Panoràmic KBr Fundación MAPFRE
Variations on “El Quart Paisatge”
Lecture series led by Joan Fontcuberta
The landscape is the expression of the place and the place is the inhabited space, the space made culture, the space of when consciousness has been appropriated. The first landscape presents itself to us as possessed and traversed, exploited by economy and consumption. The second landscape is the idealized and exotic, identified as “natural” and reduced to parks and reserves of an immaculate nature that is opposed to our civilized habitat. The third landscape is the one that is no longer profitable: it is an undefined territory, lacking in symbolic capacity, a mere space of fleeting realities, a wasteland. The fourth landscape would then be the landscape that has been supplanted (spaces devastated by human action or catastrophes), artificialized, recreated (theme parks, dioramas) or iconized to the point of being dissolved as reality (tourist postcards, video games) , virtual environments).
These categories articulate the program of the sixth edition of the Panoràmic festival, to the content of which this cycle of conferences aims to contribute the notion of landscape as an image act in which, on top of descriptive parameters (geographical or topographical), historical devices intervene , political, cultural and aesthetic.
Emanuele Coccia , writer and philosopher, focuses his thinking around the theory of the image, the nature of what is alive and the critique of anthropocentric hegemony. In this case, he recovers the artifice that operates in the world of fashion to illustrate the methodologies of transforming nature into spectacle.
Three creators will also have the opportunity to contribute their perspective. The documentary photographer Mayra Martell , known for her testimony of the human and physical landscape of the fierce Mexican drug trade, will talk about the marks that violence prints on the backdrop of everyday life. Finally, the duo of artists Jojakim Cortis and Adrian Sonderegger will show that the landscape of every event is nothing but an effect of memory and illusion. His ingenious montages reconstruct a historical scene while deconstructing its documentary certainty. The conclusion, perhaps as a generic corollary of the cycle, is that the landscape cannot be a reflection but a construction.
Joan Fontcuberta (Barcelona, 1955) is an artist, essayist, teacher and exhibition curator specializing in photography.
Wednesday, November 2 at 7:00 p.m
Després de la “Nova Topografia”: Paisatges postfotogràfics
Joan Fontcuberta
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By Joan Fontcuberta
Face-to-face and online
We are facing an ecological crisis that threatens the very survival of our species on this planet. Given the context, how can artistic practices be linked to social and economic concerns in a way that seems urgent? How can we present a political ecology in the form of an image? This paper will address these questions through a comparison of the works of Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky and New Zealander Joyce Campbell, with a special emphasis on a series of daguerreotypes produced by Campbell in Antarctica in 2006.
Thursday, November 3 at 7:00 p.m
Fashion as a paradigm of the fourth landscape
Emanuele Coccia
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Presentation and moderation by Federica Matelli
Face-to-face and online
The fourth landscape has been defined as the form of what has been supplanted: recreated and devastated spaces, transformed into a pure image. The aim of this conference is to reflect on this type of landscape from the example of fashion. After all, fashion is the practice of changing the shape of natural realities (our bodies) until they are recreated and transformed into other images that go beyond the opposition between what is artificial and what is natural. What does it mean to think about the landscape, that is, about the form that living beings bestow on each other, from the perspective of fashion?
(Intervention in Italian with simultaneous translation into Spanish)
Emanuele Coccia (Fermo, Italy, 1976) is an associate professor at the School of Advanced Studies in Social Sciences (EHESS) in Paris. He is the author of La vida sensible (Marea, 2011), La vida de las plantas (Miño y Dávila, 2017), Metamorfosis (Siruela, 2021) and Filosofia della casa (Einaudi, 2021). His books have been translated into several languages. He has directed numerous animated videos, including Quercus (2019, with Formafantasma), Heaven in Matter (2021, with Faye Formisano) and Portal of Mysteries (2022, with Dotdotdot). In 2019 he collaborated in the exhibition entitled Nous les Arbres (We the trees), presented at the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain in Paris.
Friday, November 4 at 7:00 p.m
The act of longing. Project on disappearance of women and femicides in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico
Mayra Martell
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Presentation and moderation by Lurdes R. Basolí
Face-to-face and online
The conference is structured as a chronology based on visual documents generated during seventeen years in Ciudad Juárez (Mexico), one of the most violent borders in the world, known for the numerous cases of femicide that have occurred since the 1990s. To date, the author has documented 172 cases of missing women through the registration of their spaces and personal belongings. The research is proposed as a cartography of violence, an opposition between map and territory that here interpellates the connection between vestige and pain.
The project proposes a reconstruction of the identity of women and girls, in which the complaint becomes an act of resilience in the face of the terror that is experienced in this city, the reflection of a society out of date, whose crimes have not stopped happening .
Mayra Martell (Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, 1979) has developed her documentary work mainly in regions of Latin America, around the subject of enforced disappearance, femicides and human trafficking. In 2021 he won the Ankaria Photo prize from the Ankaria Foundation in Madrid. His book Ciudad Juárez was published by the German publisher Seltmann + Söhne (2013). He currently works in Sinaloa, Mexico, on the issue of drug trafficking.
Saturday 5 November at 12.00 pm
ICONS
Jojakim Cortis and Adrian Sonderegger
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Presentation and moderation by Marta Dahó
Face-to-face and online
“In the photographic series Icons we have recreated, in our studio, historical photography in the form of three-dimensional dioramas. The models are then photographed and the resulting images are virtually identical to the originals. The illusion, which seems to have no cracks, is immediately distorted when introducing the studio environment and the trace of the work process. Scenes that are themselves deeply etched in the collective memory (the fire in the twin towers, Buzz Aldrin’s first footprint on the Moon, or Robert Capa’s fallen militiaman) stand on tripods, soft boxes and tubes of glue.”
“Icons is a tribute to the history of photography, but also a reflection on how this medium works. In an age where alternative facts are used in too many places, our images encourage reflection on the fragility of truth in photography, the relationship between authenticity and construction, as well as the importance of context and perspective.”
(Intervention in English with simultaneous translation into Spanish)
Jojakim Cortis (Aachen, Germany, 1978) and Adrian Sonderegger (Bülach, Switzerland, 1980) began collaborating in 2006 at the University of the Arts in Zurich. His photographs have been shown in numerous exhibitions around the world, including at the MET in New York, the Museum Folkwang in Essen, Fotostiftung Schweiz, the Lianzhou Foto Festival in China and C/O Berlin. His book Double Take was published in 2018 in Great Britain (Thames & Hudson), Switzerland (Lars Müller Publisher) and Japan (Seigensha).