Inéditos 2020
La Casa Encendida of Fundación Montemadrid is proud to host the 19th edition of Inéditos, presenting the exhibition projects of two young curators under age 35.
This programme is one of the few in Spain that helps young curators find their footing in the professional art world by giving the competition winners a chance to produce their first show and publish an exhibition catalogue. Over the years, La Casa Encendida has supported more than fifty new curators, in addition to facilitating the publication of catalogues and the promotion of their work.
Participants in past editions of Inéditos include artists, researchers, educators, managers, cultural producers and independent curators who have since risen to national and international prominence, including Juan Canela, Emma Brasó, Ángel Calvo Ulloa, Luisa Espino, Irina Mutt, Neme Arranz and Roberto Vidal.
The winning exhibition projects are:
Things That Never Happened but Have Always Existed
Curator: Raquel G. Ibañez (Madrid, 1989)
(Room D)
Things That Never Happened but Have Always Existed is a proposal that combines artistic practices which, in both the themes of the pieces and in their processes, are linked to the exploration of dreams and liminal spaces of consciousness. The works featured in this exhibition posit the act of dreaming as a delocalised phenomenon that does not need the bodily senses to exist, something that opens up the possibility of understanding consciousness as more than just a consequence of chemical flows in our brains.
The project takes shape as the works dialogue with each other, exploring the points of convergence and patterns that emerge among them with reference to three basic themes: memory, language and ritual.
Artists: Carla Andrade, Maru Calva, Timothy Hyunsoo Lee, Cristina Mejías, Jorge Mirón, Clara Moreno Cela, Daniel Moreno Roldán and Aldo Urbano, Lorraine Rodríguez, Manuel Rodríguez, María Salgado and Leonor Serrano Rivas.
The Swamp Thing: Critique(s) and Poetic(s) by Way of Aberration
Curator: Núria Montclús (Barcelona, 1985)
(Room E)
Doctor Alec Holland woke up to find himself transformed into the Swamp Thing after a bomb was deliberately set off in the laboratory where he and his wife and partner, Doctor Linda Holland, were developing a bio-restorative formula. Turned into a mass of humanoid plant life with Holland’s consciousness, he set out to avenge the murder of his beloved and combat the environmental (self-)destruction of the planet.
Drawing a parallel with this comic book superhero and updating it for 21st-century audiences, The Swamp Thing: Critique(s) and Poetic(s) by Way of Aberration reflects on our current interactions with the environment and explores how the resulting alterations are treated in contemporary artistic practices, their aesthetic possibilities and their discursive capacities.
In this aberrant nature, the works of Maria Thereza Alves, Elena Bajo, Luna Bengoechea, Joaquín Fargas, Bárbara Fluxá, Lara Fluxà, Basim Magdy and Joana Moll have found a tool and voice for highlighting the fragility of our habitat and questioning the environmental alterations resulting from the development of the neoliberal capitalist system, which Félix Guattari also calls “techno-scientific mutations”.
All these works have a pleasant outward appearance and poetic intensity, but terrifying undercurrents lurk beneath the surface; these undercurrents, treated critically and sometimes ironically, activate the audience and give them what I call an experience of the sublime 2.0.
