The children's collective as a space for artistic production and cultural management

Social life is full of multiple manifestations that will evidence the structures that sustain it; given the dynamics of a globalized world, it is necessary to direct efforts to culture as one of the essential nuclei in the evolution of societies. Due to the above, the population has generated proposals such as cultural collectives, which try to be the space where such production is generated, protected and motivated. Directed by the methodology of action research, the Cocotón Children's Collective project was born, a space where children from the city of Tehuacán and its region are apprentices, producers and cultural managers, allowing them to interact, express themselves and take on new roles in their development environments. The first stage of the project's implementation was achieved thanks to the interest and active participation of the children's population, using the resources and capital of their home environments.

UNFOLD

UNFOLD: Mediation by Reinterpretation is a research project and interdisciplinary network initiated by LIMA, Platform for Media Art in Amsterdam, that examines reinterpretation as an emerging practice for artistic production, presentation, and preservation of media works. New elements stretch the boundaries of traditional preservation methods and require insights from both the artist and the curator to decide how pieces can be restaged. This essay investigates how to deal with the changes of digital/media artworks over time, and how to preserve and mediate their performative aspects.

Over and Over and Over Again

Over the last twenty years, reenactment has been appropriated by both contemporary artistic production and art-theoretical discourse, becoming a distinctive strategy to engage with history and memory. As a critical act of repetition, which is never neutral in reactualizing the past, it has established unconventional modes of historicization and narration. Collecting work by artists, scholars, curators, and museum administrators, the volume investigates reenactment's potential for a (re)activation of layered temporal experiences, and its value as an ongoing interpretative and political gesture performed in the present with an eye to the future. Its contributions discuss the mobilization of archives in the struggle for inclusiveness and cultural revisionism; the role of the body in the presentification and rehabilitation of past events and (impermanent) objects; the question of authenticity and originality in artistic practice, art history, as well as in museum collections and conservation practices.

The Perpetuation of Site-Specific Installation Artworks in Museums

Site-specific installations are created for a specific location and are usually intended as temporary artworks. The Perpetuation of Site-Specific Installation Artworks in Museums. Staging Contemporary Art shows that these artworks consist of more than a singular manifestation and that their lifespan is often extended. This book provides an in-depth account of the paradoxical situation when site-specific installations are being preserved and put on display in a museum context. Tatja Scholte offers a conceptual framework for scholars and professionals in order to better understand the transformative nature of site-specific installation art and to support decision-making in museums as to conserving and presenting these artworks over time. The case studies provide insight into the diversity of artistic production over the last forty years. They explore how site-specific installations gain new meanings and forms in a museum context, and, vice versa, how these artworks become agents for change of professional routines and museum strategies.

What Can We Learn About Art from People with Neurological Disease?

Investigation of people with neurological illnesses has been a central approach to understanding the neurobiology of cognitive systems like language, attention, emotions, and decision-making. Yet such lesion studies had not been applied to neuroaesthetics. In the article under discussion, the author reviewed the extant literature and found that artists were not spared the kind of visual-spatial deficits that others experience from brain damage. Rather, in their artwork, they gave eloquent expression of the nature of their deficits. The author was particularly interested in the paradoxical enhancement of some artists whose work seemed to get better following brain injury, and developed a scale, the Assessment of Art Attributes, by which to assess change in artistic style and content. Neuropsychological studies remain a relatively untapped source of information in probing the biology of aesthetic experiences and artistic production.

The Transit of Mary Magdalene’s Soul in Catalan Artistic Production in the 15th Century

There are a great many studies on the figure of Mary Magdalene in different areas of knowledge. Nevertheless, there is a gap as regards the image of this character in Catalonia, and specifically regarding the visual representation of her soul at the moment when she died. This text aims to analyze this matter based on two Catalan altarpieces: the Altarpiece of Saint Mary Magdalene from Perella (Bernat Martorell, 1437–1453) and The Death of Mary Magdalene (Jaume Huguet, 1465–1480). The analysis has been carried out based on the postulates from the tradition of studies on iconography and iconology: the relationships between image and text, the history of the iconographic types and the magnetic power of images. The basic hypothesis is that the representation of Mary Magdalene’s soul in the 15th Century in Catalonia is visually borrowed from the iconographic type of the Dormition of the Mother of God. To test this, comparative analyses have been made of the visual representation of the two women and also of the textual sources, such as the canonical and extracanonical gospels, a variety of medieval legends and different hagiographies or vitas and sermons from the period.

TRANSGRESSÃO E FEMINILIDADE EM CELEIDA TOSTES: UM FLERTE COM O CAOS

Resumo: O presente artigo propõe examinar a produção artística de Celeida Tostes, a partir de sua biografia, construída por Marcus de Lontra Costa e Raquel Silva, no livro Celeida Tostes. Busca-se, portanto, analisar os deslocamentos da artista, entre interdito e transgressão, diante da revolução iconográfica proposta em seu trabalho e verificar em que medidas tais transgressões possibilitaram-lhe um encontro com a feminilidade. Para tal, efetivou-se uma pesquisa bibliográfica ancorada no referencial teórico psicanalítico de Freud e Lacan, no que concerne à temática feminilidade, e exploraram-se os estudos de Bataille relativos aos conceitos de transgressão, interdito e erotismo, com vistas a priorizar as convergências existentes entre tais autores. Além disso, para mediar e enriquecer a discussão, foram priorizados estudiosos dos referidos autores, como Butler, Quinet, Nunes e Safatle. Diante do explorado, pode-se constatar que as transgressões empreendidas por Celeida levaram-na a construir suas próprias regras e normas, de modo que, ao colocar seu ser em questão, opôs-se aos juízos e conceitos vigentes no contexto da ditadura militar e da arte concreta. Vê-se, portanto, que a vida e a obra de Celeida são perpassadas por um desejo que se inseriu no furo do Outro e que, dada a impossibilidade de se desvencilhar totalmente desta instância que também a fez desejar, pôde criar alternativas para se articular entre interdito e transgressão, experimentando, assim, um encontro com a feminilidade.Palavras-chave: Psicanálise. Feminilidade. Transgressão.Abstract: This article proposes to examine the artistic production of Celeida Tostes from her biography, built by Marcus de Lontra Costa and Raquel Silva in the book Celeida Tostes. The aim is, therefore, to analyze the artist’s displacements between interdiction and transgression in face of the iconographic revolution proposed in her work and to verify what extent such transgressions enabled her encounter with femininity. To this end, a bibliographic research was carried out anchored in Freud and Lacan’s psychoanalytical theoretical referential that concerns to the femininity and explored Bataille’s studies relatives to concepts of the transgression, interdiction and eroticism, with the intention of prioritizing the existence of convergences between such author. Besides this, to mediate and enrich the discussion were prioritized scholars of these authors, such as Butler, Quinet, Nunes and Safatle. Given the explored, it can be seen that the transgressions undertaken by Celeida led her to construct her own rules and norms, so that, when questioned her being, she opposed the prevailing judgments and concepts in the context of military dictatorship and concrete art. It is seen, therefore, that Celeida’s life and work are permeated by a desire that was inserted in the hole of the Other and that, given the impossibility of completely disentangling herself from this instance that also made her want, she could create alternatives to articulate between interdiction and transgression, thus experiencing an encounter with femininity. Keywords: Psychoanalysis. Femininity. Transgression.

Make this tango viral: Touching toward the untouchable in tele-synaesthesia performance

The COVID-19 pandemic has created an uncanny rift between tact and touch as it expands the virtual towards its potential. Layer upon layer of new information has been repeatedly revising and reformulating our sense of touch. The unconditional freedom of touch needs to be rendered accountable in this rift of time and space. The act of touching entails individual acknowledging the risk of reaching towards the unknown or the known. Tracing with a tactile sense of touch is to be tactful about how, where and what can such act of touching could reach, especially in the context of communicative technology. This article focuses on the possibility of virtual sensibility by challenging ways to feel touched beyond the nostalgic narratives that attempt to indict communicative technology with the loss of touch. To replenish and reinstate touch through tele-synaesthesia performance, I ask: how to elongate our somatosensensation and echo the embodied experience of touching through virtual connectivity? Tele-synaesthesia performance joints telematic and synaesthetic experience together to embody the incorporeality of touch through virtual connectivity. It embodies the injunction of physical contact and challenges what can and cannot be touched by suturing one sensuous modality to another. Inspired by Paul Sermon’s artistic production of Telematic Quarantine (2020) and Pandemic Encounters (2020), that tele-presents the stories of self (isolation), I have created The Best Facial (2021): a series of one-to-one participatory tele-synaesthesia performances, where I became a virtual aesthetician and performed ‘virtual facial care’ on Zoom amid the second wave of the pandemic in the United Kingdom. In this article, I will discuss how tele-synaesthesia performance could trigger tactile experiences in the participants in reference to Michel Foucault’s concept Heterotopia (1986) that allegorically address the incompatible physical places in the society. I discuss how to elicit an affective sensory response from non-tactile senses through virtual touch, as stated by Naomi Bennett’s ‘Telematic connections: sensing, feeling, being in space together’ (2020). I refer to Legacy Russell’s discussion on glitch (2020) to analyse the possible future of tele-synaesthesia performance and its potential for expanding virtual connectivity with an ethical touch of a non-performative refusal of the present.

Leroi-Gourhan and the Evolution of Forms

The prehistorian André Leroi-Gourhan envisages technological behaviour along a continuum of manual activity extending to artistic production. His work on Palaeolithic cave art, which dominates the final phase of his career, builds on parameters set out in the 1950s and 1960s, and indeed early works on figuration ( Bestiaire du bronze chinois (1936) and Documents pour l'art comparé (1943)) already use the methodology which characterizes his Préhistoire de l'art occidental (1965). Nevertheless, there is a qualitative shift in Leroi-Gourhan's post-war work in response to structuralism and in dialogue with his work on human evolution. Le Geste et la Parole (1964–5) represents an important point of mediation, describing the physiological foundations of aesthetic experience and the stages of development which precede figuration. Leroi-Gourhan argues for the normality of Palaeolithic art as an artistic tradition while insisting on its absolute otherness. The mind in the cave is capable of the most abstract and esoteric variations of form and content, but also represents an alternative world to our own.

‘A tremor of hope’: Bloomsbury in and after 1918

This article focuses on Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury in and after 1918. It looks at the ways in which the Woolfs, together with members of their circle of friends and family, recorded their experience, their political views, and their attitudes towards Germany, the US and Russia during the final months of the First World War and how they received the arrival of peace. Part of the overall argument will be devoted to tracing the means by which Bloomsbury and the various societies and clubs that were related to it tried to maintain continuity during the war years in London, Richmond and Sussex. A main part of the article will then analyse the development of Bloomsbury’s literary and artistic production and the new connections between art, literature and politics that were forged in the aftermath of the founding of the Hogarth Press in 1917.