19/3/13
11/3/13
On limits and perimeters;Montse Badía
At the moment the French Institute in Barcelona is presenting El perímetre intern
(The internal perimeter), a group exhibition curated by Andrea
Rodríguez Novoa and Veronica Valentini. The dozen or so works, by
Spanish and French artists, presented in El perímetro interno
propose a reflection on the notion of limits (geographical, historical,
political, economic, social, cultural, personal…), their ambiguities and
their imprecisions.
Narrating stories, highlighting examples, indicating points of
confluence or carrying out small displacements are just a few of the
examples employed by these artists to explore this notion. Oriol
Vilanova takes a vitrine from the French Institute and deprives it of
its function, simply exhibiting it open. Through the image of a wax
cylinder, Dominique Hurth proposes a series of non-linear narratives.
“Let hope predominate without being too visionary” is the message that
Anna Moreno wrote on the placards that she showed in the world
demonstration of 15 October 2011 in Barcelona and Vienna. A disturbing
and undecipherable anonymous letter is the proposal by Audrey Cottin
that focuses on the limits of authorship. A photograph accompanied by a
Quahog shell are the elements that Aymeric Ebrard uses as a way of
trying to identify what constitutes forming part of a community. Fran
Meana presents an installation, with a slightly unstable equilibrium,
where he compares images (and one ends up finding many common features)
related to North-American Land Art and workers revolts in the
dockyards of the northern Spain. Ariadna Parreu enters into the world of
desires and utopias, using scientific, geometric and telekinesic
references. Pauline Bastard reveals the mechanisms used to produce a
romantic sunset. Ryan Rivadeneyra relates, visually and literally, his
unsuccessful search for Tartessus, the mythical lost city. In their
film, Pythagore et les monstres, Louise Hervé and Chloé Maillet
transform the philosopher Pythagoras into the protagonist of a film with
numerous traits of a B series film. Through references to a story by
Lewis Carroll, Irene de Andrés constructs a perfect map, of which all
that is left is the frame. The complex history of Europe now transformed
into a huge tourist theme park is reflected in an installation, by Lúa
Coderch, in which an electric fan artificially blows up a bag from a
souvenir shop.
The internal perimeter shares approaches and concerns with another
project recently presented in la Capella that we commented on a few
weeks ago: La condició narrativa,
curated by Alexandra Laudo. Both propose a reflection related to a
specific theme and one that is relevant at the moment (one focuses on
the image and the narrative condition, while the other explores the
notion of limits and their imprecisions) and in this process of
reflection they also evidence other things: a certain generational
approximation of the artists (born in the decade of the eighties) who
work with a huge diversity of materials, though often in low-tech
formats; that they investigate, indicate and present facts or events
from the present and the past that make it possible to reflect on the
present; that they explain histories or construct situations and reveal
mechanisms.
And as we’re talking about generational themes, it’s worth
remembering that during the seventies, in a Barcelona still devoid of
contemporary art institutions (let’s not forget that the first, the
Fundació Joan Miró, was inaugurated in 1975), some of the most risky
artistic proposals took place in the foreign institutes in the city. The
Institut Français, the Istituto Italiano di Cultura, the
Goethe-Institut and the Institute of North American Studies were just a
few of the places where the works by conceptual artists were presented,
as well as the encounters, discussions and seminars that reflected on
the new role of art and artists.
I’m not sure if history is repeating itself, but it’s curious that
just when the artistic institutions in Barcelona seem to have lost their
way, some of the most interesting proposals are arising out of
independent initiatives, in foreign cultural institutes, artists’
studios and non-profit spaces. And the reasons for this are not to be
found solely in the cuts or the increase in VAT.
10/3/13
Love Longitude? 'Maphead' Locates Geography Buffs
A schoolgirl in Texas stands in front of a map in 1943.
Do you ever read an atlas for pleasure? If you go to a new city, can you imagine not knowing which way is north? Is it hard for you to imagine life without a map?
Then you might be a maphead, says trivia buff Ken Jennings.
"If there's a map on the wall of the room, people like us just cannot turn away," he tells Fresh Air's Dave Davies. "There's just something hypnotic about maps."
Jennings, who rose to national prominence in 2004 with his 74-game winning steak on Jeopardy!, charts what he calls "the wide, weird world of geography" in his latest book, Maphead, which profiles Google Maps engineers, geocachers, imaginary mapmakers, rare map collectors, National Geographic Bee contestants, roadtrippers and other "mapheads" who love latitude, longitude and everything in between.
The Map Room
One of the places Jennings visited was the Library of Congress map division, which holds more than 4.5 million items.
"The librarian there told me that it had to be in the basement because the holdings were so heavy that if you tried to put the maps and atlases on the top floor, they would fall through to the basement anyway," he says. "It's a library straight out of Jorge Luis Borges. It's a football field's worth of shelves as far as the eye can see — full of maps and atlases — and it seemed like the librarian could, at any point, pull out any of them and pull out some historical treasure."
For instance, the library contains George Washington's hand-drawn map of Virginia, as well as the maps from the Versailles conference at the end of World War I and Theodore Roosevelt's maps from South America after his presidency.
"It's just amazing," says Jennings. "It's just like a walk through history to look at these maps."
Jennings also went to the National Geographic Bee, the annual competition for teenagers who know all sorts of obscure geography trivia. He pitted himself in a trivia contest against a former contestant named Caitlin Snaring, one of just two girls to ever win the Geographic Bee. (Her winning question? What Vietnamese city, split by a river with the same name, was an imperial capital for more than a century? The answer: Hue.)
"I ended up getting a dozen right, and she ended up getting all but one of them," he says. "She beat me by a margin of 10 questions. It was like we were in a different league. She's in the pros, and she's going up against some Little Leaguer."
Jennings says that contestants know so much, they start running out of material to study.
"They're frantically going to the library for new books in hopes of finding new facts about the world to learn," he says.
A Different Kind Of Roadie
Jennings also met with a group of mapheads he calls "road geeks." A road geek, says Jennings, is someone obsessed with the interstate system of roads.
Jennings says that "road geeks" are united by their need to be in actual places.
"They like to catalog and study things that could surround them," he says. "We live in an age where the world feels very explored. ... That's what unites all of these people: a desire to be explorers even though they were born centuries too late for the real era of exploration."
Interview Highlights
On the numbered highway system"We don't realize how hard it was to drive anywhere outside the major cities less than a century ago. After World War I, the U.S. government ordered a tank convoy of jeeps to cross the country, and it took them months. There were casualties. There were injuries. A huge percentage of the jeeps that set out couldn't make it because the roads were so terrible. [The publisher] Rand McNally, looking for a way to map these roads ... could only give you directions: turn left at the barn, or turn right at the grove of poplar trees, or whatever. There was no signage, and this was not working out.
On geocaching
"These are people who are using GPS systems to find millions of little hidden objects throughout the world — often as simple as a piece of Tupperware hidden in the woods. You go to a website, you get the latitude and longitude to get the specific location of a certain specific hiding space, and then you go there and see if you can find it. Often it's as simple as a piece of Tupperware with some Happy Meal toys for the kids ... you can find hidden under a rotting log in the woods. Sometimes they're more ingeniously disguised, or there's a puzzle you have to solve. It's a culture of 4 million people who are all over the Earth right now looking for treasure that the rest of us don't even know about."
On Jeopardy!
"I can't relax and sink back in the couch and watch Jeopardy! the way I used to. That's sort of the one regret I have is, when I hear that music or I hear Trebek's Canadian accent, I used to get excited and now I just get panicky. It's like an adrenaline rush — I have post-traumatic game show stress disorder or something. I cannot relax into Jeopardy! the way I used to."
From here.
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