The Book To Come
Session two, ‘The Book to Come’ – Reading Group: ‘Ways of Opening a Book’, proposed by Mónica Carballas. Photo: Bulegoa z/b.
Thursday 28 May 2015
‘Ways of Opening a Book’, proposed by Mónica Carballas
4pm / Bulegoa z/b, Bilbao / Session two, ‘The Book to Come’ – Reading Group.
This session of The Book to Come Reading Group will select visionary, questioning proposals by three different artists and relate them to Marcel Broodthaers’ Pensé-Bête. These proposals, which came out of different spaces and aesthetic viewpoints to Broodthaers’, opened up new possibilities for thinking about the book to come in the final quarter of the 20th century.
In the second session, we discussed a work which tried to get rid of the alphabet, Enciclopedia Visual by Wlademir Dias-Pino (Río de Janeiro, 1929), a member of the Brazilian concrete art movement of the fifties and proponent of the Poema/Processo movement in Rio de Janeiro and north-eastern Brazil (1967–1972). We considered the concept of Book-work through the writings of Ulises Carrón (1967–1972), a poet, artist, publisher and theoretician who set up the alternative space Other Books and So in Amsterdam, and a driving force in the mail art network of the seventies. Finally, we looked at Hélio Oiticica’s (1967–1972) unfinished, or maybe endless book project, Newyorkaises.
Over the past few years, the work of Mónica Carballas (Madrid, 1971) has focused on critical revisions of Latin American art in the later half of the 20th century through research, publishing and curatorship. In 2014 she worked on documentation of the Archivo Lafuente collection. She worked as invited editor for Nerter magazine, Universidad de La Laguna in 2014, with Escritos sobre cine brasileño. She programmed Cuando Brasil devoró el cine (1960–1970), MNCARS Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, 2011, and co-authored Video otra vez, Metales Pesados, Santiago de Chile, 2010 with Patrick Hamilton and Guillermo Machuca. In 2010 she curated Río experimental, más allá del arte, el poema y la acción, at Villa Iris, Santander. In 2009 she participated in the Santiago de Chile Triennial with the audiovisual programme Laberinto de visibilidad: audiovisual experimental y dictaduras. She was awarded a curatorial grant by the Fundación Marcelino Botín in 2007. From 1999 to 2007 she worked as exhibition coordinator at the MNCARS Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid. She and Kevin Power set up Pisueña Press, an independent publishing project with 14 publications to date. Since 2014 she has been a member of the advisory council of the MAS Museo de Arte Moderno y Contemporáneo, Santander.