The Apartment: misplaced residences
The coronavirus crisis forces us to seek and experiment with new ways to continue our research. This time, from the domestic space and using the internet as a medium. We believe that the allegorical nature of the project The Apartment, leads to the clear movement of moving the art space to the intimate space of the home: We take a bed from our house to the street. Now the bed returns.
On this return trip, we want to propose a new format for interventions: ‘misplaced’ residences. We propose artists who use their confinement space to carry out interventions, document them, and then use Instagram to upload the content to @labimasterfoto
“Afterlife After Eight”: Moliana Mundy
“The future no longer exists, the society in constant change and mutation, no longer believes in it. We must step back and find a space ―edge, fold― of discernment from which we can observe the flow without, however, falling into isolation”.
This is how Moliana Mundy introduced her work ‘Sinantropia, the aesthetics of survival’, carried out in 2017 in Tenerife, Canary Islands.
Mundy fixed his attention on the ‘synanthropic existences’, certain species of flora and fauna that, due to the structural and physical conditions of the cities, are in need of adapting and creating spaces of refuge and survival, using both natural and synthetics. The artist focuses on this behavior and develops her work around the need to create a place from which to “pause to disconnect from the outside world and take a position”.
When we think of a space that is ‘protected against the possible dangers of the world’, we may be assaulted by images of high and thick walls, Mundy says. Also, there are other architectures of the reservation with a less definitive, more transitory and circumstantial character such as the trenches, the barricades, the roadside inns, the political asylums, the haimas of the Tuaregs. On the other hand, there are shelters that, far from claiming a stable and settled physical body, are configured in a symbolic space: ‘A girl who secretly reads the whole night under the covers of her bed.’
Trying to investigate the different ways of making art during this new paradigm that poses the confinement that global society is experiencing, Moliana Mundy proposes a “misplaced” residence for L’Apartament. Thanks to the mutability of the artistic device itself, we proposed the possibility of inverting the terms: using the intimate space of a room in a space for art.
In “Afterlife After Eight”, Mundy reflects, quoting Hakim Bey, about the need to create a Temporarily Autonomous Zone within the spaces of everyday life. Thus generating a more collected space than that of the home itself, a space of recreation, of a certain momentary evasion and always permeable to affection.
“These refuges only pretend to be spaces of delay, of transitory loss of passage, of ephemeral break with inertia, to try to understand, to make an art of living”.
Moliana Mundy @alphy_mm collaborates with her proposal “Afterlife After Eight” in the LABi04 (Laboratory of Thought, Creation and Diffusion of the Image) residency program, a project of the Master in Photography, Art and Technique of the Polytechnic University of Valencia in collaboration with La Posta Foundation, created to research and experiment with new ways of studying and understanding the image, in connection with contemporary citizen needs. Project curated by Alejandro Robaina, María Bonafé, Pilar Mompó, Sofía Alemán and Sofía Pastor.
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