I fantasize a springtime and cry

Now that the inaccessibility of the traditional space of art has become widespread, the online group exhibition I fantasize a springtime and cry looks for art practices that already knew removal and the intimacy it brings. The current situation of crisis invites us to think about the value of these art forms and their material, aesthetic and political specificities, in which the personal is the inevitable place from which one speaks.

The critical distance imposed by the general criteria of artistic and discursive quality invalidates certain ways of doing in the particular, in what is closest, in the immediate. In these practices, the idea of ​​distance becomes paradoxical: when there is no possible separation between the body - the hands, the mouth - and what affects it, self-absorption is generative. Intensification, elaboration and elongation become forms of survival and reproduction.

Between minorized codes and infantilized material cultures, from the solitude of certain rooms, 18 local and international artists circulate sadness and pleasure making communities in the distance. There are many layers of cuteness, fantasy, and emotion, and underneath are messy temporalities, death and fecundity, and a tendency to grow sideways — it's about making the world bigger. There is a productive tension between disavowal and affirmation that keeps making more surface, more space.

The virtual presence of these expressions delves in the plastic and the poetic, in the complexity of artifice and metaphor, in minor, more practicable, more accessible and closer means, in keeping with the private sphere, with its implications and its demands. Drag, role-play, invocations, DIY scenographies, sewing, adornment, gestures, annotations, diaries and spoken word respond to the needs of a lived experience. The point is not to represent an exceptional situation but to be able to live through it.

Curated by Yaby (Beatriz Ortega Botas and Alberto Vallejo).

I fantasize a springtime and cry will take place at the La Casa Encendida´s Instagram account throughout 6 weekly releases:

1. 09 May 2020. Laura Costas and Tarek Lakhrissi. Internal codes, sometimes ilegible -Emo imaginaries, tongues, dark mythologies and their times-, infect and redirect mainstream materials through a shared archive of feelings that go from nostalgia and regret to grandeur and attraction. ​
2. 16 May 2020. Marina González Guerreiro and Sgàire Wood. Specific fantasies (queer, childish) that mobilise categories and strategies inherent to intimacy such as camp, cuteness or cozyness in a metaphorical proliferation of meanings.
3. 23 May 2020. Rebecca Jagoe, Lou Lou Sainsbury and Ayesha Tan Jones. Digital alter-egos, invocations, herbalism and cures articulate narratives of both reconciliation and confrontation. ​
4. 30 May 2020. Torre Alain & Mirza, Pedro Herrero Ferrán, Precious Okoyomon and Cole Lu. Domestic objects and sentimental tokens re-elaborated to produce queer melodramas of digital correspondence, interchanges and distant ceremonies. ​​
5. 06 June 2020. Raque Ford, Caspar Heinemann and Gaby Sahhar. Minimal and interpersonal gestures negotiate the private and the public as spaces for the proliferation of non-normative practices, of forms of support and care, separated from 'the real world' that, nonetheless, draw taxonomies and adjust hypotheses for continuity and survival. ​
6. ​ 13 June 2020. MARIKISCRYCRYCRY, Iki Yos Piña Narváez and James St Findlay. Politicization of melancholy and emotional aesthetics as models of cultural resistance, reproduction and creation of a-synchronic communities that find permanence and interlocutors in solitude. ​