From 1st December to 29th January 2005
Project curated by Juan de Nieves
The cities in which we live are complex structures that transcend the everyday business of survival and habitability. In fact, the opposite is true. Urban space – and, hence, the surrounding area – is imposed upon us: a powerful economic, political and social superstructure, forcing us to float adrift among its laws and flaws. In the latter, in the non-regulated areas, art and its tactics may be able to provide some form of evasion or circumlocution; new approaches with which to perhaps ever-so-slightly transform or reinterpret the places where we coexist and are socially driven, and which we call cities.
At EACC, we believe that the city and its context – the signs of identity that have built and which make up our community, and its contradictions and disorder, too – is a subject that must be discussed and reflected upon. In order do this, systematic work has to be carried out that will help awaken critical awareness among citizens, by means of not only the tools and resources inherent to an art centre.
The aim of the Contemporàni@ project – which left its mark in previous editions – is to serve as the first step in this direction. We trust that it will be enlarged in the future, and not just in the conventional exhibition format. The city and its landscapes, its historical memory, the new elements that are modifying its social structure, its urban layout, its economic realities… These are some of the aspects that artists and others, have been working upon to show us new models and relationships on our local map.