I finished my good friend and fellow Classicist Johanna Hanink’s brilliant new book The Classical Debt: Greek Antiquity in the Era of Austerity before boarding the plane from Madrid to Athens. I am here to experience, research and write about the documenta 14 exhibition, specifically how both ancient sites and themes are activated by the […]
Yesterday at the Guggenheim Bilbao I saw Pierre Huyghe’s remarkable 2014 film Untitled (Human Mask). It stars the monkey Fuku-chan (who came to fame in a YouTube video that depicts her working as a waitress north of Toyko) dressed in a mask and wig waiting impatiently in an abandoned restaurant. Set and filmed in 2011, […]
Tonight in Athens, between 7-8pm in the Odeon (Athens Conservatoire) you can experience the 51st rendition of Bilbaino artist Mattin’s ‘durational concert’ Social Dissonance, created with Dafni Krazoudi, Danai Liodaki, Ioannis Sarris, and Eleni Zervou. Here is the score for each nightly performance (excluding Mondays): Social Dissonance Score: Listen carefully. The audience is your instrument, […]
On arriving in Bilbao last night I was excited to discover the collection of books that I left in Rebeka’s mother’s apartment, bought during our year sabbatical in Madrid (2014-15). Knowing that I would buy more books than I could fit in my suitcase, I not only left these books here on our way back […]
‘I come in fear, an exile’s book, sent to this city: kind reader, give me a gentle hand, in my weariness: don’t shun me in fear, in case I bring you shame: not a line of this paper teaches about love. Such is my author’s fate he shouldn’t try, the wretch, to hide it with […]
Yesterday while looking for two exhibitions at PHotoESPAÑA 17, I stumbled across the exhibition El borde de una herida: Migración, exilio y colonialidad en el Estrecho (“The edge of a wound: Immigration, exile and coloniality in the Strait of Gibraltar) curated by Juan Guardiola at CentroCentro Cibeles. This strait between Spain and Africa was famous […]
“Forty-two” is the response given by Deep Thought, the supercomputer programmed to calculate the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything in Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. This answer, while delivered after centuries of waiting and couched within some serious expectation management (‘You’re really not going to like it’), […]
Yesterday I visited the extensive Lee Lozano exhibition at the Reina Sofia which offered a generous selection of the full range of her work, from the monumental ‘machine’ paintings and the obscene Subway Series to her text Pieces and the Wave series. While walking through the exhibition, I initially thought of posting on Minus Plato about the […]
Yesterday, after a picnic in Parque El Retiro, we visited the Franz Erhard Walther exhibition Un lugar para el cuerpo (“A Place for the Body”) at the Palacio de Velázquez and the Rosa Barba installation Solar Flux Recordings at the Palacio de Cristal. Both of these sites in the park are extensions of the Museo […]
Being back in Madrid brings memories of the year we spent hear during our sabbatical (2014-15). During that time I was lucky enough to meet the photographer Alejandra Franch and discovered her curious ongoing project and photobook Bello Público (“Public Body Hair”). At the time, I offered to annotate these photographs with a series of quotations […]