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INDEX Chema Alvargonzalez
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GlogauAIR
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Open Studios
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Resident Artists
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Álvaro Rodríguez Badel
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Anfal AlKandari
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Chae Won Moon
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Charity Be
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Cristina Santos Muniesa
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Franco Palioff
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Mette Sanggaard
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Mimi Youn
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Nao Usami
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Roxy Richens
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Sinéad Aldridge
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Vincent Laju
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Project Space
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Group Show "The intentionality that seeks..."
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Catalogue's Cover
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Chema Alvargonzalez Chema Alvargonzalez (Jerez de la Frontera, 1960 - Berlin, 2009) founded GlogauAIR in 2006. After studying Fine Arts at Escola Massana (Barcelona), he continued his studies at the HdK (Berlin) under the direction of Rebecca Horn obtaining a Master of Fine Arts and Multimedia. From that point on he worked and lived between Barcelona and Berlin. Alvargonzalez experienced the Fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the exciting period which followed. He became part of the Künstlerinitiative Tacheles where he introduced and welcomed incoming artists to Berlin and its new, flourishing art scene. His experiences over these years alongside his passion for collaboration and building artist networks led him to eventually found GlogauAIR. In 2006 Alvargonzalez starts the project of GlogauAIR in the same building that still hosts the residency today. GlogauAIR was created as a meeting point between artists from all disciplines where they could collaborate and expand their practice, explore and interact with the city of Berlin. Alvargonzalez is a representative of the generation of artists whose artistic work was highly influenced by globalisation and technology. As a consequence, Chema’s pieces, as well as GlogauAIR, were set as a breakthrough beyond geographical boundaries. After Alvargonzalez’s early death, his siblings Pablo and Columna took over Chema’s heritage, founding La Memoria Artistica Chema Alvargonzalez in order to preserve his artwork, also taking over the direction of GlogauAIR. Today GlogauAIR continues Chema’s mission to host and create with international artists from all disciplines. Memoria Artística Chema Alvargonzalez Copyright © All rights reserved Light Messages (2008) Es Baluard. Museu d’Art Modern i Contemporani de Palma Palma de Mallorca (Spain)
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GlogauAIR GlogauAIR is nowadays a non-profit art space and residency, located in a historic building in Kreuzberg. Founded in 2006 by the Spanish artist Chema Alvargonzalez, it is supported by La Memoria Artística Chema Alvargonzalez. The word GlogauAIR comes from the phonetic combination of GlogauerStrasse: the name of the street where it is located, and its purpose: an Artist in Residence program where artists can develop their own journey in the city of Berlin which is a pioneering metropolis for contemporary global culture. The Residency Program offers 13 studios to international artists from all artistic fields. During their stay they receive curatorial and technical support, as well as the possibility to take part in diverse activities such as workshops, exchanges and talks that aim to help them in their professional careers. Each artist develops an artistic work in one of the GlogauAIR studios in Berlin, which will then be showcased in our Open Studios event at the end of their stay. This past year GlogauAIR has faced many challenges, most of them originating from artists not being able to join the Residency due to COVID-19 pandemic. Far from allowing this to stop us, we have developed our On-line Residency Program which is now available for artists who cannot join us physically in Berlin. This program includes most elements of the On-site Residency Program, including our personal monitoring, activities and final Open Studios exhibition. GlogauAIR aims to continue the project originally created by Chema Alvargonzalez: an openness and receptivity to new ideas and the support of local and international contemporary art practices.
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Open Studios Every three months, at the end of the Residency Program, GlogauAIR opens its door to the public hosting an Open Studios exhibit. On-site resident artists in Berlin open up their studios and visitors are invited to approach the work the artists have been developing during their residency period. Furthermore, since establishing our on-line Residency Program, we also host a Virtual Open Studios which can be found on our website. These two complementary Open Studios allow our on-line and on-site artists to showcase their work together, and illustrate the results of their artistic dialogue from the term. Sharing the Open Studios event, the Project Space hosts an exhibition with an invited artist from Berlin - the Berlin Guest Resident - or in collaboration with Institutions -which can curate either a collective or an individual exhibition- or Curators, adding value to GlogauAIR’s project by providing artistic exchange and dialogue.
Architectural Details of GlogauAIR's Stairway
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Resident Artists The summer when limits were broken and lethargy was dusted off from our shoulders. The group of artists in residence during this Summer Term 2021 has been bold, passionate, open and enthusiastic during these past three months, looking for new challenges in their artistic practices, jumping from disciplines, experimenting and opening new paths of action. GlogauAIR, as an hybrid institution both based in Berlin and offering a virtual program, has been full of life, light and experiences. We appreciate the courage and the effort that the artists have put in both residency programs in which we, as an institution and as a team, are able to grow and defy ourselves too. We have been immersed in the creation of a new video game by Nao Usami in which an amorphous form is the main character in a scenario quite familiar for everyone now: an empty lonely space, domestic but aseptic without the ones that we love who are far, far away. Some could think of it as an analogy of the methodology of remote work we have been following for the last year, in which we have been connecting with artists from around the world allowing us to keep each other company, getting to know other art communities, also different approaches and experimentations. The Open Studios where limits were pushed and lethargy was blown away. Charity Be is a contextual intermedia artist currently working on the relationship between the body, time and space. From a deep rooted philosophical and nature-related perspective, her practice combines video, sound, textiles, performance and sculpture, resulting in installations appealing to our senses.
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How does one decide to move or choose a direction? Mette Sanggaard’s practice questions the interactions between humans, non-humans, objects and their surroundings. Through her pieces she challenges everyday actions and shifts the focus to what usually goes unnoticed, allowing new paths and changing the direction of our attention. Both Be and Sanggaard have also been working together on Everything in Life is Vibration (Albert Einstein), a participatory performance in which both artists reflect on magnetic fields and the vibrational effects on and between the bodies. Introducing a new view on images, Cristina Santos Muniesa experiments with painting and the role of images in our current society. Dissolved images and unintelligible screens are some of the mediums she uses to present the visual acceleration culture we live in and the loss of meaning that comes with it. ChaeWon Moon shares through her images a chaotic world: confused situations or anarchic sequences. Her work in fluor colors painting, embroideries and mixed media installations talks with irony and humour about the nowadays public space, full of rules and restrictions. The powerful colors are also present in Anfal AlKandari eclectic artworks, from her drawing, paintings and digital impressions to the interactive installations that mixed images, light and a pinch of popular references and languages. Her work is a complex layered work of emotions, memories and experiences from her surroundings covered with optimism, emojis and symbols that make her work recognisable and cheerful. The new projects in which limits were disrupted and lethargy was scattered. The most recent project by Sinéad Aldridge has been developed from a personal and emotional experience that she is sharing through a formal research connected with art history and philosophical references alongside with very gestual painting. The working process functions as a therapy to research and question aspects of the end of
life, the weight of the body and ancient traditions around death. Like a hunt to the past, hidden memories and anonymous stories Mimi Youn recovers and collects images to set up visual narratives. She regards photographs as a link between the outside world and human being's inner desires. Vincent Laju’s pieces are born from an experimental soil. Using mediums such as the shakuhachi, cello and drawings he creates electroacoustic compositions. During the past 3 months Laju has been focusing on the notion of uselessness and the lack of purpose, proposing an experimental sound experience to which every person can relate to differently. Franco Palioff's works faces the viewer with social constructions and norms he abruptly criticizes and makes us reflect upon. Introducing artificial knowledge and computery machines to his pieces, Palioff’s latest piece literally puts himself under the yoke of gender and neoliberalism stereotypes. Álvaro Rodríguez Badel is not content just with the sight of nature, he is determined to use technology to reshape and reconfigure the way we look at ecosystems, interconnections and organic forms. He uses 3D scan to translate complex natural environments to virtual spaces and images. Roxy Richens brings the exterior space to talk about displacement, romantics imaginaries and dreaming about new scenarios. Frames and the frozen images of mythical films like Solaris by Andrei Tarkovsky or the soviet Planeta Bur by Pavel Klushantsev are superposed and layered in big format, detailed and charcoal drawings. A new group of resident artists whose limits were challenged and lethargy was dissipated once again.
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Resident Artists
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Álvaro Rodríguez Badel
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Colombia Anfal AlKandari
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Kuwait, Qatar Chae Won Moon
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South Korea Charity Be
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United States Cristina Santos Muniesa
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Spain Franco Palioff
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Argentina Mette Sanggaard
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Denmark Mimi Youn
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South Korea Nao Usami
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Japan Roxy Richens
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Australia Sinéad Aldridge
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Ireland Vincent Laju France
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Álvaro Rodríguez Badel Colombia @rodriguez.badel
Rodríguez Badel is a media artist from Bogotá – Colombia, a country he has been discovering and has influenced his work due to its biodiversity and magic. He creates all his works underlined by the idea of representing nature through digital mediums and exploring how logical or computing processes understand the world around us. How does technology perceive or represent nature? Having a mostly self-taught understanding of computer graphics and 3d scanning, Rodríguez Badel ends up exploring new ways of representing the world and perceiving nature through the eyes of technology. Right now he is working on a project that proposes a look at the Amazon forest through a series of 3D scans made with photogrammetry. The data from the scans is processed to generate a series of twodimensional prints, pen plotter drawings and video works that focus on three key actors in the forest; trees that sustain life, flowers that are key for reproduction and fungi that connect every living being in the ecosystem. He goes on with this complex way of representing the forest motivated by the idea of using technology and making art through it to help us understand nature and respect it.
The forest as seen from the river #1 (2021) Photogrammetry printed in Giclée 42x59 cm
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Anfal AlKandari Kuwait, Qatar www.anfalalkandari.com
Anfal AlKandari is a Kuwaiti/Qatari hybrid visual artist based in Qatar. Her primary interest is digital illustration, installations and mixed media. During her MA Visual Arts degree from the University of the Arts London (UAL), she took her art practice a step further through learning how to transfer her personal experience to the audience. Recently she is looking into themes such as the inner child, dark and light shadow within the human self and parallel universes. Through each project she tries to make these experiences inclusive and interactive to spark curiosity to the audience and invite them to self-reflect. For her GlogauAIR project she wants to continue exploring personal human behavior and emotions and how those come to the surface within herself. The colors and mediums used in her work, a mixture of multiple digital elements such as manipulating photographs, digital illustration, animation and video, juxtapose with the complexity of the topics. Although the concept of her upcoming project will serve as a continuation to her previous work, she plans to widen the range of used materials and techniques and explore printing on unconventional mediums, enrich her work with new elements and include sound as a new area of investigation.
If not now then tomorrow (2021) Acrylic on canvas 60x50 cm
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Chae Won Moon South Korea www.chaewonmoon.com
ChaeWon Moon is a visual artist currently living and working in Seoul. With collected images and sentences from various manuals and guides, she creates pseudo information systems that allude to the fluctuating and unpredictable nature of daily life. Moon focuses on disassembling the logic that is designed to show singular completion, like manuals or guidebooks. Instead of helpful knowledge, her non-functioning manuals lead viewers to enigmatic suggestions about various situations. Driven by the experience of incomplete translation between languages and doubts about the myth of stableness, she’s been continuing her practice featuring playful and fragmented structures. Jokes, puns, or sarcasm are the main tone, which is opposed to giving serious advice or fixing problems. She disassembles goal-oriented systems, which she thinks of as a failsafe of unpredictable outcomes. With digital collages as the base she embodies the image to the form of painting, printmaking, engraved plexiglass or even embroidery. As the work itself is open to the mundane materials, it also absorbs the environment she is in. Such as cross stitch series, which reflects the days of shelter at home during pandemic. Her project for the GlogauAIR residency presents her internal shifts associated with safety and preventing the danger. With dry but teasing images, her work alludes to what we thought as normal and stable, like breathing, and detours or nonsense we experience more often.
Untitled (Wrong way) (2020) Embroidery on fabric 22.86x22.94 cm
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Charity Be United States www.charitybe.media
Contextual intermedia artist Charity Be constructs unnatural environments and temporal-spatial situations in her art. She is currently interested in how and why we move our bodies individually and collectively through time and space. How do we connect, how do we encounter, what are our intentions and rhythms? Drawing heavily from philosophical texts and the cycles of nature, Be often builds sensory-rich environments with video, sound, textiles, performance and sculpture that heighten or disorient our senses, in order to manifest the invisible and experience the conceptual through our bodies. While in residency, Charity Be has created a short collection of videos and is developing a larger installation to be presented later in the fall. This work focuses on our collective body-space, as shaped by biological and digital realms. Be is also currently collaborating with fellow resident, Mette Sanggaard on a participatory performance. The duo met here in Berlin for the first time in July 2021. Having discovered many symbiotic elements in their practices and inspired by magnetic fields and the vibrational effects on and between bodies, they have created the piece Everything in Life is Vibration (Albert Einstein). Charity Be holds a BFA in Intermedia Art from Mills College in Oakland, California and has worked and exhibited internationally. Originally from the United States, Charity is relocating to Berlin. Do you know of an available apartment? Untitled (Zukunft N. 1) (2021)
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Cristina Santos Muniesa Spain www.cristinasantos.es | @cristinasantosmuniesa
Cristina Santos Muniesa is a Spanish visual artist currently based in Berlin. She obtained her MFA in Valencia UPV and broadened her artistic practice and education in Mexico City UNAM. In her work she analyses our daily life relationship with image production and reception within the Internet, smartphones and social networks. Her artistic practice may use photography and video, but it is deeply rooted in painting. The image is fast, easy to produce, easy to swallow, an excess that becomes emptiness. Spectators, before the horror of boredom, can’t hold themselves back. They are caught in a continuous present of visual excitement where, once exhausted, language becomes thinner, loses meaning and tends towards abstraction. Through her pieces, Santos Muniesa reflects on how the level of involvement and awareness of users affects the distance we maintain with the reality and meaning of images, without losing sign of the capitalist interests benefiting from people's mind's limitation and transformation of our impulses into bad habits. Her practice compares visual accelerated time with pictorial production, focusing on the events affecting interpretation and access to information, under an aesthetic of the residual, of everything that can't be retained. When the distance between reality and its representation increases, when reason and vision are insufficient, where can we find shape, skin, contact? A painting was here (2021) Video frame crop
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Franco Palioff Argentina www.francopalioff.com
Palioff is a multidisciplinary artist originally from Argentina whose practice is focused on painting, 3D videos, and robotic objects and installations. They all converge in intense, obscure figures, like savage sexual forces of nature navigating an existentialist world full of pain, joy, lust, pleasure and injustice.His objects and installations use sarcasm and irony to critique existentialist post-modern society, experienced through human interaction with machine programmed behaviour. At GlogauAIR, Palioff has developed the performance "HERESYATOR-2000", a presentation of a fictional product for public spaces. It consists of a 3D video advertisement and a demonstration of the built product, this last one being a machine which scans the user’s face in real time and uses machine learning tools to determine their percentage of happiness and gender. The machine tortures the user at a rate proportional to the percentage of the complementary gender and to the lack of happiness. The absurd parallel created simultaneously critiques how commercial software uses deep learning tools to define gender into binary classifications while also returning torture to its origins as a public spectacle, giving people the power to protest the validity of the punishment. It all criticises a standardized archetype of superficial success promoted by social media and neoliberalism. Now instead of having the obscure path to experience it, you can buy the "HERESYATOR-2000" and have the raw experience of understanding yourself in a visceral way. Heresyator-2000 (2021) 3D representation of the performance
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Mette Sanggaard Denmark www.mettesanggaard.dk
Mette Sanggaard is a visual artist and designer working with spatial and sentient topics. Her work explores the interaction between humans and objects in relation to their surroundings and architecture. Through performance and staged scenarios she researches how different landscapes and encounters affect or interrupt the action of the body. How does one decide to act, move and choose direction and which transferences will arise? With a background in graphic design Mette works with repetitious motion, systems and graphic scores. She creates playful layouts that invite audience and passers to interact and participate by using physical props, tactile materials and sound. A focus through Mette’s work is an interest in memory and movement and how this is layered information in our bodies. She works with constructing separate universes that occupy their own time and space and aims to challenge our everyday routines by creating a space for new paths and traces to happen. At GlogauAIR Mette is more specifically working with pre-recorded material confronted with live movement. During Open Studios September 2021 she invites the audience to interact with her work and participate in her research on how we as humans/others/nonhumans are affected by coincidences and interruptions in the way we communicate and act in the world.
Fractal garden (2021) Digital collage
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Mimi Youn South Korea www.mememimi.com
Mimi Youn is a visual artist working and living in Seoul. She is interested in time, space and how memory and lives are reflected in photographs. In her practice she collects various images, including abandoned and archival pictures, which she uses as the basis of her work. She creates her own narrative by disassembling and recombining the traces of the past in those collected photographs. During her residency at Glogauair, Mimi has compiled old images: portraits, holiday snapshots and family photos in Flea markets. Once, these photographs were cherished by people, but now they are abandoned. To Mimi, this evokes astonishment, ambiguity and stirs up psychological emotions such as nostalgia, sadness and pain. She regards photographs as a link between the outside world and human being's inner desires. She tries to bring back and meditate about lost time, memory and past lives using photographs. Apart from the images collected in Berlin, for this project she is also using her own family photos and photographs she has taken. Her goal is to create a flow based on her imagination in which she wanders without knowing the final destination. She connects old and new images like she plays puzzles, and invites the viewer into the times and memories she has created.
Over to you (2021) Photography Dimensions variable
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Nao Usami Japan www.naousami.com
Nao Usami is an artist currently focused on game development using 3DCG technology. In her practice she seeks to break free from all types of social categorization, such as gender, race, and class, and to do so she pursues the creation of a positive parallel world: Usami uses games as a medium to create a world where the player proceeds and makes their own choices among multiple options. She vouches for games because of their ability to experience situations with other people and objects. She uses 3DCG technology to present physical characteristics as something that is able to be altered. By expanding the limits of the human body or making it fuse with non-human objects like plants, animals, or machines, she explores how we can remove ourselves from existing value systems and defy physical limits to choose our own bodies. In the residency at GlogauAIR, Nao Usami decided to participate in the online program due to the difficult situation of COVID-19. Today there are many others besides her whose mobility is restricted and who cannot see their families and loved ones in other countries, even if they wanted to. These situations have been the driving force behind her game ‘In front of me’, which is based on her current discomfort and the stories of her friends who are not able to return to their homeland.
Ambiguous Lucy (2021) Video game Supported by Arts Council Tokyo (Tokyo Metropolitan Foundation for History and Culture)
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Roxy Richens Australia @glamrrrox
Roxy Richens is an Australian visual artist now living in Berlin. She completed a Bachelor of Visual Arts from Monash University, Melbourne in 2009 and a Graduate Diploma in Museum Studies from Deakin University, Melbourne in 2012. Her practice is primarily focused on drawing but also branches into performance-based video, costume and visual styling. Her multidisciplinary practice is unified by theatricality, mise en scène, sexual innuendo, film history and pop culture references to illustrate themes of delusion, death, celebrity and idol worship. At GlogauAIR, Roxy explored scientific proposals to colonise the atmosphere of Venus for human habitation. In particular, she aimed to blur the polarities of the pre-exploration, sci-fi romanticism that saw Venus as a tropical paradise and the current scientific knowledge of the hellish reality of Venus that is mostly incongruent with human existence. This concept was articulated in charcoal drawings that take visual reference from multiple relevant film stills overlapped and merged so that each is simultaneously visible and obscured. The hints of recognisable imagery buried in the drawings mimic the perpetual cycle of glimpses of hope and dashed illusions in the search for even the most miniscule signs that another planet is like our own.
Untitled (seaweed deception) (2021) Charcoal on paper 56x76 cm
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Sinéad Aldridge Ireland sineadaldridge.eu
“It is immediately evident that Aldridge’s work is very much several things at once: It is musical and arithmetic, spontaneous and reflected, emotional and intellectual, intimate yet richly layered. Using a gamut of brush marks to dissolve these dichotomies, Aldridge combines colors and choreographed movement into controlled compositions that at once signal spontaneity and instruction. In short: the work emerges as both a thinking through the viscosity of the material and materialized thought.” Jonatan Habib Engqvist Curator
Sinéad Aldridge is a painter based in Berlin and Co. Sligo Ireland, her work draws upon paintings extensive historical pool and conspires to expand, subvert and create new visual interpretations, presenting the viewer with a rich experiential encounter. The performative nature of mark-making, where touch and the handmade link like a shadow, become inevitably tied to human presence. During her residency at GlougauAir, Aldridge’s research focused on work that depicts mourning, death, and the representation of women usually found in scenes from The Passion. As a starting point, she selected specific artefacts and paintings from the collection at the Bode Museum and the Gemäldegalerie Berlin. Her interest in the repetition of gesture and expression and the folds of the drapery found in painting and sculpture of the late Gothic period allowed Aldridge to test elements for presentation, which promotes a new interpretation of her painting practice. Drift 1 (2021) Oil on linen 70x50 cm
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Vincent Laju France www.vincentlaju.com
Vincent Laju is an artist from France. He has a background as a cellist in contemporary music, he has worked in different Nationals Centers for Music Creation like Groupe De Musique Expérimentale De Marseille GMEM, MIMI Festival 2016 or Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilizations MUCEM. He plays with Grand8, a large improvised music ensemble created in Marseille in 2016. He works with mediums such as electroacoustic, shakuhachi, cello and drawing for composition and improvisation. The full and the empty, accumulation and void are themes that he develops in his residence in relation to its context: Berlin, city with empty spaces due to the war, GlogauAIR building and its resonance. The approach of emptiness can be philosophical, spiritual, or poetic, as for example in the Japanese music of Shakuhashi where silence is the central element. From interviews and field recordings, he works with words and other sounds that act as the raw material of his pieces. He later on slightly modifies these sounds with electronics and mixes them with the sounds of acoustic instruments such as the Shakuhachi, studying the relationship between electronic and acoustic sounds. In his process he works on the notion of uselessness, lack of purpose and experimentation, proposing a sound experience whose perception depends on the sensitivity of each person. Wörter (2021) Pen on paper 24x21 cm
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Project Space
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Group exhibition "The intentionality that seeks..." in collaboration with LOOP Barcelona
Chema Alvargonzalez Estefanía Peñafiel Loaiza Bettina Hoffmann Édouard Decam Mona Vatamanu & Florin Tudor
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Chema Alvargonzalez La intencionalidad (2005) Photography 180x120 cm
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© Chema Alvargonzalez 2021 All rights reserved to Memoria Artística Chema Alvargonzalez
The intentionality that seeks... Group exhibition in collaboration with LOOP Barcelona Curated by Laura Olea López and Maria G. Latorre
The group exhibition “The intentionality that seeks...” is an international selection of moving image artworks that bring a new vision on the visual poem by the Spanish artist and founder of GlogauAIR Chema Alvargonzalez. The piece "About Navigation" (2005) is one of the artworks that Chema Alvargonzalez left us with after he passed away in 2009. This visual poem can be read as a word puzzle that provides infinite possibilities thanks to its multiple word-combinations. The unlimited chances cause a drift, multiple encounters and places to intentionally let thoughts flow. The videoworks gathered in this group exhibition connect with the words scattered through the visual poem by Alvargonzalez. Together, the moving images and evocative concepts they represent, suggest different ways of navigating the blurred reality we live in. When reality is shown through a representation, sometimes an encrypted map, the only track that we can follow is the whimsical compass. We could call it the intentionality: is it maybe gut? Human instincts? Social costum? Subconscious drives? Yes, choices -many times random- establish unexpected experiences. The unforeseen journey generates a unique situated knowledge, producing one’s own perspective. Making reality a phenomenon in eternal construction. Leaving just the intentionality as the guide in this game board (how Alvargonzalez presents these concepts on the artwork) we can play around looking, imagining, leaning out, evoking the ambiguity of poetry. This exhibition is a collaboration with institution, fair and festival, focused on of video art creation and artists. The intentionality that seeks...” are part VIDEOCLOOP.
LOOP, a Barcelona based the support and promotion artworks selected in “The of LOOP’s online archive
… the outside with the inside In this poem-image, Alvangonzalez allows the viewer to connect "the outside with the inside" welcoming absolute wander. From the literature of the intimate journal, the intentionality is also to browse, constantly travelling between limits and intrigued by the outside. A willingness to let oneself be fascinated by what surrounds us, to allow being affected.
Estefanía Peñafiel Loaiza “cartographies 1. la crise de la dimension” 2010 vidéo HD (18 min 40)
Pañafiel Loaiza questions in this piece the delimitation of territories and separations, which also includes the tangents of the self as a subject and the mental journey that this awakens. The act of writing is therefore represented in a manual dance that imprints identity, making language a space for projection, personal re-reading, recalling past experience. Some of the stories that appear in the text will reveal an extract of the text of the book "Ecuador" by Henri Michaux from 1929.
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… a mirror that reflects The mirror appears at first as a literal reflective object in which a greater awareness of our individuality emerges. Reducing one's selfimage to the reflection in the mirror runs the risk of confronting selfawareness. A captured scene can’t tell the whole story, and those gaps in the sequence tend to be filled by imagination, memories, prejudices. If time suddenly stopped there, a tension will produce suspense, anguish and expectation of the unforeseen. Beyond selfobservation, we must be aware of the unity of all living things, elements and conditioning factors in a determined time and space.
Bettina Hoffmann “La Ronde” 2004 Single channel (6 min)
A staged and frozen encounter that Hoffmann offers to us for the pleasure of analyzing and scanning the distance, the elements of everyday life and its relationships. A moment is suspended in time, allowing us to speculate about what happened and what is coming next. Confusion is very much present in the action of stopping time, but so is attraction: The uncertainty sucks us in within the hypnotic circular movement of the artwork .
… the outermost Squinting the eyes is the intention of seeking a glance at the horizon; an almost imperceptible gesture that denotes a massive craving. At some point, squinting eyes looking at the sky wasn't enough. It was needed to look further than the human eyes could, further our capacity. The exploratory aim has generated huge technological and optical advances. The machines as posthuman beings that fulfill our desires for capture even bigger landscapes, larger images of the places we are at the same time that we imagine where we are not.
Édouard Decam “Volva” 2016 Video, 16 mm film (24 h 16 min)
A resounding machine in a quiet panorama is the essay of this 16mm film. The allegoric challenge of imagining look, study, discover and categorize the inscrutable outer space. This video delights in the mechanicals engine from science developments and architectural structures in the middle of the Pyrenees mountains, showing a science fiction landscape (Volva is the name that the German mathematician, astronomer and astrologer Johannes Kepler gave to the Earth seen from space in his book 'Somnium', considered the first work of science fiction).
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… and the most profound Intentionality seeks to influence reality, its goal is not only a contemplative one. The desire to make your mark as we pass by, to make ourselves present. Let us delve into the structures in which not only our gaze, but also our body, lies. Because if the living breath can no longer perform, we will find another way to raise our voice, to communicate, to make an impact hoping someone will receive it from the other end. Let’s release our intentions through poetics.
Mona Vatamanu & Florin Tudor “Manifestul” 2005 Film, Vienna (1'32")
An act of resistance and yet a gesture left to chance, the entropy of the wind and the airflow. The poetic action of crying out loud to the sky. The materiality of Super 8 film gives a feeling of blurred memory or surrealistic experience. Leaning out on the edge of a concrete utopia, Mona Vatamanu & Florin Tudor throw away many dreams.
For this exhibition, four possible sentences or paths were formulated, but many more could be wondered. Chema Alvargonzalez's visual poem invites to reformulate realities from one's own game board. In the progress of touring these and more series of not-too-random concepts, some unintentional ways will be discovered.
Catalogue's Cover Every three months GlogauAIR releases a new catalogue collecting the work and projects of the artists in residence. The catalogue in your hands not only showcases this term’s creations but becomes an archive of the collaborations and experiences of welcoming artists from around the world to our building and the city of Berlin. Our first catalogue edition was released in 2006, and it has changed a lot since then. Starting this year 2021 we are giving our resident artists the opportunity to present their work in the cover of the catalogue through an Open Call. Making this publication a canvas in which our artists in residence can intervene results in a more personal publication for every residency term. Participating in the cover of the catalogue also allows the artists to translate their work into a different medium. After carefully reviewing the proposals for this term, the jury formed by every team member of GlogauAIR selected the image submitted by Nao Usami, current on-line resident artist from Japan. Usami’s main practice uses video games as the medium to understand reality and suggest alternatives to it. The cover image belongs to her latest work “In front of me”, in which Usami designs an empty room, almost aseptic, inhabited only by a gelatinous, shapeless, pink amoeba-like character. Far from the clean aesthetic the design presents, the concept behind the graphics shakes up the stomach: the goal of the game is for the player to escape the room which symbolises the spaces millions of people had, and still do, quarantined in for the past years while apart from their beloved ones. Usami’s game reflects on our current reality without much pretension, and that’s the key to it being so fitting: from a non-optional situation, Nao comes up with a multi-choice proposal, just like from a lonely and isolated forced condition her game provides entertainment and a new perspective to a too-well-known experience.
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Nao Usami© In front of me (2021)
Memoria Artística Chema Alvargonzalez Founders Honorary President Studio Assistant
Columna Alvargonzález Ramos Pablo Alvargonzález Ramos Mª Pilar Ramos Angueira Mariona Benaiges Pecanins
+34 (93) 415 12 93 C/Martínez de la Rosa, 48 Bajos Barcelona 08012, Spain www.chemaalvargonzalez.com
GlogauAIR gGmbH Founders
Director Program Coordinator Program Curator Curator Graphic, Media & Communication Technical Support Internship Program
Chema Alvargonzalez Pablo Alvargonzález Columna Alvargonzález Mariona Benaiges Pecanins Laura Olea López Maria G. Latorre Beatrice Lezzi Sergei Kurek Eleonora Barbato Kate Channer Martin Duthey Lauryn McNamee
+ 49 (0) 30 61 222 75 Glogauer Str. 16 10999 Berlin, Germany www.glogauair.net
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