Places categories: IVAM Centre Julio González

#Portaldeigualdad. Campaign for equality between women and men in the museum and in education, 2020-21 is a public art project conceived by the feminist artist and curator Mau Monleón Pradas for PATI OBERT at IVAM as part of the museum’s IVAM Produces programme in collaboration with various cultural associations working in Spain to achieve equality.

The idea behind the project is to set in motion a Campaign for equality between women and men in the museum in various phases, with the goal of demanding compliance with the current Law on Equality. To this end, various actions are proposed both in the physical offline space as well as in the virtual online space.

#Portaldeigualdad is a participative campaign driven by artists, cultural agents and associations which calls for the inclusion of an Equality Portal in the webpages of museums and art centres.
An Equality Portal is an innovative idea that allows museums to include a gender perspective in their webpages of all the information they handle and produce, so that it is visible and available for all the public. This information should include their collections, exhibitions and other activities, as well as the management of their libraries, and other aspects related to each particular museum, at the same time taking on a prospective quality.

The #Portaldeigualdad project focuses its campaign on various participative actions, including a video campaign, a visual participative campaign and a discussion forum, among others.
Begun on 7 September 2020, the first participative action is a video format for social media with a nationwide remit, through which individuals are given the possibility of supporting the campaign by making a recording with their smartphones and sharing it as a story and post.

The artist invites people to take part in the project by recording a video and sharing it on social media, and asks each participant in turn to invite other people to share it and record their own video, adding the hashtags #Portaldeigualdad #IVAM in their stories and posts.

The participative visual campaign also contemplates the installation of an intervention by the artist in the IVAM’s sculpture garden in the form of an advertising billboard with the slogan Espacio para mujeres. ¡Si tú quieres! Museos y Educación (Space for Women. If you want! Museums and Education). #Portaldeigualdad

People can also collaborate with the project by joining the #Portaldeigualdad campaign as an individual, museum or association in:

@maumonleon.es
facebook.com/mau.monleonpradas
www.maumonleon.es

With the collaboration of:
MAV Mujeres en las Artes Visuales
Clásicas y Modernas, Asociación por la igualdad de género en la Cultura
AVVAC Artistes Visuals de València, Alacant i Castelló
AVVCA Associació Valenciana de Crítics d’Art
MACVAC Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Vicente Aguilera Cerni de Vilafamés
OBSERVATORIO CULTURAL DE GÉNERO
LRM CIDII Comunidad de Conocimiento desde la Perspectiva de Género
ACVG Arte Contra Violencia de Género
ITAMAR Revista de investigación musical
IES Barrio del Carmen, València
UPV Universitat Politècnica de València
LCI Laboratorio de creaciones intermedia

In November 2002, the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights adopted the General Comment no. 15 on the Right to Water. Article I.1 declares that “the human right to water is indispensable for leading a life in human dignity”. General Comment no. 15 also says that “the human right to water entitles everyone to sufficient, safe, acceptable, physically accessible and affordable water for personal and domestic use.”

At a time of global pandemic in which we are being constantly reminded about the importance of hygiene and social distancing, we wonder what happens when these measures are impossible. We take a look at refugee camps on Europe’s southern borders where thousands of people survive in overcrowded conditions and, similar to previous projects, we also make contact with activists working on the ground. On the border between Turkey and Syria, in the region of Idlib, various humanitarian aid projects are currently being carried out with the collaboration of a small organization from Valencia of freelance activists. One of the actions they are undertaking consists in buying and distributing 1000-litre tanks to ensure a regular supply of water to camps and irregular settlements in the area.

The current installation, Proyecto Agua, II. (1×100= 1000), comprises a number of cyanotypes with images of different recipients (bottles, carafes, buckets, glasses, etc.), that give us a graphic idea of what 1000 litres of water is really like.

The IVAM is in the transit of becoming an instrument, passage, unexpected music and device for sound art that, among other ‘transits’, arouses our curiosity and attention.

To remedy the situation, and as a musician of inclemency, bells and heights, I went back to Juan García Castillejo, that futurist pioneering priest who, 87 years ago, in 1933, built an electro-composing device able to “produce a pleasant sensation and a new and exquisite taste, a music suggestive of surprise and emotions, mystery and magic, a music of dynamism that discharges sparks, that illuminates the regions of fairies and wizards.”

And, lo and behold, while checking out what’s available in technosonics I discover pressure sensors, in other words, contact devices designed to capture soundwaves and translate them into electrical signals when certain crystalline substances are subjected to some kind of mechanical pressure.

All it takes is for our feet to step on the ground in upwards and downwards movements to unknowingly produce sounds and even interactive music.

Thanks to “electric vitality”, a staircase or a hall is converted into fluttering music that flies and fills with the colour of harmonics an IVAM that looks to the future as a cathedral of spontaneous, unexpected, random and new listenings.

With these decisions and these methods of treating sound as a plastic material that occupies architectures, materials and volumes, we are bringing to life what, in Castillejo’s words is “a new field that has been opened for music for its future development”.

The circuit board was designed and developed by Riley García.
The software was created by the sound artist Arturo Moya.

With the collaboration of Montserrat Palacios, June 2020

The painting installation invites the visitor to cohabit with the painting, conditioning the current state of the action in function of their determination, their time and their passage through the space, whether it be by observing it, stepping on it, spoiling it or, simply, leaving their prints.

The project focuses on a personal graphic transcription on the immediate surroundings of the IVAM, taking its starting point in a compilation of drawings and visual traces left on the ground in the garden behind the museum. An ongoing visual examination of the ground recovered lost gestures that speak of how the city is used as a support for plastic visual expressions and also of its wide capacity for inhabitability.

Every Sunday following 19 May, the day the art centre proposed this project to me, I have explored the surroundings of the museum and especially the garden behind it. On my first visit I discovered a number of drawings on the ground that reminded me of children’s games, doodles and traces that looked like signs or codes between anonymous people who had made them to communicate with each other.

On my following visits I continued looking at the ground and saw that there were new drawings, telling me that the anonymous artists were prolific. On my fourth visit I was particularly struck by one of the new drawings which depicted a long, shapeless form composed of two very irregular parallel lines that gradually narrowed until arriving at the word “salida” [exit]. The addition of text marked a difference with all the other drawings, turning it into a path leading to that word. The form struck me as very attractive and organic, while at once containing an underlying aggressiveness that dovetailed with the aesthetic posits of my own world.

The drawing matched to perfection the idea I had for the project, given that the location assigned for the proposed intervention connected the entrance/exit to the museum with IVAM Lab, a space conceived to communicate, a place people pass through.

Which is why the following relations that arose during the course of the research struck me as particularly suited and interesting. The formalization was conditioned by the parameters in which my own work is bounded: the city, its uses, inhabitability, ground, dirt, trace, print and changes of the surrounding environment. A relation between entrance and exit, path and passage. The aforementioned garden facilitates access to the museum, leading directly to the lobby. A compilation of elements from the exterior of the museum for their development inside the museum. Time and continuous alteration of our surrounding space. Work around the museum. An approach to the centre itself.

The basic references I am using for the installation are taken from an inventory previously compiled during my visits to the surroundings of the IVAM. At the moment, the painterly transcription represents an alphabet of symbols comprising forty-five drawings, with the possibility of further expanding it right up until the date of execution of the intervention.
A publication will be printed on paper with the goal of documenting the glossary of symbols obtained during the working process. The brief publication will include a text and will also function not just as an in-hall leaflet, but also as a collectible piece for visitors (for instance, a fold-out, poster, or small format book).

The work is materialized by covering the floor of the hall with white non-slip vinyl to create a homogeneous and hermetic space. The room thus produced will operate as an empty canvas on which to individually represent the transcription of the drawings obtained in the surroundings of the IVAM.

I will paint directly on the vinyl floor using various techniques including markers, spray and enamels. The walls will be left bare, thus forcing our eyes to look towards the ground, stimulating a direct cohabitation between the visitor and the painting, which, once again, will represent the references compiled around the garden, now layered one on top of another. The walls are left bare so that the printed publication can be placed at some point.