text-collection.hangar.org

The Texts Collection is a program that accompanies and amplifies artistic practices by generating a collection of monographic texts for Hangar residents. Each artist has the possibility to commission a text about their work from an author of their choice—local or international; known or to be known—in editorial dialogue with Hangar. The intention is to produce publications on their practice in general—beyond this work or that particular work—designed for agile circulation and reedition, ensuring a long life, and contributing to expanding the networks and frameworks of artistic practices. Through this editorial device, artists can count on a comprehensive and in-depth text that captures their ways of doing and thinking holistically, integrating different projects to build an overall view of their practices. The Texts Collection also provides artists the opportunity to establish a writing relationship as a starting point, rather than as the result of a project or exhibition.

The Texts Collection is a program initiated in 2023 based on the observation that in the field of contemporary art, publishing and writing occur when an exhibition takes place, which leaves out processes or languages that do not crystallize in an exhibition. Artists have to wait for an exhibition context to edit a publication and work with an external perspective of their choice. When this happens, these texts are often tied specifically to the content of that particular exhibition or project, limiting the scope of what is included in the writing. Publications end up being small cutouts in the continuum of artistic production, unless there is a retrospective exhibition. It was also among the initial observations that many artists do not make the leap to internationalization because there is no good, comprehensive, and translated text of their work that allows them to present, connect, or apply. And of course, this project is also driven by the conviction that artistic practices depend on a series of textual or paratextual materials—published or only used in calls for proposals—that can determine their circulation.

At the same time, we apprehend the Collection as an editorial interface that proposes an approach that is both proactive and reflective: it puts into practice new forms of publishing with the aim of restoring the transformative power of writing. Criticism is—or should be—a continuously revisited exercise, always discussed in its function and boundaries. It is an indispensable part of the phenomena that articulate a context, presenting and commenting on them through publication. Therefore, it must be given the space-time and conditions that allow for this revision and regeneration of the written records of intellectual production.

The Collection is born from the conviction that the possibility of activating the political imagination, of daring to imagine other worlds, involves the mobilization of other modes of enunciation, of stating. We insist on writing as an epistemic environment to revitalize and articulate other forms of sensibility, actively contributing to the understanding of artistic production in relation to other disciplines as a space of enunciation with its own capacity for reaction.

Editors: Carolina Jiménez, Anna Manubens
Texts: their authors
Design: ODD Oficina de disseny (Diego Bustamante, Ariadna Serrahima)
Web development: Daniel Cecilia
Translations: Nuria Rodriguez Riestra, Alba Mayol Curci, Giuliana Racco, Aeiou Traductors

Artist

Author

Title

Residency

Milena Rossignoli

Vera Martín Zelich

A Moving Canvas