Call open until 19 March to participate in Iván Argote's work.
The Colombian artist is in charge of the artistic intervention that will take place in the library of the Faculty of Fine Arts of the UCM in Madrid.
Coinciding with the centenary of the Fine Arts Library, which we are celebrating in 2023, we have reached the last phase of the project. Concomitentes. A project that we have been working on since 2017 to think collectively about what are the specific activities of libraries and libraries; or, in other words, what kind of encounters do libraries bring about.
To this end, we have added the artist Iván Argote to this process of celebrating library potential, who has proposed two interventions. The first - tentatively entitled Skin tables, tattoo tables, secret tables, tables that talk, ask questions, search and get lost.-consists of the engraving of a collection of phrases on a series of tables in the Library.
The second-A brick that moves—consists of the collective production of clay bricks, also stamped with words or other inscriptions, which will be distributed throughout the faculty, in the same way that books and ideas borrowed from the Library travel.
The words and phrases that will remain inscribed on the tables and bricks will be collected through an open call, for which we want your participation: What phrases, verses, or quotes evoke the Library for you? What would the tables of this library say if we let them speak? What words would you like to see accompany you (and the many users to come now and in a hundred years) when you are in this space? What would you like to see tattooed on the skin of the library, and with what do we collectively take responsibility?
From 1 February to 19 March you can send us phrases (yours or not), verses (yours or someone else's) and/or single words (in the language of your choice) via the following address this form.
From what we receive, we will make a collective selection that will be recorded on the tables in the Library.
It will be our gift to those who visit us in the next 100 years.
Biography and career of Iván Argote
Iván Argote (Bogotá, 1983) is a Colombian artist based in Paris. Iván's work explores the relationship between history, politics and the construction of our own subjectivities, through very varied formats that include video, sculpture, collages or installations in public space, tending to raise questions about how we relate to others, the state, heritage or traditions. His works are critical, and address the idea of bringing affects to politics and politics to affects, with a tone somewhere between the strong and the tender. In his interventions in public space - whether monuments, large-scale, ephemeral or permanent - Argote proposes new symbolic and political uses of the collective and the public space they inhabit. In this line, his recent projects at the Sorbonne Nouvelle and Science Po universities in Paris (both 2022) stand out, as well as his site-specific installations at Desert X 2019 (USA), at the South Douala Public Art Triennial (2017) or the future commission for the Spreepark public park in Berlin (2025). Iván Argote has recently won the St. Anne Park's Land Art Commission competition organised by Sculpture Dublin.
Consultation here the complete album of the meeting with Iván Argote.
