Within the program of activities on the occasion of the exhibition Esther Ferrer. the body crossed by gender, space and time.
Course/Workshop taught by Margarita Aizpuru (curator of the exhibition, art critic and educator).
Days: December 11, 12 and 13, 2024
Schedule: 4 to 8 p.m.
And a selection competition for up to 4 performance projects, chosen by Margarita Aizpuru and Rosa Castells, to be carried out in the PERFORMANCE AND GENDER CYCLE to be held at MACA, as part of the practices of the Course-Workshop on a date to be determined in 2025.
Admission requirements for the course: Interested persons wishing to enroll in this course must submit the following documentation:
• Registration request by email, providing your personal information
• Abbreviated curriculum or curriculum summary of the applicant if they are a natural person
Registration deadline: It will end hours before the start of the course as long as places are available. Corresponding course certificates will be issued, signed by the instructor.
Information
The content of the course-workshop will focus on the conceptual, visual, theoretical and practical aspects of performance in interrelation with gender discourses and positions and feminist practices.
From the origins of performance and body art in general, to these recent years in which we have witnessed a revival of this artistic practice, different generations of artists have developed mechanisms and languages, and have opened paths as specific and forceful in the territory of performance as to speak of the importance, in its evolution, of female presence and even of feminist performances.
Discourses on the body, in the first decades, to which would have to be added the paradigm of gender identity from the 1980s onwards, coincide with a change in attitude in art.
After 1970, many women developed specifically feminist works. There was an increase in works that reinserted the experiences of being a woman into art practice.
From the second half of the eighties, and especially in the nineties, changes were going to occur in the sense of opening to a new aesthetic that rediscovers happenings and performance, while re-analyzing the relationships of the body and performance in contemporary societies.
For all these reasons, students will be informed about what performance carried out by women artists has meant from gender perspectives and feminist practices. And this by carrying out a theoretical-practical journey, with numerous visualizations in class, which will be explained and analyzed and debated, of performances carried out by the artists, in their different tendencies, approaches and practices, from the sixties to the present day, both at the level of our country and internationally.
Objective
The fundamental objective of the course is to inform/train in the field of performance from artistic, as well as gender and feminist perspectives, emphasizing the study of historical development, women artists and performance trends, their fusions and crossbreeding with other artistic areas and their exhibition in different spaces and modes of intervention and exhibition.
This information and training will be carried out by the course/workshop instructor who will teach it herself, incorporating performance practices, through a competition among the students, of which Margarita Aizpuru will select 4 performance projects to be carried out at MACA, within a Cycle organized for this purpose in 2025.
Methodology
Phase 1
Theoretical-practical course, accompanied by abundant and varied audiovisual material, on performances, their tendencies, practices and interventions. The discourses and analysis of performances and performative works will be accompanied by visualization of performances by different artists on video and fixed projections, which will serve as a documentary basis for the debate and discussion that will accompany the course at all times.
Phase 2
Performance competition for course/workshop students. As established in the "Performance Competition" section in the last section of this information.
Esther Ferrer: the body traversed by gender, space and time
25.10.2024
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09.02.2025
The exhibition focuses on the idea of woman and her body in interrelation with time and space. A body, that of the artist herself, from which she produces actions and creative works. And, from which, she traverses and measures space and, in turn, is crossed by time, even showing the aging of a woman, confronted with the idea and promotion of eternal feminine youth fostered by the patriarchal system. And that body is also transferred to photography, installations, drawings and even video, through self-portraits of her face and body fragments, in performative attitudes. Furthermore, a bodily action, shown through a series of images and audiovisuals that, as documentation of a selection of performances, are offered as visual and sound narrative media, alongside "the scores" or scripts that she constructs to continue in the execution of her performances. In short, an entire multi and interdisciplinary performative exhibition route expanded from action to plastic works and vice versa, its incitement to the realization of actions by the public or its mere evocation, or else the visual pieces as traces or remains of performances. While showing us her own body set in motion in time and space, seen and read as a meaning of symbolic layers and deconstructive representations of the patriarchal gaze on the female body. And, all of this, bathed in a certain sense of acerbic humor, the conjugation of the absurd and chance encounters with objects, words and signs.
