wolf vostell - coche - le bastart

Wolf Vostell, immobile travel among migratory birds

When the temperatures are around 45 degrees, Extremadura is napping until sunset. Shutters remain closed, the streets empty… We have just left behind the small town of Malpartida and we already drive on a path of gravel crossed by capricious granite formations that precede what a little further will make up the curvilinear “skyline” of Los Barruecos. Erosion, a patient sculptor, has been modeling this stone universe over the centuries. When reflected in the pools, […]

romina de novellis - gradiva - le bastart

Romina de Novellis, old myths, new rites

What is the distance between a Swede sculptural beauty soaking in the Fontana di Trevi and an Italian brunette eating spaghetti, in a histrionic style, before the Fontaine Saint Michel in Paris? The latter, in a cannibal act, “devours” the misogynous construction that the first epitomize. It was one of the urban performances that the Neapolitan artist Romina de Novellis made when settling in the French capital (Splash! La Dolce Vita a Parigi 2010). Continuing […]

tracey moffatt - other - le bastart

Tracey Moffatt, interracial desire, a matter of ghosts

Je pense que le couple nègre/blanche est pire qu’une bombe, writes Dany Laferrière (Comment faire l’amour avec un nègre sans se fatiguer, 1985). Sexuality is, more than anything, a matter of ghosts, and the ghost that join a black man and a white woman is one of the most explosive that there is. Sexual imaginaries in relation to ethnic otherness continue to bear the burden of colonial legacy. The topics are renewed, adapting to the changing demands […]

gema ruperez - be a heroe - le bastart

Gema Rupérez, longing for survival

In a state of nature, man is a wolf to man according to Hobbes, so it was necessary a behavior agreement. The social contract was born of the fear that we inspired each other. But living in society, the survival instinct is added to competitive anxieties and an aggressiveness inoculated by the system that makes the man a wolf with a tie, to men and to women. So, where are we going?, Gema Rupérez asks us in […]

tania candiani - organ - le bastart

Tania Candiani, everything sounds

Between what resists to disappear and the premonitory dream of a future that has already been, Tania Candiani explores the revolutionary poetics of the anachronism and the universal curiosity that moves the world. She herself embodies that interdisciplinary curiosity that today seems relegated to art, given the drastic separation between fields of knowledge that once went hand in hand. We sense the same sensitivity and poetic emphasis in the way Tania gives new life and […]

txema salvans - waiting game - le bastart

Txema Salvans, on route

8 a.m. Murcia’s beaches are now on alert for strong gusts of wind, but the sky will remain clear all weekend, while in Tarragona… Txema Salvans listens to the weather forecast while placing his stuff in the van (tripod, camera …) With his hands already on the steering wheel, he traces with marker some secondary route on a Spanish Levante map that always carries on. Or, well, let’s not be so romantic…, even if analog photography […]

aes+f - trimalchio - le bastart

AES+F, existence as perpetual limbo

Entertainment in its most advanced state is no longer supported by evasion but rather by the exploitation of extreme emotions. Bruce Bégout speculated about it in his novel Le Park, about an island transformed into a resort not suitable for mass tourism, in which visitors could satisfy their most perverse desires. Dungeons in casinos basements, dangerous jungles and neurobiological architecture contributed to fill their morbid thirst for spectacle. The nouveau riche who participate in the […]

david trullo - boys love - le bastart

David Trullo, subversive museographies

David Trullo travels to the past again and again. It has done so by collecting visual flashes that somehow contributed to forge his personality (Timewarp), reconstructing episodes mutilated by the heteronormative speech (A true history) … Now, in his two current expositions reviews the queer iconography confronting with pieces of the National Museum of Decorative Arts (Queer cabinet) and tracing a personal homoerotic genealogy impregnated with lyricism and irony in equal parts (Souvenirs). The truth […]