am enslaved by any serialized project, by a derivative idea that manipulates me in order to complete itself. It makes me think of myself as merely a colony of isolated members, where there is no real ‘me’ but an illusion of ‘me’. Do I really have a need of using those cultural vehicles? Is it just a way of delayed neurosis? Has it something to do with prestige? Maybe a narcotic? Well… I think that the methodology of working with series has something to do with a kind of parasite slavery, and that a way to escape from this situation is studying a subject to such a point that you could explain it to an alien intelligence (or better, to a machine: in some years time you could do that, that’s for sure). At this point, not being a person interested in accumulation or even authorship, I’d rather jump to another subject in the chain of evolutionary nonsense. Perhaps I should do something more specific about this idea. MORE >>
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Mark Wilson, “Untitled Gray Ground & Untitled Light Gray Ground” (1973)
“Personal computing may have begun in the 1980s but the history of computer art started much earlier during a period when only a few visionaries sensed the impact computers were going to have on our lives.” (from: hyperallergic.com)
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Private Parts
31 March, 2010
Short but grotesque, this mix combines 40 minutes of music into a 7 minute pleasantly unlistenable cacophony. Mainly inspired by the history of collage music put together by John Leidecker/Wobbly and the music of Erik M. , I wanted to experiment with the way we experience recorded material, and how we think we should listen to music. Though the result may not be as enjoyable as the separate recordings, I feel through this process I have had an active exchange with each creator/musician., and is therefore worth the defilement.
-matt o.
Private Parts
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