La Posta does not operate alone, but rather in a context of emerging organizations in the city of Valencia that are changing the face of contemporary art in this city. We are referring in particular to two spaces that have started their activity recently: A10 and Pols. The three organizations are characterized by being initiatives that start from collectives of curators and creatives, and, in this sense, the main objectives are those of thought, creation and dissemination of images and cultural experiences in general.
A10
A10 (C/ Azcárraga, 10) is a space run by Agencia 17 (Ali A. Maderuelo and Julia Castelló) for one-day actions. This project began in January 2019, as a self-managed place of experimentation that invites emerging artists and other agents to develop actions for a single day. A10 aims to provide an alternative framework for the development of new artistic approaches, both in production and in the exhibition format. As curators, Agencia 17’s practice questions the value of images and their transmission capacity, from a perspective determined by the time in which we live. “We are interested in expanding this questioning to any field of contemporary artistic creation” [transcribed from the Arte Informado website; it can be seen here]
As an example of the activities they organize, on November 30, 2019 the collective project “Demise: of a Dream x Smegma” was presented with works by Diego Navarro @diegovnavarro [go see this, please], Claudia Dyboski @dyboski [see here], Tea Stražičić @flufflord [see here] and a performance by Bod [包家巷] @baojiaxiang [see here]. An exhibition curated by Ali A. Maderuelo, Julia Castelló and Guillem Sarrià.
From the “Demise of a Dream” flyer: “The prevailing sense of matter in modern Western culture has been that it is essentially a passive material, set in motion by human agents who use it as a means of survival, modify it as a vehicle of aesthetic expression and impose subjective meanings. This view of inert matter as inherently devoid of agency or meaning and heterogeneous to consciousness has an elaborate provenance in classical science and philosophy, but it also seems consistent with, and indeed presupposes, a commonsense naturalistic attitude that takes for granted. sitting a natural world “out there” as an essentially given collection of objects. However, is it not possible to imagine matter quite differently: as perhaps a living, self-transforming materiality already saturated with the capacities and existential meaning typically found in a separate, ideal, and subjectivist? Diane Cook, 2010.
Pols
Pols (C/ Francisco Moreno Usedo 23), made up of Paula García-Masedo (Madrid), Carles Angel Sauri (Valencia) and Néstor García Díaz (Berlin), do not have a specific place on the web in which to report themselves and of their activities. Collected from here and there, it is a “curation laboratory”, or “independent” room. Pols has an Instagram [see here]. One of his most striking projects is “In inflamed loves”, with works by M Reme Silvestre, Marina G Guerreiro, Mar Reykjavik, David Bestué, Fernando Gandasegui, Alex Reynolds, Guillermo Ros, Cyriaque Villemaux and Javi Cruz. One of the artists participating in this project explains the genesis of the name of the project on his blog: “Pols proposed Javier Cruz and me [Fernando Gandasegui] to title, as a piece, his first exhibition. We asked the performer Sandra Gómez to attend the inauguration and, once there, collect the flow of orality, which she would post in text messages. The flow of words that was reduced during the inauguration found its way to a terrace in Barcelona and a car in the direction of Móstoles, from where we decided, due to its improbability and eight syllables, that I write as the title the phrase IN INFLAMED LOVES” [see here].
It is still not clear whether the appearance of these spaces and the projects implicit in them, which occurs in parallel to the closure of many commercial galleries, has been a coincidence or there are root causes that should be analyzed.
As for La Posta Foundation, it is in the process of reconsideration. In particular, on the functionality of a physical space of well-defined dimensions while the epidemic pursues us; And, in relation to this, which role is more appropriate for a website. A good example of this rethinking is this same post. It is an idea that was initially thought of as a room exhibition to be developed in the next season; later, in view of the epidemic, it was seen that this was not going to be possible, and the idea was converted into a work of documentation to be shown on the La Posta website in the “media” tab (which is where it is usually show the results of traces on the www); to finish realizing that this is an exhibition …in times of coronavirus.