ENCLAVE LAND ART

Edition

2022

CONCEPT OF THE RESIDENCY

Enclave Land Art 2022 invites artists to reflect on how the Sun, ever-present in Vall de Gallinera, is influencing and shaping its surroundings, and on how this impacts on nature, animals and humans.
The Sun's influence is mirrored by a natural separation of the valley itself in two segments: the Solana (permanently sunny side) and the Ombría (shady side). The human distribution within the villages is equally affected, all being located on the southern side of the Gallinera river, the backbone along which the water flows constantly, despite its appearance and disappearance.
The Solana, mainly shrubland, thinly vegetated and strongly sun-exposed, has very high temperatures during the summers. Decades back, this favoured transhumance and livestock transport, as well as the construction of farmyards - although abandoned today, they still stand as a fine expression of the dry-stone construction, typical of the region, and have now become a building heritage of the area.
The Ombría, the shaded area, is characterised by thicker vegetation and colourful terraces stretching across the whole rhombus-shaped valley.
Alongside this anthropic-natural link with the land/sun, a distinctive element, la foradà, originated thanks to the particular orography and an imaginative play of nature.
The natural arch in the rock is a coup du théâtre. The Sun wants to wink and sneak into the shadow. It is an unexpected spot that offers the Sun the chance to participate twice a year in this unattainable place. In the 17th century, some Franciscan monks interpreted this as a divine sign and built a monastery in its honour. The solar alignment reached notoriety and it was reinforced by this building. However, this was lost and forgotten until the beginning of this century.
As José Lull wrote in 2008 in La alineación solar de la foradá en la Vall de Gallinera, nowadays the monastery does not exist anymore. All the traces of its presence were cancelled, even from the collective memory of the valley. Only a vague memory has been heard about its existence before. Even the solar alignment through la foradà was lost. No alignment, no franciscans, no monastery. Everything forgotten, buried forever.
However, in recent years, the alignment of the Sun has made a comeback, and the legend of the monastery it illuminated has become part of territorial history and a rescue of historical memory.
In this second edition of the Enclave Land Art Residency, we invite artists to reflect upon the presence of the Sun and how it affected, is affecting and will affect human nature.
The existence of a dialogue with Mother Earth has always been a constant. We can only understand Nature's signs and thus benefit from them if we are willing to look at them closely and from a variety of different perspectives.

ARTISTS

AMY CUTLER

  • BIO

    Amy Cutler is a live cinema artist and sound designer from London who draws on her unusual training (a PhD in cultural geography) to create site-specific films and projection events. She is interested in cinema which is responsive to the conditions of the environment in which it is placed, and she often creates indoor and outdoor projects which draw on fieldwork, ecologies, local archives, and atmospheric data. Previously in her practice she has created live cinema and audio-visual installations for specific locations, including Pendle Hill, Lancashire; Lud’s Church Ravine, Staffordshire; and even an uninhabited Finnish fortress island, Örö. Overall, her work explores the intersections of species, spaces, and audiences, with a particular interest in rituals of place and community gatherings (such as skygazing).

HIROSHI ICHIKAWA

  • BIO

    Landscape Designer / Artist in Tokyo, Japan.
    As a landscape designer / artist, I always think and care about the relationship between people and the natural environment. With deep respect for sites, vernacular elements and local community, I believe that Land Art throws out a hint / question about this relationship, which can only be experienced on the site.

ANA MATEY

  • BIO

    Ana Matey (Madrid, 1978) is a visual artist, performer, photographer, cultural activist and tireless researcher. Her work is a profound exploration of the limits of the human body and its relationship with nature, articulated mainly through three key verbs: to walk, to collect and to displace. Since 2001 her work is present in museums, galleries, theaters and independent spaces in Spain, Europe in Italy, Portugal, France, England, Ireland, Germany, Poland, Hungary, Holland, Bosnia, Croatia, Norway, Switzerland and Finland; outside Europe in Costa Rica, Mexico, Dominican Republic, Canada, Morocco, Indonesia and Japan. Since 2006, she has been working in parallel to her creative work in the field of dynamisation, research and training. Co-founder of ElCarromato, (2006/10), where ARTóN, (2009/14) was born. And the current EXCHANGE Live Art, a collective creation and research project with the artist Isabel León (2012) and MATSUcreación (2012).  She has received numerous creative grants and awards. The latest, MAV Biennial Award with EXCHANGE (2022), the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo Medioambiental Valdelarte with “Conversaciones con lo Natural”, Huelva (2020), the Centro de Arte La Regenta with “Sobre el acto de caminar”, Las Palmas (2019).

LEONARDO MAGNANI

  • BIO

    Leonardo Magnani was born in 1981 in Florence. BFA at the Academy of Fine Arts, Florence in 2005. Lived and worked in London between 2008 to 2012. In 2013 he received a grant from MIBAC (Italian council for art and cultural events) for an artist residency in Argentina. Since 2015 he is based in  Florence, Italy. In 2018 he opened Underwood studio , a multifunction space -Lab ,sharing skill & facilities. Creative incubator.

FILIPA PONTES

  • BIO

    Filipa Pontes is a visual artist and researcher from Portugal. In the last ten years, she has participated in international exhibitions and art residencies in countries such as Portugal, Spain, Mozambique, Brazil, China, Norway, and Germany. She also works as an independent curator and as a professor. Filipa is an expert in contemporary drawing (Ph.D. in Fine Arts in Practice). Additionally, she holds a degree in Graphic Design and a postgraduate in Creative Illustration. Currently lives between Leipzig (Germany) and Lisbon (Portugal).

VICTOR MASFERRER

  • BIO

    I’m graduated in Sculpture at Escola Massana in Barcelona, and simultaneously graduated in Philosophy at the University of Girona, finishing my studies at the University of Rome “La Sapienza”.  I combine my projects as a sculptor as a consulting professor of the Degree in Arts at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC), where I run the materials laboratory. As an artist I have been developing for years a research related to light and perceptual processes, experimental photography and its technologies, linked to the relationship we have today with the image.  I am interested in the nature of form and the forms of nature, the relationship we have with it and with the environment around us. I poetically investigate the symbolic relationships we have with the world, with geometry and with space.  I have shown my work in La Capella (Barcelona), Espai d’Art Torre Muntadas (Barcelona), in the Bòlit Art Contemporary Center (Girona) in the Museum of History of Girona, in various points of the Navarre geography in a project coordinated by the Centro Huarte in Pamplona, among others. I have received grants such as  Idensitat collective (Barcelona) or the grant for young artists from the Fundació Domènech Fita, in Girona. I have carried out artistic residencies in Italy, in Salt and Girona.

MACARENA AGUILAR TAU

  • BIO

    Macarena Aguilar Tau aka MAQ es artista sonora, compositora, productora, investigadora y docente nacida en Argentina. Ha estudiado en la Facultad de Artes de la Universidad Nacional de La Plata donde obtuvo los títulos de licenciada y profesora de música con orientación en dirección orquestal. Actualmente su trabajo está ligado a la exploración del sonido del entorno y sus posibilidades creativas. Lleva adelante el proyecto de sonoteca colaborativa @1200km_h, donde reúne grabaciones de campo y difunde reflexiones sobre el paisaje acústico, prácticas de escucha, ecología acústica y bioacústica. En sus trabajos ha realizado música original y diseño sonoro para películas, cortometrajes, obras de teatro, danza, performance, instalaciones, realidad virtual y podcasts. Además ha investigado y escrito diversos artículos sobre compositoras argentinas pioneras en la música electrónica. En julio de 2022 ha editado su primer álbum “Materiales” junto al sello “The Journey you never had”. En la actualidad imparte el workshop “Arqueología electroacústica” donde comparte estrategias creativas para la composición a partir del registro de audio.

PROJECTS

PROJECT GALLERY

Valleyglow

Amy Cutler

To bring cinema to life, you just apply light. How can this take place as a local environmental event? VALLEYGLOW is a project for Enclave 2022 which will explore the light itself as a local participant in the environment of film, at different locations of dawn and dusk, from the castles of the Solana to the rare flower gardens of the Ombria. This will develop experimental ‘luminist’ filmmaking approaches – using site-specific states of light as ways of telling alternative environmental stories of localities and the beings that live there – and interviews with valley inhabitants about their memories of Foradà. The name ‘valleyglow’ is a twist on ‘alpineglow’, an example of a unique phenomena of sunlight produced by illuminated backscatter between mountains. What are the hyperlocal light conditions and unique communities of light and shadow at Vall de la Gallinera, which we can call ‘valleyglow’? How do these conditions shape the forms and rhythms of life here? As well as creating a film, the public output for this project will include outdoor projection in a live show inspired by the traditions of son et lumière spectacles, which began at chateaus in the Val de Loire. This will be an experiment in how cinema, as a science of light, can act as a local observatory for the gathering of environmental neighbours – as well as exploring bigger ideas about our shared existence as communities linked to solar states and solar futures as well as unique sheltered spaces (or enclaves). 

Piece

Hiroshi Ichikawa

The sun always lets us know that humans are only a piece of the world. Historically, the first sundial was used in 4000 B.C. In other words, it is possible to say that we have been knowing and feeling we are in a cosmic scale system for a long time. Shadow appears when the sun appears. It is a sign of the connection between the sun and humans. "piece" is an artwork which expresses this relationship. Shadow appears on white stones to make us think about ourselves, the sun and its relationship.

PROJECT GALLERY

PROJECT GALLERY

El Recolector de Plumas

Ana Matey

"El Recolector de Plumas" is a project by the artist Ana Matey. The work for Enclave Land Art arises from the experience of walking between the bordering space of La Solana and La Ombría in Vall de Gallinera. A work that will be born from the reading of the territory, to then move on to the writing of the same through the feather collected by the artist on the routes. The sun will be the fundamental material of the work, "I will always walk to meet it".
She begun this project in 2008, and thanks to it she ended up living in the natural environment. At the beginning of the project she asks herself how she wants to live, "slowness vs. speed", "countryside vs. city", "collecting vs. producing". For ENCLAVE Land Art, the binomials "light vs. shadow", "nomadic vs. sedentary", "material vs. spiritual or existential" will be present in the construction of the piece. Matey says: “I am interested in the work as a driving force for divergent thinking, which generates a multiplicity of thoughts and emotions, as happens when travelling through a territory.” 

En-Light

Leonardo Magnani

The intention is to make visible what is invisible what is empty, concrete.

The hollow space of the natural arch , Forada, will be realised in a woodsculpture, through a process of intertwining string.

Through a kind of conversation with the mountain, walking across the rocks, the skeleton of that big eye will be revealed.

PROJECT GALLERY

PROJECT GALLERY

Llum a Sanchis Guarner

Filipa Pontes

For the Enclave Land Art artist-in-residence, I am presenting a poetic and ephemeral performance that is a tribute to the flaming star. From sunrise to sunset, I will produce a giant drawing on the ground to reveal the hidden map of the Sun's passage in a specific place showing an immaterial dimension of the site to rethink the relationship between human beings and nature. I invite the community to join me in drawing and participating in this magical and immersive experience following the Sun's pace.
note: “Map The Sun" is the name of the series. There is a new title for each performance directly connecting to the place. After arriving at Vall the Gallinera, I will find the name/title for the performance.

Luz Oscura

Victor Masferrer

The Luz oscura project aims to rethink the way in which we relate to the landscape and the territory, seeking to resignify the space (and specifically, the "postcard" look) from an installation and a series of photographs taken through pinhole cameras that open the door to the mysterious of natural phenomena and the solar cycle in particular.
I like to think that more than images, the long exposure pinhole photographs are single-frame videos, in which everything that has passed in front of the camera is recorded,although we only see the apparent trajectory of the sun and the static masses (trees, mountains, architectural elements or constructions...).
Since the invention of perspective, the painting has been compared to an open window.
The painting within the painting becomes here the image in front of the "territory": a moving image,
subjected to the vagaries of the wind, which dislocates and fragments the immediate environment, showing a singular gaze, an expanded singular gaze, a photograph expanded in time.

PROJECT GALLERY

PROJECT GALLERY

Sonar Solar

Macarena Aguilar Tau

“Solar sound” is a research project focused on the transformations resulting from the movement of the sun on the acoustic landscape of the Vall de Gallinera. Based on a previous study of the acoustic components on the shady and sunny areas, this search proposes to show the different ways of listening to the incidence of sunlight on the soundscape of both sides of the region. As a presentation, a work will be produced in the format of a sound installation, which will bring listeners closer to the possibility of listening to the Solar sound.

GALLERY