art exhibits curated by Iges in the Koldo Mitxelena of San Sebastián: “El Espacio del Sonido. El Tiempo de la Mirada” (Space of Sound. Time of the Look), and “Dimensión sonora” (Sound dimension) (exhibitions held, respectively, in 1999 and in 2007).
LII ARTe SONoro PRESENTATION
This publishing boost appears to be continuing - or even amplifying lately: in 2008 the Contemporary Art Museum of Vigo (MARCO) published Audio Hacklab, a volume derived from the project of the same name led by the Galician collective Escoitar.org, where reflections on the current state of practices related to sound and its hearing abound. Back in 2009 two significant - although to a certain extent, antithetical - publications reviewing the development of experimental poetry in Spanish appeared (both, once again, in catalogue format, and linked to important exhibitions): on one hand, Escrituras en Libertad. Poesía Experimental Española e Hispanoamericana del Siglo XX (Writings in Freedom. Experimental Spanish and Latin American Poetry of the XX Century), curated by José Antonio Sarmiento for the Instituto Cervantes, and, on the other, Escrito Está. Poesía Experimental en España (Written it is. Experimental poetry in Spain), curated by Fernando Millán for Artium (Vitoria) and the Patio Herreriano Museum (Valladolid). Let us note, at least as a sign that this encouraging trend is continuing to its consolidation, two projects that have
appeared in 2010: La mosca tras la oreja. De la música experimental al arte sonoro en España, an ambitious book (accompanied by four CDs) by Llorenç Barber and Montserrat Palacios, published by the Fundación Autor, and the catalogue for the exhibition Encuentros de Pamplona 1972: Fin de Fiesta del Arte Experimental (Encounters in Pamplona 1972: End of the Experimental Art Party), presented between October 2009 and February 2010 in the Reina Sofía Museum of Madrid. These last two publications, La mosca tras la oreja and the exhibit catalogue devoted to Encuentros de Pamplona 1972, could announce a new turn within the historic line that we are attempting to describe in these pages. Unlike the majority of the aforementioned texts, the relationship of both volumes with clearly musical matters is direct: both the subheading of La Mosca tras la Oreja (“De la Música Experimental al Arte Sonoro en España”) as well as the profile of the authors (both are musicians) bear witness to this, in the first place. Regarding Encuentros de Pamplona, it is worth noting that one of the primary event promoters was Luis de Pablo, whose biographical and aesthetic career may well be on the same level, in many regards, with those of Ramón Barce and Tomás Marco - just as they were introduced in the opening paragraphs of this text -.