Activities // Open Calls

OPEN CALL TO PARTICIPATE IN THE EXHIBITION CREADORES 2021

SME FRANCESAS VALLADOLID / 11 JUNE-16 AUGUST 2021

 

1 PURPOSE OF THE OPEN CALL

"Creadores" (Creators) has been an essential platform for exposure to local contemporary artistic activity in recent years, an opportunity for several generations of artists from the city to show their work in a recognized and intimate space: the Las Francesas municipal hall. One of its many strengths has been how it has provided a kaleidoscopic, rich, and very extensive look at artists in the incipient stages of their careers, or while they are still developing.

For this new edition of "Creadores 2021" we aim to probe different ways of putting together this miscellany of works, reducing the number of artists, but expanding their freedom and specific production for the exhibition. We also would like for it to be an opportunity to generate internal debate as a working group, and for this dialogue to reach and penetrate the public and the dynamic of the exhibition during its run. In this process, we draw on the collaboration of artists in full their expressive maturity, most of whom have participated in other editions of the event.

Our intention as a group is to investigate and put in crisis the common themes, without losing sight of a certain almost "primary" propositional power in the spatial intervention, understood as a complete organism. These concepts proceed from a contextual position, very much rooted in the local character and history of the building to be intervened; one which suggests disturbing connections with the post-2020 global situation, and will serve as a common substrate to develop a unique, hybrid and collective spatial skein.

The inclusion of a European artist from the Creart network through an open invitation to intervene in the "Patio de las Tabas" will help to expand the intervention beyond the walls of the venue and the local area.

 

2 CONDITIONS OF PARTICIPATION

This Open Call is addressed to artist born or resident in any city of the Network (Genoa* and Lecce - IT, Liverpool - UK, Clermont - Ferrand and Rouen FR, Zagreb - HR (member of HDLU), Kaunas - LT, Lublin and Katowice - PL, Aveiro - PT; Skopje – MK)

*as for Genoa, can apply artists under 35 who live, study or work here

The organization will cover:

- Production expenses of the works of the selected artist.

- Installation, transport and insurance costs of the works.

- Dissemination and publicity of the exhibition, including a catalogue, photographic report and a promotional video.

- Travel, accommodation and subsistence costs for the artist of the selected CreArt network, on the occasion of the installation and opening of the exhibition (maximum 4 days).

- According to the evolution of the Covid19 crisis, Organization might cover cost for PCR test.

Each selected artist will receive € 800 (including taxes) for participation fee and up to € 1,500 (including taxes) for work production expenses and transport costs

 

3 HOW TO APPLY

The following attached documentation is required in a single PDF document:

• ID or passport (scanned copy) and/or any kind of document that proofs your connection to your CreArt home city;

• A short version of your curriculum vitae (maximum one A4 sheet)

• A brief written project proposal (maximum one A4 sheet)

• Graphic documentation related to the proposal and possible works that could be included in the exhibition.

Only applications with complete information will be accepted before 15th March

 

4 SELECTION PROCEDURE

The curator will examine each of the proposals presented, studying the quality, feasibility, and adaptation to the concept of the exhibition and the exhibition space proposed. The curator will select one artist from the network that will join Creadores 2021, together with 6 local artists. CreArt Valladolid will inform all participants by email, before 26Th March, and the selected artist will be announced in the CreArt website.

The participation in this call implies the acceptance of the Call and the selected artist must include in their CV and in all future communications (press, digital media) that have been selected to participate in the CreArt Exhibition in Valladolid.

Creadores 2021:

"El gran banquete

 y otros rituales de clausura"

(The great banquet and other cloister rituals)

 

Memory and context

The Convento de las Francesas (Convent of the Frenchwomen) was founded in the 15th century as an institution of rigorous seclusion by two sisters, María de Zúñiga and María de Fonseca, who ceded their palace and their own land for its construction, donning the habit themselves. It would end up becoming a destination for members of a certain social elite, including the nobility and distinguished families. It was, therefore, a site of voluntary seclusion, at times, but even more often, forced.

From that monastic complex the Church (reformed in the 17th century) is still preserved as a municipal exhibition space, while the cloister, embedded in a 20th-century housing block, clearly denotes some of the paradoxes and contradictions between public and private spaces in the contemporary city. This "Patio de las Tabas" represents a fascinating example of openwork Gothic tracery, designed by Fernando de Entrambasaguas, lying somewhere between organicism and an archaic, singular style. The amalgamation of lamb bones and pebbles embedded in the flooring was a Castilian tradition that we now view as an astonishing kind of macabre game, an "ornament" that immortalized the culinary and leisure practices of its inhabitants in a geometric and funerary floral tapestry; a very strange example of complicity between architecture and bone, construction and skeletons.

It is still curious that this place, a true "cage of the self" for many people for centuries, so explicitly manifests the traces, encapsulated in time, of the animals that gave its inhabitants sustenance; the tragedy of the food chain, and the comedy of the Sunday banquet.

In 2021 we find ourselves in a situation that echoes a cloistered convent, featuring forced monasticism, our lives now confined. Given this scenario, we look for deliverance, an intimate escape in the family circle, in the small cracks of the system and its laws, and in the refuge that art always offers us as a place of complete freedom, at least on paper.

A new rituality

From this euphemistic "new normality" comes a dysphemic "new rituality". Eating together around the table is now a dangerous act, and, therefore, more coveted and carnal than ever. The quintessential sacred space, consecrated to the Eucharist of bread and wine transubstantiated into divine body and blood, will be used here as a place of pagan and communal celebration, a site for new rituals. And, no matter how deconsecrated the church may be, it is still a church, nonetheless. The disentailment processes generated fractures in the spatial reading of the old city, unstitched paragraphs from the book of the modern city and new grafts of exotic practices that sometimes flourished, full of meaning.

We imagine here an "artifact" of offering and celebration, a mundane altar made up of a large continuous table full of bizarre objects of worship, a banquet full of textures and, possibly, somewhat irreverent meanings, more aimed at the senses than the mind. However profane and far removed from symbolic pageantry it may be, we do not want to disassociate this celebration of art from a certain sacredness in its experience. A moment to recover the intimate transformation of the poetic act as a shared ceremony, a humble, local pause before the great global "reset". The monastic order has been abolished.

The spine

A mixed installation of objects will occupy the spine of the basilica, returning attention and gazes to the central space of the church and its scale, originally a mechanism between the mundane "here-and-now" and the "there-later." The temple prevails and "sweats" its spirits. Working along this axis, on its spine, also introduces the notion of a deambulatory, a space around which to rotate, which is still the function of the nearby cloister, an enclosure that served as a source of mental and physical solace within the strict inner monastic order. Going around over and over again, every day.

There is a gender-based reading as a starting point to think about and put oneself in the place of those secluded, or caged, women, who for centuries inhabited the space between these walls. It is, at the very least, poetic justice. The productive and creative practices that were carried out in its interior, related above all with the culinary sphere, and crafts, can give rise to approaches by which we question our position regarding hedonism vs prison-like discipline, and ornament, and its "vain crime", vs. the grave weight of sacred mourning.

In spite of everything, we find ourselves in a place full of concealed spaces and obscured identities. A "secret" circuit, exclusively for the people of the convent, surrounds the upper central space of the basilica: a collection of delicate (and brutal) devices at the service of a liturgical and sensual "voyeurism". At least one privilege of these nuns was being able to watch without being watched – an increasingly appealing idea in times of fascism and massive electronic espionage. "The great banquet" proposes a recovery of that game of crossed glances, a murky atmosphere in which to achieve a "twinning" that transcends the individual project. An exquisite corpse of diffuse genealogy.

Specific spatial intervention proposal

There are two possible places for the artistic installation, which can be worked on exclusively, or both at the same time. There is the Church Choir, within the municipal exhibition space, and there is the exterior space of the Patio de las Tabas, especially the open courtyard featuring the central fountain. It is understood that the use of the rest of the elements of this cloister is varied and multiple, but, insofar as the interventions take into account the nature of the constructed heritage, care in its integration, and adaptation to an outdoor space, this will be positively assessed. For the same reason, works that require technological or electrical installations are not advisable.

We will attach at the bottom information files and to-scale plans on both sites. 

At a disciplinary level we are interested in spatial installations and practices revolving around "the sculptural" in a critical way, works that make use of the different reinterpreted crafts; the mutating, organic capacity of the work during the time frame of the exhibition; and the inclusion of senses beyond sight. As in all rituals, we seek a non-hierarchical sensory experience that is open to perceptions beyond the rational and analytical, where the atmosphere itself can be the central material.

Juan Carlos Quindós de la Fuente
Curator

 

JUAN CARLOS QUINDÓS DE LA FUENTE

Educated in Architecture, he has worked as a professional photographer, documenting architecture, heritage and works of art for various national Spanish museums, and is currently a professor at the Escuela Superior de Diseño (school of design) in Valladolid.

His interests mainly have to do with contemporary urban spaces from a multimedia and transversal perspective. His artistic work comprehends photography, video art, sound art and installation, and has been exhibited at the Museo Patio Herreriano, La Casa Encendida cultural centre, the Museo Cerralbo, the Laboratorio de las Artes de Valladolid (LAVA), and at art galleries such as La Gran. He has also produced experimental film and video projects such as “Conclusión Abierta”, on Jorge Oteiza; and live cinema exhibitions at the Sónar festival, TedX and the Archaeological Museum of Palencia.

As a curator he has overseen various exhibition projects, such as CreArt’s dual “HORIZONTE DE SUCESOS. Experiencias sobre espacio y tiempo” exhibition at the Museo Patio Herreriano; an exhibition on Val del Omar and Vicente Escuredo at the National Sculpture Museum of Valladolid, and pop-up exhibitions at the V-A-C Foundation and at the Ca’Pesaro Contemporary Art Museum, both in Venice.

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