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Laura Vallés Vílchez

9 posts
(Castellón de la Plana, 1984) trabaja como curadora, editora e investigadora. Estudió la carrera de Bellas Artes y un Máster en Fotografía en la Universidad Politécnica de Valencia, una experiencia que le llevó a realizar una estancia en Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne, entre ambas titulaciones. Desde 2016 realiza el doctorado en el Royal College of Art de Londres, donde reside, da clases de comisariado y actualmente dirige 4Cs From Conflict to Conviviality through Creativity and Culture. Esta labor se inicia gracias a una beca de la Fundación Botín y se nutre del trabajo que realiza como cofundadora y editora de Concreta: editorial que publica una revista así como una serie de libros y que sedimenta experiencias anteriores siempre en instituciones con un pie en entornos pedagógicos y otro en entornos públicos. Es el caso de Afterall en Londres, organización editorial vinculada a Central Saint Martins, donde trabajó en 2009, para luego trasladarse al MoCP de Columbia University en Chicago en 2010. Como curadora ha organizado exposiciones tales como Te toca a ti (EACC, 2018), 15.600 días. Xisco Mensua (CCCC, 2019), A través de la arena (Azkuna Zentroa, Artium y CentroCentro, 2019-20). Recientemente ha dirigido la bienal Mitos del futuro próximo, Fotonoviembre, TEA, 2019-20). Ha impartido conferencias en instituciones tales como Royal Academy of Arts, SOAS, Universidad de Granada o UPV, así como traducido autoras entre las que se encuentran Donna Haraway o Moyra Davey. Sus textos han sido publicados en revistas y plataformas como Photographies, Camera Austria, 1000 Words Magazine, Babelia o A* Desk.

“One is Always Plural”

Laura Vallés Vílchez: I would like to begin discussing your latest exhibition at Van Abbemuseum, titled A Daily Practice. The show is the result of a three-year research project on the museum’s collection using the Feldenkrais method as the framework. This somatic method was initiated by the Israeli engineer and physicist Moshe Feldenkrais, and consists of connecting the bodily movements with certain emotional and mental mechanisms. The essence of this method resides in the interaction between (...)

FOREWORD
Concreta 17, sonorities at the frontiers of the body, Laura Vallés Vílchez

Concreta 17 (Spring 2021) offers a chorus of voices that approach the issue of the bodies: their legibility and political, poetic and aesthetic alliances beyond representation. It counts with the collaboration of Laura Vallés Vílchez, Ursula K. Le Guin, Néstor García, Yael Davids, Jon Mikel Euba, Andrea Soto Calderón, Marina Vishmidt, Paula Pérez-Rodríguez, Jorge Satorre, María Salgado, María Montero Sierra, Lara García Díaz, Irene Blanco-Fuente, Miguel Ángel López-Sáez, Lucas Platero and Álex Martín Rod.

From the Tangle to the Spider’s Web

The author speculates on the history of active substances in relation to their colonial past and proposes a reading of them as a refuge from which to reinvent power, move through the new modes of idolatry, and decolonize thought. Donna Haraway, talking about the production of modern culture in her readings of National Geographic on primates in the late eighties, pointed out that cultural critics are faced by a world very much like tangled balls of yarn, whose meanings must be untangled by (...)

Gently revealing, caring hard, all touching…

"Sida la flecha. Suma y sida. Sida del vaticano... quien va a Sevilla, perdió su sida..." is a fragment of the audio that tags along with me like a soundtrack on my walkthrough of Anarchivo Sida at Tabakalera. The performer-actioner Miguel Benlloch, together with Tomás Navarro and Rafael Villegas—aka Las Pekinesas—are the artists featured in a video of the SIDA DA performance (1985) held (...)

Murmur in the White Cube: On Iman Issa’s work

Laura Valles reflects on Iman Issa’s artistic practice in which subjects such as familiarity, mimesis and fiction are presented in the form of a display. Issa’s work seems to demand a responsibility to the forms capable of generating a speech act. “Come back and make up a good-bye at least. Let’s pretend we had one”, Clementine says to Joel in a scene from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, the 2004 film with a story by Charlie Kaufman and Michel Gondry that reminds us that it’s not so easy (...)

FOREWORD
Concreta 06, Overflowing the exhibition space, Laura Vallés Vílchez

Concreta 06 (Fall 2015) reflects on the exhibition space as a settled and privileged place in which art occurs, that is, art is activated. Furthermore, it raises questions regarding the material condition of the artwork, its meaning and its relations with diverse contexts and audiences. This issue features essays and articles by Lucy R. Lippard, Mar Villaespesa, Tamara Díaz Bringas, Fernando López García, La Ribot, Peter Osborne, Edit András, Goshka Macuga, Anna Boghiguian, Grant Watson, Roman Ondák, Mireia c. Saladrigues, Antonio Menchen, Laura Vallés, Jaime Cuenca and Imogen Stidworthy.

Invisible Traces: On Xavier Ribas’s Nitrate*

THERE WAS ONCE A MINE OF GOLD IN PERU, LATER IT BECAME A COPPER MINE, AND NOW THEY SELL THE WATER THAT COLLECTS IN THE BOTTOM. The Album and the Letters The starting point for the project Nitrate was a photo album called Oficina Alianza and Port of Iquique 1899 and a series of letters. In the first of the letters a worker from the saltpetre mines in Iquique wrote to the English investor, Lord Aldenham, on 18 July 1900, inviting him to accept the album as a souvenir paying testimony to the (...)

Aspen: the magazine in a box (1965-1971)

Laura Vallés reflects on Aspen magazine "the magazine in a box", edited by Phyllis Johnson between 1965-71 in New York, and designed by artists such as Andy Warhol, Brian O’Doherty or Dan Graham. In the early 1960s, it was still possible, broadly speaking, to assign a work of art to a specific category such as painting or sculpture. That said, artists from the historic vanguards had already defied these discrete compartments passed down through tradition by proclaiming new means of (...)

FOREWORD
Concreta 01, Displacements and evictions, Laura Vallés Vílchez

Concreta 01 (Spring, 2013) contains a number of essays, conversations and projects addressing the idea of displacement understood not only as a transfer, movement or oscillation, but as an aesthetic and political positioning within contemporary art practice that explores territory as a shared place for commonality, a space for dialogue and as a position of confrontation. This issue of the magazine features essays and articles by Jean-François Chevrier, Lluis Benlloch i Calvo, Esteban Pujals, Enrique Vila-Matas, Graciela Carnevale, Nacho París, Ângela Ferreira, Jürgen Bock, Marie José Mondzain, Peio Aguirre, Laura Vallés, Maia Creus and Alberto López Cuenca; as well as projects by Xavier Ribas, Anna Boghiguian and Carla Filipe.