Since its creation, the University of Alicante Museum (MUA) has remained committed to contemporary art. This led to the launch of its Residency Programme for Artistic Creation and Research in 2015. The aim of this public and international programme is to galvanise the artistic sector and promote creation and research in contemporary art.
Within this programme, five projects are selected and receive funding. For two weeks, the resident artists must undertake their project within the MUA facilities, allowing them to work at this institution, become familiar with its dynamics and receive support from technical staff while giving shape to their projects.
This is a special year, as we present the exhibition for our 10th Residency Programme. The residency period ran from 9 to 20 September. With this initiative, the UA Museum has become a major centre for creation and research in contemporary art. The five selected projects were conducted by Diego Balazs, Lorena Lorca, Lucía Mir Tort, Elisa Terroba and Brisa MP, a diverse group of artists who for a few days shared their experiences and worked very hard to finish the projects on display in the Museum’s Sempere Hall.
We hope you enjoy this exhibition, this captivating journey through the current art scene.
Espacio Lúdicon’t
Diego Balazs
Espacio Lúdicon’t is a painting project and installation that explores the use of limits as a tool for play and reflection. This dynamic is governed by the concept of dinergy, coined by György Doczi to refer to the union of complementary opposites; in other words, in this project doing nothing triggers the action of playing. Mistakes lead to a reinterpretation of the objects we play with, forcing the viewer to devise a new logical solution. To develop this new approach to toys, a shortcut was taken: the lively Creole and post-Creole spirit and its relation to Spanish picaresque. The latter is a Latin American cultural trait whereby one tries to find a way around rules, an alternative way of doing things, even if it means straying from the set path.
By taking toys out of context, the artist can analyse multiple ways of interpreting them. “Don’t kiss the engine, Daddy, or the carriages won’t think it’s real” – like the present project, this quote from Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens is a reflection on how human beings change while playing, of how we see the world around us when we play: for instance, a kid pretending to be a locomotive becomes a locomotive. Here, the viewer is encouraged to become a player – and a toy to play with.
/bibliografía
Elisa Terroba
The /bibliografía project investigates the role of books as cultural media and as tools to preserve memory. The artist sees books as space-times containing multiple layers of information, focusing on the trace left by the users of the UA Main Library (notes, marks, underlined passages, photos, etc.) as part of a contemporary archaeology. These overlooked elements make up an intertextual narrative that reveals the way in which readers interact with knowledge.
The project aims to document and explore those interactions. In Elisa Terroba’s view, books are not just for reading – they are spaces in which knowledge is both used and acquired. Margins and folds are conceived as places of dissidence from which new narratives and meanings emerge, as both physical and conceptual spaces, and give rise to new interpretations.
De lo particular a lo vegetal
Lucía Mir Tort
In this set of works, the artist combines precise geometric shapes and imagined natural elements to create a dynamic dialogue between organicity and simplicity. The result is a visual universe that challenges the boundaries between nature and structural logic. In conceptual terms, the landscapes that emerge from these works have been created following an in-depth exploration of the environment, of objects that seem to contain hidden landscapes within themselves, like stones. More specifically, the works are a reference to the art of suiseki, which emphasises the power of stones to suggest landscapes and emotions.
The project defies the widespread notion that drawing is a mere tool for sketching, a step towards the intended result. Instead, Lucía Mir argues that a drawing is also relevant in its own right, as a piece to be exhibited and appreciated as a complete, standalone work of art.
Forest
Brisa MP
Will nature as we know it still exist in the future? What will our natural environments be like, our corporealities, the world around us? Will machines become so integrated with nature as to generate new species? Can we think of machines as our collaborators, as part of society, to help us remember what we have already lost?
Forest is a new media art project offering a blend of techniques and materialities, a combination of visual arts, physical computing and robotics. The focus is placed on experimentation and material and artisanal processes using DIY kits, hardware and free software, as well as organic and inert material found on the UA campus. The aim is to ask questions in an ever-changing context, in the face of an uncertain future. Artistic practice is understood as a space brimming with life, based on trial and error rather than on instructions and repetition.
Forest is an artistic and critical gesture, a hybrid imaginary of small movements, of fragments and remains. We are taken a few years into the future, when we will maybe look back longingly on the things we have lost.
Nostarte anticipado
Lorena Lorca
In this project, artistic practice provides a tool to study the processes that take place before a loss. The feeling that we have lost someone, or that we have wasted our time, usually leads to some sort of anticipated nostalgia, which is hard to decipher. Due to the passage of time and our fast-paced lifestyle, we become blind to the ephemeral nature of life.
The artist encourages viewers to take their time and perceive the natural rhythms of longing, nostalgia and loss. The result should be a dialogue between loss and presence, between someone’s existence and the fact that sooner or later they will leave us. The use of photography is noteworthy: the artist has taken and edited pictures of people who trigger that reaction of anticipated nostalgia.
