24.07.2012

PhotoEspaña International Festival of Photography and Visual Arts (June 6-July 22, Madrid), was at its 15^th edition this year.

I had the great opportunity of being invited to its official opening by La Fábrica (the art management company that organizes PhotoEspaña), a corporation that is also a publishing house specialized in contemporary photography, art and literature, and comprises an exhibition space as well as a bookshop.

I spent a few days in Madrid, where I visited many of the numerous festival’s venues located around the city’s gallery district, museums, art centers… and even a former water station turned into a cultural center, the Canal Isabel II, which hosted Rosa Múñoz’s solo show, “Constructed Memories”; such a peculiar space was the scenery for Munoz’s collages; through a series of complex digital manipulations, these imaginary urban built-up areas detach themselves from the representation of contemporary skylines to become destabilizing “favelas from the future.”

This year, the festival's theme was “From here. Context and Internationalization,” a concept extensively illustrated by Gerardo Mosquera (PhotoEspaña artistic director), who guided us around and discussed the featured artists.

My first encounter with the program was in the name of fashion photography. In its Gran Via’s boutique, luxury brand Loewe hosted Scott Schuman’s solo exhibition, “The Sartorialist”. The inventor of the homonymous fashion blog (www.thesartorialist.com), Schuman exhibited a selection of the improvised shots that made him so famous and recognizable. In their rich simplicity, the photographs pleasantly complemented the elegance and warmth of Loewe’s interiors.

At Off Limits, a show called “No projected Above the Pope” featured Santiago Serra in collaboration with Julius Von Bismark. In the occasion of Pope Benedict XVI’s visit to Spain, the two artists contributed to the protests that the event inevitably raised. For this purpose, Von Bismark created a built-in light sensor placed on a 35mm camera, which projects images on flat surfaces as soon as it registers a flash from another camera; the effect is so quick that it is not detectable by the human eye in the exact moment it occurs. The project consisted in projecting Serra’s tradmark “NO” during one of the Pope’s public appearances. Von Bismark himself was at Off Limits, chatting about this venture as well as answering the visitors’ questions, many of them quite challenging in the way they interrogated the modalities of the project and its resemblance to a Photoshop process.

As always, PhotoEspaña payed tribute to the history of photography and its influences on contemporary visual art practices; in fact, contrasting the young and fresh Asian artists, the Teatro Fernán Gómez proposed another show, “From the Factory to the World. Photography and the Warhol Community”, an intimate exhibition which offered a glimpse of the most talked-about artistic communities of our times by displaying over a hundred photographs shot by the artists who experienced The Factory, such as Richard Avedon, Cecil Beaton, Billy Name, Stephen Shore and Andy Warhol himself, among others.

At Matadero Contemporary Art Centre we had a sneak peek of the latest project of a successful Italian artist recognized internationally: Marinella Senatore’s “Rosas” is a trilogy of video works that involve people from Derby (UK), Berlin and Madrid. The artist — who was part of Bice Curiger’s pavilion at the last Venice Biennale — aims to create a community of non-professional actors, dancers and performers in an operation that results almost neo-realistic in its visual outcomes. Having arrived during rehearsing time, it was quite impressing to observe the artist directing and interacting with many people at once.

Towards the end of my stay, fashion came back into the picture, this time at the Circulo de Bellas Artes. “Gentlemen of Bacongo” is a project started by Daniele Tamagni in 2006, in which the Italian photographer documents the lifestyle of a Congolese subculture, the so-called sapeurs. In French, “Le Sape” stands for Société des Ambianceurs et des Personnes Élégantes (Society of Tastemakers and Elegant People). This group of Congolese men dress from head to toe in European fashion and follow precise style rules; from the way a necktie should be done, to the strict use of colored outfits. Aside from its obvious anthropological implications, the show was cleverly displayed, with the photographs’ colors enhanced by the intense blue of the room’s walls.

Upstairs, The Circulo hosted the most notable exhibition of my trip: “Aqui Estamos” ("Here We Are"), a group show including Richard Avedon, Richard Billingham, Paz Errázuriz and Lilla Szász. Billingham's series about his father evokes a squalid, yet delicate and warm context, obtained by the photographer's unconventional use of composition and sense of humor.