Publications

This February, 2019, Vanina Hofman publishes Prácticas divergentes de preservación del arte de los medios. Recordar y olvidar en la cultura digital (Editorial Prometeo, Buenos Aires), INVESTIGA CULTURA Award from the Ministry of Culture of the Argentine Republic.

ABSTRACT

In the framework of the debates about memory and materiality in the digital age, this research asks about the possible futures of media art, introducing the ‘ecology of practices’ as a thinking tool through which to recognize and explain a ground of divergences and pluralities. This book suggests an opening in conceptions about the ‘preservation of art’, anchoring them in concrete practices of maintenance, restoration, archiving, transformation and creation. Some of these practices – together with their positions and values ​​- are more easily recognized, others less; however, it is the coexistence in diversity and dispersion that enables the legacy of our cultural productions. This work highlights the multiplicity of knowledge, the soft lines of the forgotten and the forgotten, the tactics of resistance against disappearance, and thinks about permanence, memory and forgetting, from a process perspective and in the present tense.

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Ana Rodríguez-Granell participates with the paper “Modernismo Vernacular y Reflexividad ante Hollywood. Una revisión historiográfica sobre el cine de los años treinta” in L’Atalante. Revista de estudios cinematográficos, sección Puntos de Fuga, nº 27 (english version / versión en castellano)

For some decades the approaches of the New Film History have been concerned with redefining the history of cinema in a non-teleological way. In this way, they have destabilized categories of consecration of certain stylistic models such as the idea of modernity or classicism. In this article we are going to propose a revision of some cinematographies and peripheral films to Hollywood or to the framework of classicism – The great dildo (Velikiy uteshitel, Lev Kulechov, 1933); Pie in the Sky (NYKino, 1935) and The Crime of Mr. Lange (Le crime de M. Lange, Jean Renoir, 1936) – to see how, from practices close to the avant-garde, there are processes of assimilation of certain classical icons to the pair that, precisely for that appropriation, we attend to self-reflexive proposals. These practices of de-location of the classic in some films outside and even within Hollywood during the thirties propose historiographic and conceptual reconsiderations around notions such as modernity that we will explore here.

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Ana-Rodríguez-Granell participates with the paper “Infraestructuras para la Revolución: tensiones entre arte, materialismo y tradición en la nueva política económica de la Unión Soviética” in the book Subversiones artísticas en regímenes totalitarios, a volume that presents an approach from different cultural, political and social contexts to the critical response articulated by different artists who work in neoliberal, dictatorial or socialist disciplinary systems.

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Pau Waelder publishes “Lo familiar siniestro. Tecnologías de vigilancia para una intimidad compartida”, at: Pedro Vicente and José Gómez-Isla (eds.), Álbum de familia y prácticas artísticas. Relecturas sobre autobiografía, intimidad y archivo. Osca: Diputación de Huesca – Universidad Internacional Menéndez Pelayo (UIMP), 2018, p.99-110.

This publication is the continuation of the book Album de familia. (Re) presentation, (re) creation and (in) materiality of the family photographs coedited in 2013 by La Oficina Ediciones and the Diputación de Huesca. Both publications are born from seminars organized by ViSiONA and UIMP between 2012 and 2016 within a theoretical framework in which the importance of family photography as a source of inspiration and reference for artistic and interdisciplinary research has been studied.

The texts included in this book are based on research on contemporary artistic creations that go beyond the formal and conceptual limits of the family album and that, from a critical and poetic point of view, subvert their dominant narratives to build new stories. In the same way, this publication analyzes the new social significance and current uses of the family album as the backbone of our identity -both individual and collective- and as a step from the private to the public.

Album of family and artistic practices. Re-readings on autobiography, intimacy and archiving are divided into three sections. The first deals with the theme of the album, biography and self-representation. In particular, it is analyzed how many of the stories constructed from the family album now become an aesthetic element that some contemporary creators have appropriated, both to represent themselves and to narrate their own version of the world.

In a second block the rereading of the album and the concept of intimacy in our current context is addressed due to the excess of public exposure to which we submit our domestic photographs and our private discourses. These essays reflect on the gradual dissolution of the differences between public and private. The intimacy, displayed without shame in personal photo albums through social networks, has now become pure extimacy.

A final block studies the inevitable parallelism between family album and archive. Erected both in memory repositories, their discursive logics propose construction methodologies that may differ from each other, but that also reflect the way in which we visualize both the social and the personal (as opposed mirrors), thus establishing concordances, connections and points of encounter between both logics.

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Ana Rodríguez-Granell participates in this book with the chapter “When Criticism Meets Gangster Films: The Spiv Cycle as Oppositional Aesthetics in Postwar Britain”

This paper focuses on an overlooked period of film history between the brilliant 1930s and the film modernism to come in the late 1950s, a time when critical and militant manifestations in British cinema were co-opted into the institutional narrative of quality film. Following World War II and the rise of Labour’s social democracy, realism became the bedrock of British national cinema as part of the country’s cultural rebuilding. In this context, and given the efforts invested in the war and the institutionalisation of realism exemplified by Millions Like Us (Sidney Gilliat & Frank Launder, 1943), what had been a period of political exaltation gave way to a dismembering of the avant-garde practices and the critical militant documentalism that had represented the working class. Faced with official cinematographic discourses that tried to temper the radical spirit of the pre-war years, calls came for narratives that expressed civil responsibility, civic sense, compassion and rectitude, or ‘hopeful and clear-eyed’ narratives. This paper seeks to examine how gangster and spiv films provide a subaltern representation of the British working class. It will analyse the political economy of post-war British gangster films, popular cinema and certain sectors of the industry as a forum for challenging institutional aesthetics. The influences from the 1930s, oppositional discourse and the sparks of modernity in gangster films such as Waterloo Road (Sidney Gilliat, 1944), They Made Me a Fugitive (Alberto Cavalcanti, 1947), and It Always Rains on Sunday (Robert Hamer, 1947) will be examined. This will be done to determine if this kind of film, which led to sub-genres of social criticism, may be deemed a vehicle for vernacular modernism.

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Pau Waelder publishes “The artwork is a digital file, yes” (Daata Editions).

I have been invited by David Gryn, director of Daata Editions, to write a text for the Foreword section on the platform. The text addresses the preconceptions related to collecting digital art and it particular the type of artworks sold by Daata, which are digital files that the buyer can download with a certificate of authenticity. Below is an excerpt:

When considering how to collect digital art, we come across two preconceptions: what an artwork must be and what digital files are worth. First, it is commonly assumed that an artwork is an object with unique attributes, original, and irreplaceable. The object routinely goes from the artist’s studio to the gallery, where it is acquired by a collector. There is no doubt that it is always the same object that trades hands, and it is finally the collector who decides where the artwork is placed and who has access to it. Conceptual and performance art has challenged this notion again and again, but the artwork always finds its way into the market and the collector’s home in the form of a more or less stable object. Thus, if an artwork (a) is not an object, (b) can be copied, (c) can be accessed or experienced beyond the control of its owner(s), and/or (c) requires a computer, software and display to be at all perceivable, some may find it “difficult,” “challenging,” or even not worth collecting. This relates to the second preconception.

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Aida Sánchez de Serdio, from Catalonia at the Jornadas nacionales de extensión from the Universidad de la República (Montevideo, Uruguay). She participates as an invited lecturer with the paper “Universidades entre el neoliberalismo y el servicio público: las artes y la cultura en la encrucijada”.

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