Saturday 19 February, 11 a.m.
Ovni Archive, Satellite Contact and User Group Disco, the three art works comprising this exhibit, are placed at a tense spot in between the duality of archive-representation.
Curator and researcher Jorge Blasco, referring to the work of Rosell Meseguer, notes that in the territory of art we acquire, gather and produce documents that are "items" whose purpose is to be shown. Thus, the frontier between building an archive and the exhibit is broken down.
What are the consequences of this breakdown? In this analytical tour through the archivo-archivante exhibit, with an essential stop at the Ovni Archive installation by Rosell Meseguer, our aim is to reconstruct a certain geneology of these practices. In this sense, in the words of Jorge Blasco, we are invited to think about and understand the processes of the artist's work from a standpoint of the action of archiving-exhibiting as an inevitable pairing which implies that the structure of the exhibited archive be visible. This is in contrast to traditional archives, where one needs search instruments to understand the information hidden in the shelves or bits and where documentary units are recovered one by one, with no overview of the whole documentary context in which they are deposited.
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Rosell Meseguer (Orihuela, Spain1976) holds a PhD in Fine Arts from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. In 1997 she started to work with alternative photographic processes, which became the subject of her thesis and experimentation formats in her art work. It all began by going down into a mine as a child; a real labyrinth of tunnels. Those journeys, from salt in salt mines to shipyards, were the root of my attraction to underground worlds and coastal settings; a tracker of vestiges and documents from the past. Currently she is professor of Image Technologies I at the Fine Arts School in Cuenca. In her visual arts projects, the presence of 19th century photographs combined with digital techniques and other visual arts areas, like painting or installations, is fundamental.
Jorge Blasco Gallardo (Barcelona, 1972) studied Fine Arts at
the Universidad de Salamanca and went on to study at the Technological
Educational Institution of Athens. His post-graduate and doctoral work
was done at the Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Barcelona
(ETSAB-UPC). He is the head of the project Culturas de archivo
(Archival Cultures), which began at the Fundació Antoni Tàpies in
October 2000. Currently he is working on developing projects and
publications related to Culturas de archivo (Archival Cultures), as
well as on editing the project portal and on the production of AIAN, in
the section on the Spanish Civil War. He is also the head of the
research group GRUP DE RECERCA, a collaboration among the Departamento
de Cultura y Medios de Comunicación, el Instituto de Cultura de
Barcelona, la Fundación Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona and la
Fundación Antoni Tàpies to study and create new archival models in the
fields of art, history, science and society.