CHUS MARTINEZ

Generazione Critica: You are the curator of Der Tank, a place of experimentation that has an articulated program between commissioned projects and lectures and for this reason is a privileged observation point. In your opinion, how are the themes and areas of research of younger generation artists being addressed? Do you find common lines or central issues circumscribable to media and techniques?

 Chus Martinez: It is difficult to summarize and yet values like non binarism and conditions like fluidity do influence an artistic language that follows these principles in dealing with materials, and also with the role of the viewer. To create multiple layers of transitions between artistic languages, the materials and the space in which the works are presented seems fundamental to the young generation. We could speak of fluid-informalism, a force that makes no distinction between analog and digital matter, an energy that tries to address the question of nature and gender even if it is not there as a ”subject”. To make the values of care present is a fundamental trait and I cheer the younger generations for embracing it and bringing this again and again to life.

GC: The role of director of the Academy of Arts and Design in Basel confronts you with didactic planning and teaching. Where curatorial practice and the responsibility of training courses in the artistic field are finding a common ground? Are the practices and roles influencing each other?

 CM: To be honest, I continue being a curator. Public programing and programing have been always an essential task of me. In the Institute thinking and collectively reflecting on the formats that “closed”, those that allow guests and those that are public has been as well very important to define the profile of an Institute that wants to invite many others inside. The art teaching is conducted by artists. We talk and debate a lot in small and not that small groups about its challenges and premises. Then the materials that we conceived for the students, and all the ways we want to be there for those that already graduated, for those that never studied with us but want to be part of the symposiums or art talks or listen to our podcasts series … all these rings of interaction with a broader artistic community is key. Graduate exhibitions are conceived in the same way I conceive any other exhibition: rounds of discussions with the artists about what they plan, production problems and budgets, ways of interpreting and presenting the work… Every end of the summer these around forty new works produced over a year are presented to the public in Kunsthaus Baselland, our partner in this adventure. A co-curator is named every year to share the task with me: Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Ines Goldbach, Sofia Hernandez, Filipa Ramos, Nicola Dietrich, and Fernanda Brener this year. A text and a performance program is prepared for the audience. Every element that we share with the public is defined with the team, carefully produced and though through. The Art Institute aspires to be an important reference to many.

 GC: In your career as a curator, you have had the opportunity to collaborate in important and articulated exhibition events, I think, among others in dOCUMENTA (13) curated by Carolyn Christov Bakargiev and the Catalan pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015. What kind of approach and what are your key points inside your curatorial practice in dealing with such complex projects, both from the point of view of relationship with the artists and of space management?

 CM: Oh, in the last years the question of space and new commissions has taken another shape thanks to my involvement with the Ocean space in Venice, an initiative of TBA21 Academy with which I have been very involved from the beginning. My passion as a curator is to create new works with the artists. To reflect on the spaces these works are presented in a dynamic way. To be able to bring to life a perception of the works and the presence of the art in more traditional institution can not render. Large scale and uncommon spaces offer me this playground. But also group exhibitions like Feet of Clay, that I curated with Filipa Ramos in the Galeria Municipal de Porto last Spring 2021, experiments around and about joy and a material like clay. Collective exhibitions –large or small –offer a unique opportunity to reflect on how we connect to and through the works present. Also, the last years the project space at Museum Thyssen where I did a large commission with Claudia Comte has offer me another ground where to encounter a classic collection and its audience and create a program to opening that up to questions that are present in classic painting but formalized differently. Every context is a chance to invent. And I learn through all of them how to become better in communicating with the audience. My writing changed for the best thanks to the research required by these commissioned works, through the challenges of the different contexts. I became much more able to convey my motivation, my ideas, my own readings in better more direct, more plain ways. I am very thankful for this, and learning to tell and to share has become a fundamental drive in my practice.

GC: The pandemic years have forcibly changed the use and the production of art: by comparing your past experiences with the most recent ones, what are the most significant changes in the professional context you have faced? Has the pandemic emergency, which seems to be more endemic than exceptionality, has changed paradigms and practices?

CM: Not yet. It seems to have forced us to think in digital platforms and formats of distribution and yet nothing substantially has changed, in my opinion. However, the crisis of materials and the prices of energy may have a much more immediate negative impact. I have not read a line on how the energy bills are affecting budgets and also travelling works, international exhibitions etc. Indeed, I think we reflected far too little on specific, practical changes and repeated endlessly that changes would emerged, but which changes exactly do we have in mind? I think the identification of all the elements we want to change and the proposition of alternative solutions is still ahead of us. And this is an urgent matter, since other changes –as I was saying right at the beginning of my answer— are made in our way and affect in a disastrous manner what we can still do.

GC: In 2015 you curated an exhibition entitled “The Metabolic Age”. What is the Metabolic age for you and what development process does it follow, stop or accelerate?

CM: The Metabolic era is a time when many people around the world understand that the distinctions and ideas about differences defined in Modern times are not of use anymore. A time of transitionings, an era where more than one identity can happen at a time. An era when bodies connect with nature differently and establish a new commonality with life that was unprecedented. An era when technology also stops being an enhancer of human traits and an extension of the human power over nature and over life to adapt empathically to the function of care and protect life. An era where art does and acts in many ways that go beyond the “presentation”, the “exhibitions” and serves as a real ground to explore a new science, the ways intelligence activates freedom and democracy, again. An era when we can dream of a renewal of our trust in culture, in equality and diversity.

GC: You are on the curating board of Ocean Space in Venice, a place with a very specific mission ‘to catalyze literacy and the defense of the oceans through the arts’. How do you approach this curatorial challenge, which involves a theme of extreme environmental importance and the need to raise awareness? How can contemporary art itself be a means of dissemination, in the practice of an artist?

CM: I have been fantasizing with the idea of conceiving the Ocean as a public space and an art space. By this I mean to take seriously the possibility of not only “patronizing” the Ocean with our care but giving it full agency. Taking the possibility of becoming with the Ocean and therefore imagining a co-creation force between science, artists and the Ocean. This has been my main goal in defining the program in the Ocean Space. Setting in motion a sentiment that moves away from the patrimonial notion of humans owning the Ocean. An ownership that lead to an abuse, to the extreme exploitation of its resources and that now can be reverse. It is not about this, it is about imagining the Ocean already as a partner, an entity that has a voice and a say in its own future. I think artists are crucial to convey this imagination and this image in the citizenship. Judging by the audience has been receiving the programs, the exhibitions we have been proposing I truly think that the minds are ready to understand the political implications of such a stand point. Art acts introducing a feeling, that then becomes an intuition, then an idea, then an image. When this process is set in motion it already has positive implications in the ways people perceive and interpret the lives of indigenous communities, vernacular knowledges and artistic practice around the Ocean and nature. Art creates a public pragmatic space where to experience the Ocean, not data or information about the Ocean. We do not need opinions to change the world, we need experiences that turns our decisions more open and sensitive towards life. The Ocean, like us, suffers from anxiety. We need to act on those feelings and create cultural conditions to lessen the negative effects of bad human decision making.

GC: In June 2022 your book “Like this. Natural intelligence as seen by Art” was presented. It brings together a series of exhibition events at Der Tank and a new project within the FHNW Academy of Arts and Design in Basel. The leitmotif of this research that you carried out as director and curator was the relationship between man and nature: what were the fundamental steps that brought together the different phases and developments of this project up to its publication? And how did the different study areas manage to find common ground?

CM: One of the big tensions inside the artworks is the perception of the outreach. Industrialization, Modernity, the entanglement of capitalism and class formation and awareness has deeply affected the role and the self-esteem of all those working in the arts. The binary logic of popular versus elitist, commercial versus conceptual, slow or niche versus the speed of media has determined the way we address the relevance and importance of having art and culture at the core of our communities. One can say that the art system has not allowed for any fluidity and no much of transitioning exercises are possible inside a rigid inherited world of patrimonial concerns. Thinking about it, this explains my insistence in metamorphosis. Avantgarde understands the experiment as a matter of form —breaking with old formats, the emergence of hybrid forms, the discovery of new forms. A swan becoming a woman and a woman turning back into a swan is not only a question of formats. Probably, till very recently, no one thought these processes would be possible outside the metaphoric and literary worlds of fantasy and fiction. A world pandemic was needed to make clear the many thousands claiming for this possibility for their own bodies. Bodies being disentangled from their biological traits, from their sexual assignments, a fluid substance that runs through the whole society as a source of nourishment compelling all the structures designed to name and identify in a certain way to change, to dance with this immense flow that is just starting. Still many imagine „a“ transition in a life time, a change, an adaptation that needs to happen, a correction that may be made… We are so easy to fool.. by ourselves. Once a transition happen many may follow. They should. Why would one embark in this adventure once? Who assures us that the identity we desire with twenty will continue to release the same joy a decade later? I see those individuals capable of undergoing complex, painful and even very risky physical transitions as veritable pioneers of a time to come. Like the argonauts and the cosmonauts, real visionaries, those transitioning are taking the task upon their bodies to experience and discover for the rest of us what are the possibilities of a world in transformation. Millions of processes at many different scales will start happening besides the more complex medical ones affecting the established processes, structures and institutions.

So, the different art commissions and their reception during the last approximately seven years have gave me the common ground. A ground that says we need to relay and near the intelligence that is present in nature. We need to radically change the art teaching according to this value, so that we can transform how we present art to the society.

GC: You have worked in museums and institutions, collaborate with magazines, and carry out projects as a freelance. How do you think the mission and objectives of institutions are evolving in the context of the micro system of contemporary art? What is (or what could be) their role in twenty years?

CM: It is a very complex answer. I would like institutions to abandon little by little formats that are close or ready to be presented to the audience. Spaces and formats in-between, more able to encompass activities, co-habitation. The exhibition has become too much of a showroom and too less of a place to inhabit in different manners. I would like to see an imagination of the needs of different sectors of the citizenship reflected. Presence is going to be something more and more necessary in the future. To be with each other and experience together, to talk, to reflect and to learn to listen are going to be key elements of a healthier, less radicalized society.

GC: The project you followed that you most experienced as a challenge (and a satisfaction) and what would you still like to achieve?

CM: I would love to invent a new institutional format, where children would be at the center.

Chus Martinez, Portrait, © Photo by Nici Jost

08/09/2022