This book is an unusual collection of letters that the painter Miguel Ángel Campano, winner of the National Prize for Plastic Arts in 1996, sent to the professor of Philosophy Nicolás Sánchez Durá, between 1971 and 2012. The impetuous spirit of the artist emerges from them. Campano goes through his biography, expresses his ideas about painting, his reflections from psychoanalysis or his passion for art or literature. A volume that shows his character, at times somber, at times euphoric -always magnetic-, in the words of Sánchez Durá, “as radical as lovely, extremely demanding and splendid”.

Miguel Ángel Campano has been one of the most evocative and modern Spanish painters of recent times, owner of a stroke that gained depth as he approached abstraction. While studying Fine Arts in Valencia, he became friends with Nicolás Sánchez Durà, professor of Philosophy at the University of Valencia and passionate about contemporary art, a hobby that led him to found the Temple Gallery and to curate exhibitions (including several by Campano) in institutions such as the IVAM in Valencia, the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid or the National Bank of Athens, among others.

Participants in the presentation: Nicolás Sánchez Durà, Simón Campano, César Martínez-Useros and Nuria Enguita.

The cycle Presentes densos. Around the arts of living on a damaged planet, began in September 2020 and is curated by Miguel Ángel Martínez. The title of the cycle comes from an expression by Donna J. Haraway, who in her latest book, Staying with the Trouble, talks about the contemporary era as a “dense present”. As Haraway, this project invites us to become capable of giving a responsible and perhaps partial response to the challenges and horrors of the Anthropocene. For that purpose, the project begins with the ecological emergency situation of the Natural Park of l’Albufera de València.

17th session of the cycle. Workshop Around attention and imagination, coordinated by Carmen Pardo Salgado.

The session focuses on our ability to pay attention, and it is developed as a “workshop to learn to listen (also to birdsong)”. It is proposed as a theoretical-practical experience in which an introduction to the learning of listening is carried out. This introduction, which will be developed in three stages, involves a journey through the ways in which attention and imagination are articulated in our listening:

• Time one. About silence and the possibility of listening: it is necessary to lose oneself to begin to listen.
• Time two. If you listen to the world, the ear is filled with sounds. Listening to the silence.
• Time three. To a non-anthropocentric listening: about the vocalizations of humans and birds.

Carmen Pardo Salgado works in the interface between philosophy and sound art. She is a tenured lecturer at the University of Girona and Professor of the Sound Art Master’s degree at the University of Barcelona. As a post-doctoral researcher in the IRCAM-CNRS unit in Paris (1996-1998), she carried out research into the soundscape in contemporary music. She edited and translated Escritos al oído by John Cage (1999) and is the author of En el silencio de la cultura (Sexto Piso, 2016); La escucha oblicua: una invitación a John Cage (Sexto Piso, 2014; Robert Wilson (in collaboration with Miguel Morey, Polígrafa, 2003); Las TIC: una reflexión filosófica (Laertes, 2009); and En el mar de John Cage (La Central, 2009).

Check out the microsite of “Presentes densos”:

José Miguel G. Cortés, curator of the exhibition Mona Hatoum, will give a lecture on those aspects of the artist’s work that are related to the overcoming of limits and static boundaries. We will analyze the thematic issues as well as the questioning of identities and the diversity of materials that have been used in her installations. Mona Hatoum’s work bets on fluid or porous approaches that generate more open and inclusive attitudes and positions. They tend to questioning or contradictions: precariousness and instability, the ambiguous and paradoxical or memory and identity are some of the most relevant.

José Miguel G. Cortés is professor of Art Theory at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the UPV. He was IVAM’s director between September 2014 and September 2020 and has published several books and curated numerous exhibitions of modern and contemporary artists.

Round-table discussion organized on the occasion of the exhibition Mechanical and Technical Imaginaries in the IVAM Collection, moderated by the teacher and architect, Mónica García, with the participation of the artists Soledad Sevilla, Jordi Teixidor and José María Yturralde.

At the end of the 1960s, after decades of isolation, a critical and open future began to emerge in Spain. The fascination of scientific and technological advances was integrated by the ideology of productive, cultural and social democratization.

Young Spanish artists, which were linked to groups such as Antes del Arte (1968-1969) or Centro de Cálculo de la Universidad de Madrid (1968-1973), opened up new horizons of thinking that revealed the need to understand the different artistic languages logically and systematically.

The cooperation of art and science and the integration of computers into its creative processes inject the germ of the rational and the experimental. Artists such as Soledad Sevilla, José María Yturralde and Jordi Teixidor transfer these advances to tradition in order to widen its limits.

REGISTRATION

Prior reservation is required at ivam@consultaentradas.com or 976004973 (Monday to Saturday from 9 am to 8 pm).

Conversation on the occasion of the opening of the exhibition Industry/Matrices, threads and sounds, by Lorenzo Sandoval, artist and curator, and Tono Vizcaíno, archaeologist and heritage manager.

Industry. Matrices, threads and sounds is a hybrid proposal that is situated between the creation of an archive and an artistic project, developed by Lorenzo Sandoval and Tono Vizcaíno. Its objective is to offer a necessarily partial reading of Valencian industrial heritage based on the sound, the intangible and social movements.

During the conversation, they will introduce the proposal, which is developed through the compilation of sounds, processes, images, videos, music, art pieces and discourses linked to factories in their original context of use, but also in their abandonment and their conversion into heritage spaces. It focuses particularly on the proactive uses of industrial heritage driven by citizens. The project is positioned outside the romanticizing image of industrial ruin. Understanding heritage and history as living processes that allow us to generate conceptual tools to understand the past, present and future of the history of labor and its relationship with culture.

Lecture by Professor Víctor del Río on photography and visual culture in the context of the exhibition Imaginarios mecánicos y técnicos en la Colección del IVAM.

Víctor del Río holds a PhD in Philosophy and teaches Theory and History of Modern and Contemporary Art at the University of Salamanca. He is a member of the teaching staff of the Master of Advanced Studies in Philosophy at the same University, as well as of the Master in Photography, Art and Technique at the Universitat Politècnica de València.

This lecture is part of the public program prepared by IVAM on the occasion of the exhibition Imaginarios mecánicos y técnicos en la Colección del IVAM, which includes concerts, lectures, round tables and an artist’s workshop.

MATRIZ N005 – Castellón of the project Industria/ Matrices, tramas y sonidos by Lorenzo Sandoval and Tono Vizcaíno.

The project Industria / Matrices, tramas y sonidos, carried out by Lorenzo Sandoval and Tono Vizcaíno for the IVAM, has its last activity before the opening of the exhibition. It is «Matriz N005-Castellón».

La Plana de Castellón and its surroundings have a long tradition of industrial pottery production, which today still constitutes the main engine of its economy. This phenomenon means that a large part of its residents have been related to the factories in different ways.

In this meeting we will talk about the links between heritage and memory through the voices of different people involved in projects of recovery of the industrial past, driven both from institutions and civil society.

The session will be structured in two parts:

Interventions:

• Vicent Estall, Tile Museum of Onda.
• Teresa Artero, Alcora Ceramics Museum.
• Pilar Beltran, Entramats project.
• Nel-lo Navarro, oral memory Fábrica Segarra de Vall de Uxó.

Dialogue among the participants (open to the public).