El gesto narrativo. Historic vanguards

El gesto narrativo. Reading group facilitated by Álvaro de los Ángeles

The collection from IVAM is organised using six chronological and themed blocks which explain, with their own voice, the art developed from the beginning of the 20th century to the modern day. Perhaps not everything is as it is (or was), but it is everything that exists. Stories of the present – and those that come from far away but are updated in our present- should be told as a polyphony of voices and from contexts that make us sharpen our critical eye regarding their construction and relevance.

Over six sessions, using six books, we will delve into the narrative actions that literature offers us and we will link them together, sometimes with simple gestures and sometimes with more complex choreography, with the IVAM collection. The worlds of fiction build reality; they are reflective mirrors or transparent windows, but they always tell us what we are, or what we are eager to become, from our previous experience and towards our future possibility of transforming ourselves. In these narrative gestures, traversed by stories and lives, we will slow down.

1914-1939: Historic vanguards
«This period comprises from the First World War until the start of the Second, the same year in which the Spanish Civil War ended. IVAM possesses a significant collection of works belonging to historic European vanguards, especially from constructivism, dadaism, futurism, neoplasticism and non-figurative or concrete abstraction.»

—La tela de araña (1923) de Joseph Roth. Ed. Acantilado.
Wednesday 2nd November 2022 at 18.00.

This foreboding book perfectly exemplifies what was happening in the countries resulting from the disappearance of the Austro-Hungarian empire. It was originally published in weekly instalments in the Viennese newspaper Arbeiter-Zeitung, between October and November 1923, just a few days before the Munich Putsch, the failed coup d’état by Hitler and Ludendorff. The importance of newspapers and the expansion of illustrated magazines will give us chance to talk about the entire graphic production resulting in the collages of John Heartfield, Raoul Hausmann, Hannah Höch and the universe of George Grosz and, therefore, of the historic vanguards. Joseph Roth died in 1939 in Paris, the city he had emigrated to in 1933. Few authors had reported so bravely on the rise of the Third Reich and the reasons for the collapse of the Habsburg empire.