August 12. Laura Vallés: A Rehearsal to the Test. Editing Spaces, Part 2

Monday, August 12, 19:00
Laura Vallés: A Rehearsal to the Test
Editing Spaces, Part 2

‘A Rehearsal to the Test / Editing Spaces’ takes as a point of departure a series of editorial projects run by women (Aspen, Metronome, Arena, Zehar, Concreta) and proposes an exercise to rehearse a series of questions on how words world worlds from the shared experience of reading, editing, curating. The event will be divided in two parts: the first one will introduce the framework of this on-going research, and the second will put forward a series of interrogations on how these processes operate in space, in which the audience will have to imagine and inhabit their own answers. A discussion about the envisioned environs will take place after the performative lecture.

Laura Vallés is a contemporary art researcher, curator and writer. She is co-founder and managing editor of Concreta: a Spanish organisation researching into image creation and art theory, which publishes a journal twice-yearly, as well as a series of books. Laura is interested in the practices that emerge from the intersection of editing and curating as a space of negotiation and asymmetry. This presentation is part of a research-in-the-making developed at the Royal College of Art and as such it will be presented as a rehearsal in media res, from its condition of unfinishedness. Laura has edited and translated essays and conversations by Jacques Rancière, Donna Haraway, and Ariella Azoulay, to list a few; she has curated exhibitions and organised events with filmmakers Pedro Costa and Fabrizio Terranova, artist Carla Zaccagnini, and philosopher Franco “Bifo” Berardi at La Filmoteca (Valencia), Feira Tijuana (Porto), Tàpies Foundation (Barcelona), and Lumen Studios (London), among others. Her most recent curatorial project, It’s Your Turn, took place at EACC (Castellón) in 2019. She is currently working on an exhibition in three episodes in partnership with Azkuna Zentroa (Bilbao), Artium (Vitoria), and CentroCentro (Madrid) (2019-2020), and on the directorship of Fotonoviembre Biennial (Tenerife) (2019).

Editing Spaces
One of the meanings of the word publication is to make something public. If the relations between local and global are regarded as a text that can be read through contemporary art practices, a pertinent tactic would be to substitute the idea of exhibition with publication. This means to understand exhibitions as narrative machines, as expanded books that can also unfold a set of other possibilities such as cross-temporal approaches, choreography of bodies moving through the extensive idea of text and support structures.

The work of the artists/curators invited to Editing Space develops from translations from texts to installations, from transitions between the written and the performative.

With: Discoteca Flaming Star, Alicia Kopf, Josep Maynou, Mattin and Laura Vallés,

Supported by the program PICE of Acción Cultural Española.