Art of the Insect Collection

As part of the recent exhibition "In Collaboration with Earth" at the Glass Box Gallery (UC Santa Barbara),  I presented a series of museum specimens with related artifacts. The first drawer of insects is all regional bees to Santa Barbara, California. The second drawer focuses on the Western Monarch. Discussion and Microtheater about the insect boxes were performed live during the exhibition and can be revisited on Facebook. In short, the insects are the stars!

Audiosphere Exhibition at Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía

Image of Audiosphere. Sound Experimentation 1980-2020

Audiosphere

organized and exhibited at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, curated by Francisco López 

Sound Experimentation 1980-2020

Although the opening is delayed, I am very excited to be invited to participate in an exhibition at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía curated by Francisco López. The exhibition includes works by 810 artists from 80 countries of the six continents and is focused on "highlighting the need and relevance of a social history –not again a mere chronology– of experimental audio."

Audiosphere. By way of a selection of hundreds of sound works, Audiosphere. Sound Experimentation 1980-2020 looks to cover an historical and cultural void in terms of the recognition, exhibition and analysis of a key part of the recent changes that have taken place in the artistic conception of sound.

By way of a selection of hundreds of sound works, Audiosphere. Sound Experimentation 1980-2020 looks to cover an historical and cultural void in terms of the recognition, exhibition and analysis of a key part of the recent changes that have taken place in the artistic conception of sound creation.

Conceived from a social perspective, and with the aim of revealing and providing context to reflect upon and discuss the techno-cultural changes that have occurred since the 1980s, the exhibition will present the work of a broad number of experimental sound artists, hailing from all over the world, the majority unknown to the contemporary art spectator. 

The show will revolve around seven sections, each one addressing different social, technological, historical and cultural processes: genealogies, networks, mega accessibility, cyborgisation, aesthetogenesis, recombination and rights. Although such processes have been generated collectively and today are widespread, they have not been sufficiently identified, acknowledged or analysed artistically. 

Audiosphere thus seeks to constitute a non-conceptual, large-scale contemporary art exhibition with no images or objects, underpinned solely by sound works and an exhibition design that facilitates experiential, profound and prolonged listening.

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With the sponsorship of:

Maladresses ou la Figure de l’Idiot

An exhibition of Snowflake will take place this month at the Institute of Social Hypocrisy in Paris

with Mathis Collins, Michele di Menna, Petrit Halilaj, Justin Meerkel, Irene Moon, Annette Ruenzler.

Video soundtrack by Darker Florida (Irene Moon and Christopher Cprek)

Some thoughts about the idiot from curator Fanny Gonella:

The word idiot defines a category of people and, consequently, is part of a normative system, which sorts out individuals according to their mental condition. It seems some categories have a hard time finding their place in society, and the idiot, because of his supposedly inappropriate behavior, is kept on the margins of this system.

Although this figure is hardly visible in daily life, it can be encountered easily in literature or films. The context of fiction allows for the complexity of the true idiot’s figure to unfold. He does things out of confusion rather than according to personal interests. This character, being partly dispossessed of himself, offers the possibility to reflect the „landscape“ around him. He functions as a vehicle for other people’s stories. The transparency of his actions, due to his absence of strategy, turns him into a catalyst on the people surrounding him. The idiot brings along a degree zero of intention.

His actions are generated by the position of the others, but he totally ignores their expectations, or what they would normally consider as suitable. Though he acts without following social rules, his behavior does not contain any provocative intention or judging attitude. His genuine thoughts, being expressed without any secondary objectives, offer a clear view on the most complex situations because he does not act according to the potential consequences of what he says or does.

Within our environment, which is overloaded with strategies, the idiot opens unseen perspectives and appears as an existential figure. He develops his own path according to personal beliefs and regardless of decency, which makes his actions incommensurable to everyday logic. His thoughts do not unfold according to prejudices or norms and in this sense, the true idiot sometimes appears as the hidden face of the genius. Reciprocally, knowledge seems to function as a scholarly repetition of norms from the past that have been taken for granted. The idiot’s ignorance suggests an odd form of beauty, without relation to classical harmony but rather to apparently insignificant things and clumsiness.